When a friend sends you an email that starts with “you’re a genius!” you know you might be onto something. I’m about to share with you the trick that I taught her and I hope you’ll love it as well.

For the past several months, I’ve returned home from the gym in the morning to a breakfast that’s already ready to go. Have I hired a personal chef? Has a neighbor snuck into my apartment and made my breakfast? Am I getting breakfast delivered? No, no and no. (But how fun would a personal chef be?)

Instead, I’ve been taking around 20 minutes on the weekend to create breakfast parfaits in advance. I start with my favorite yogurts and a bunch of reusable serving-size storage containers. I then get as creative as I want to be with other ingredients that go in. Usually I start with a layer of frozen blueberries on bottom. From there, anything goes! My ingredients have included chopped almonds, chopped walnuts, hazelnuts (so fancy!), frozen raspberries, frozen mango, strawberries, chopped ginger (fabulous for decreasing inflammation after a workout), chia seeds, cocoa nibs (hi healthy chocolate for breakfast), dried raisins, cranberries, more blueberries…you get the idea.

I set up a little assembly line and make as many parfaits as I have containers. Voilà! Into the fridge they go and breakfast is ready for the entire week. Since I do this all at once, I use a much wider variety of ingredients then I would if I had to assemble each one individually every single morning.

I’ll leave it to you to pick your favorite healthy additions, but let me add some tips about yogurt: I use two entire large containers for the week’s worth of parfaits. (Bonus win for the planet with fewer empty containers to recycle.) For my taste, I usually select one Greek and one regular yogurt for a nice consistency, but at LEAST one is always whole fat and both are PLAIN. The 80s are over and thank goodness they took their big hair and the anti-fat let’s-load-everything-with-sugar craze with them. (Sayonara SnackWell’s!) You don’t need to obsessively read nutrition labels, but next time you’re picking up yogurt, pick up one plain and one sweetened and just check out the grams of sugar in each. (I’ll wait while you freak out about the difference…) The sugar lobby what? Yeah, don’t get me started. Just pretty please put the one that should be labeled as dessert down and take the plain one home. Your body will thank you.

Enjoy your parfaits and the extra time you’ll save yourself each morning!