13 Struggles Anyone Who Has Ever Meal Prepped Will Understand

Meal prep is 75% searching for the right tupperware lid.

1. The healthier, better quality food always costs more money.

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You want cheap pasta sauce? Here’s a jar for $2. Oh, you want pasta sauce that doesn’t contain artificial coloring, artificial sweeteners, MSG, Butylated Hydroxyanisole, sodium nitrates, sodium benzoate, and potassium benzoate? That’ll be $14.

2. It takes a heroic effort to carry in all of the groceries you’re about to cook with.

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Enough ingredients to make several meals, taken to your kitchen in one strenuous trip.

3. The meal prep process consumes your entire day.

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Throwing a bunch of food together in a few hours doesn't sound too difficult, yet meal prep always feels like the nightmare where you're being chased but can't run fast, except it's the clock ticking and hours passing, but somehow you have more things to do.

4. Eating the same meal repeatedly feels like watching the same episode of a boring TV show every... single... day.

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It's like when you discover a song you like and play it 500,000 times in a row until it's annoying, except it's a meal that you didn't love in the first place, but you're stuffing your face with it over and over and over again.

5. Also, not only does eating the same thing get old, but the food stops being fresh and tastes more like trash each passing day.

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Day 1: This food is fine!

Day 2: This food is not quite as good, but it’s not the worst.

Day 3: Sheesh, this food is getting kinda old, but results > taste.

Day 4: OK, I only cooked this food four days ago, why does it taste seven years old?

Day 5: This tastes the way food poisoning feels.

6. Being stuck with a boring-ass Tupperware of healthy food at lunch while your co-workers are eating stuff that looks and smells delicious.

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By cooking, you're committing to a particular lunch for a set amount of days, because you're definitely not wasting the food that cost you time and money to prepare.

7. You’ll spend a significant chunk of your life searching for the correct Tupperware lids.

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Much like socks and lip balm, Tupperware lids love to disappear unexplainably.

8. Brown rice takes about 42,937 years to cook.

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The cooking instructions will say 30 minutes but nope, it's more like 42,937 years.

9. You’ll see other people preparing incredibly beautiful, delicious, perfect looking dishes on Instagram, yet yours look disappointing.

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You can take a picture of an ice cream sundae in a dumpster and it'd still look delicious because ice cream is just that photogenic, but it's amazing that super healthy food prepared in bulk can look as pretty as some people make it.

10. If you screw up the ingredients on something, you’ll be stuck eating that botched batch for at least the next few days.

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It can be something as small as adding too much of the wrong spice to something, or accidentally cooking meat so long that it dries out, and suddenly it's that much more difficult to stay on track eating your healthy meals.

11. Even when you find delicious healthy meal prep recipes, there’s always some sort of disappointing catch.

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Like, hey, did you know there’s a way to make healthy, delicious protein pancakes! Oh, but you can't put syrup on 'em.

12. Forgetting to pack utensils along with your meal.

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Scooping brown rice into your mouth with your fingers like an animal is a sad place to be.

13. After spending hours preparing the food, you then have to do a shit ton of dirty dishes.

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Making a week's worth of meals means creating a week's worth of dishes in a short span of time.