The most important part of working out happens in the kitchen: your diet. Eat well, eat healthy, hit your macros. I can't account for taste, but I have some advice from a year of making 3000 calories, 180g of protein, costing about $12 a day, for myself. If meal prep is a drag for you, you might be doing it inefficiently.

1: Slow cooker / rice cooker. This is the single best investment you can make. Even if you're exhausted and quarter-conscious, you can still toss your (hopefully pre-prepared) portions into the pot and hit "start". If you get a rice cooker, make sure it's at least 10 cups so you have enough space to fit your day's meal. Also, dry the outside of your pot before cooking, or it'll sound like the 1st of July. Yes, I'm Canadian. I use a rice cooker, just because it cooks a lot quicker (~45 minutes).

2: Cleaning. For any sort of non-stick surface, including the inside of rice cooker pots, do not use scrubbers or steel wool. Use the soft sponge side. This will make them last longer, and avoid strange chemicals getting into your food. Similarly, don't toss bones and shells in them.

3: Kitchen scissors. For close to 100% of my cooking, I do not use knives. More on them later. Most of the cutting you will do will be removing bones and portioning, both of which are more efficient (if uglier) with kitchen scissors. Also, less cleanup (no cutting board to wash), and much safer when you're not entirely alert.

4: Silicone fish slice / spatula. This tool is much easier to wash than the standard rice cooker spatula, and is multi-purpose. Just don't use it to fry things with. Which brings me to...

5: Wooden spoon / spatula. If you're frying things in a non-stick pan, this is your only option. Stainless steel will scratch the coating, and silicone might melt. Feel free to use metal with cast iron, but if you have the time to maintain cast iron, you probably won't need this guide.

6: Chopsticks, wood, long and short. If you need to reach out and pick something up, these are what you want. Especially useful when lightly-frying fish fillets.

7: Stainless steel bowl. Porcelain is generally heavy and fragile, while plastic scratches over time. I eat out of this most of the time now. A bowl is much less messy than a plate, with much fewer crumbs and spills. I found this out when my apartment got ants: I switched to stainless steel bowls, and the ants were gone in 3 months.

8: Bigass ladle, if you make soup or stew. No substitutes for this. Silicone is generally good for the temperatures you work with, but stainless steel is pretty good too.

9: Cutting boards should be wood, if you can't avoid using knives. Doesn't have to be fancy wood, but it should be whole wood. Avoid plastic- it scratches and accumulates germs too easily. Don't even think about glass, stone, or metal, as the damage to your knives will easily cost more than what you save on chopping board maintenance. Also, you should keep separate boards for raw and cooked food, especially meat.

10: Learn to sharpen your own knives. Knives must be sharp to be used safely and efficiently, and most tinkers will ruin your knives. It takes time to learn and master, but this is a perfect hobby to relax with after a day's work. The 400/1000 two-sided stone that comes with most sets will serve you well. The key is to maintain a constant angle of the blade to the stone. Once you can do that, the rest is accommodating different blade shapes. Use the coarse side to fix major imperfections (including your own mistakes), and the fine side once you have fixed the edge to a decent cutting ability. I don't recommend butcher's steels until you get a feel for what they do to the edge (they straighten out rolled edges).

I hope this little collection of accumulated wisdom helps you. Stay strong!