My coworker brings the same lunch every day — a sad plastic container with chicken, sweet potato, and steamed green beans. She microwaves it while staring into the middle distance. By Thursday she is usually eating takeout. I asked her why she does not just cook something different and she said, “I meal prep on Sunday. There is only one option.”

The problem is not that meal prepping is boring. The problem is that eating the same meal five days in a row is boring, and most people think those two things are the same thing. They are not. You can meal prep and still eat different things every day. Here is how.

Sheet pan meals change everything

The fastest way to get variety into meal prep is a sheet pan. Throw different combinations of protein + vegetable + seasoning onto separate sheet pans and roast them all at the same time. One pan gets chicken thighs with paprika and sweet potatoes. Another pan gets salmon with dill and asparagus. A third gets chickpeas with cumin and cauliflower. Same oven, same 400 degrees, same 25 minutes. Three completely different meals. Portion them into containers and you have variety for the week without spending all Sunday in the kitchen.

I do this every other Sunday. It takes about 90 minutes total — including cleanup — and produces five days of lunches that are all different.

Sauces are the secret weapon

Roast a big batch of plain chicken breasts and plain vegetables. Bland on purpose. Then portion them into containers with different sauces: pesto on Monday, peanut sauce on Tuesday, salsa and lime on Wednesday, teriyaki on Thursday, buffalo on Friday. Same base ingredients, five different meals. Most good sauces take under five minutes to make or come from a jar. This trick alone is what finally made meal prep sustainable for me.

The freezer is your friend

If you make a big batch of something you actually love — chili, curry, lasagna — freeze individual portions. A month from now, when you are tired of whatever you prepped that week, you can pull out a frozen chili from last month and it feels like a treat. Over time you build a library of frozen meals that gives you variety without extra cooking. Start with one extra portion per batch and freeze it. In six weeks you will have a dozen different options ready to go.

Meal prep does not have to mean monotony. It just means thinking one step beyond “cook a lot of one thing.”