High-protein meal prep comes down to one sum: your daily protein target, split across the meals you will actually eat. Once that number is clear, a week of food needs fewer recipes than you might think.
Start with your protein target
If you lift, aim for 1.6 to 2.2 g of protein per kg of body weight a day. We explain why in how much protein you need to build muscle. Liftprep uses 1.8 g per kg when you are building and 2.2 g when you are losing fat.
For an 80 kg lifter building muscle, that is 144 g a day. Across five eating occasions, about 30 g each gets you there, and a bigger lunch and dinner let your snacks be small.
A day of high-protein meals
These five recipes come from the Liftprep library. All five suit batch cooking, and the figures are per serving, worked out from CoFID, the UK government's food composition data.
| Recipe | Protein | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| Ham and cheese egg muffins | 26.6 g | 229 kcal |
| Chia protein pudding | 19.9 g | 251 kcal |
| Batch beef and bean chilli | 40.6 g | 365 kcal |
| Batch boiled eggs | 15.1 g | 157 kcal |
| Cajun chicken and sweet potato | 50.4 g | 409 kcal |
| Total | 152.6 g | 1,411 kcal |
Eat them in that order: muffins for breakfast, pudding mid-morning, chilli for lunch, eggs in the afternoon, and the chicken for dinner.
That clears the 144 g target with room to spare, and at 1,411 kcal it leaves plenty of calories for the food that makes meals feel like meals. Most people training on 2,000 to 2,600 kcal a day will add rice, potatoes, bread, fruit or a bigger portion. Not sure of your number? Here is how to work out your calories.
Why these recipes work for meal prep
They have lean protein at the centre. Chicken breast, extra-lean mince and eggs give you a lot of protein for the calories. Our list of the best high-protein foods at a UK supermarket ranks them.
They do two jobs at once. The chilli pairs beef with kidney beans, so one pot gives you protein, fibre and carbohydrate together.
They keep. Egg muffins, chilli and cooked chicken all freeze. Chia pudding needs no cooking at all, so a fresh batch midweek takes minutes.
Fit it around one cook
UK food safety guidance says to eat leftovers within 48 hours, so a single Sunday cook has to lean on the freezer.
- Sunday: make the chilli, the chicken and the muffins. Keep Monday's and Tuesday's portions in the fridge and freeze the rest. Boil eggs and set chia pots for those two days.
- Tuesday night onwards: move the next day's boxes from the freezer to the fridge each evening.
- Wednesday: boil more eggs and set more chia pots for the rest of the week.
The full method, including cooling and reheating, is in how to meal prep for a week and keep it safe.
Vegan or vegetarian?
The same approach works without meat, though you need to plan more carefully, since plant foods tend to bring more calories per gram of protein. Tofu, lentils and chickpeas do most of the work. We will cover this properly in its own post.
The short version
- Set your target at 1.6 to 2.2 g of protein per kg.
- Build each meal around a lean protein, then add carbs to reach your calories.
- Repeat a few recipes. You do not need seven dinners.
- Freeze anything you will not eat within 48 hours.
Liftprep builds this for you: a week of meals that hits your protein and calories, with one shopping list in aisle order. Try the free calculator.
Sources
- Morton RW et al. (2018). A systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression of the effect of protein supplementation on resistance training-induced gains in muscle mass and strength in healthy adults. British Journal of Sports Medicine 52: 376–384.
- Food Standards Agency. How to chill, freeze and defrost food safely.
- Public Health England. Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (CoFID).