>When I thought about getting my food, I really had three goals: cheap, fast, and healthy.
Here's my cheap, fast, and healthy diet that doesn't require any cooking. I started a few months ago and it's very effective in losing weight and saving time.
Half of a pound container of cottage cheese, plus a large melon (cantaloupe or honeydew are easy to cut once you learn how) for breakfast.
One can of sardines for lunch.
Another can of sardines, plus a can of vegetables for dinner.
One bottle of water at each meal plus 1-2 more throughout the day. Whenever hungry in between meals, snack on almonds.
You can buy a week or so worth of everything at a time, and some like the fish, vegetables, and nuts can be bought in bulk for months. Effectively no work to prepare anything, the trickiest is really the melons, you can substitute to bananas or grapes for easier fruit but higher carbs. And you can always eat out a meal every few days, estimate how much it makes up and eat that much less.
This costs roughly $10/day, and I'm targeting 1200 calories, which is the minimum recommendation for men. I track everything with an app and allow myself to go slightly higher if I'm hungry at the end of the day. There's about 3-400 calories buffer for those almonds, which I sometimes use for coffee with milk, or for various alternative snacks (e.g. granola bars in bulk turn out to be extremely cheap on a per calorie basis). And then there's a buffer between 1200 and the roughly 17-1800 I'd be at for breakeven, so if I splurge once a week I just don't lose weight that day but I'm not gaining anything.
This gotta be a joke right?
Your story is something I would expect form a 4chan greentext.
In case its not: I am happy you can live with this kind of diet but honestly, it just sounds very horrible for me and if I would need to live like that every day I would become very depressed. It's worth to cook at least simple food, just to have some variety in ur daily live and warm meals are so much nicer than eating cold every day.
Yeah, gotta agree here. I've lost a significant amount of weight, which I've talked about before, and I never had to resort to anything that horrific sounding.
Here's my advice for quick cheap healthy meals: get a microwave steamer. Throw frozen veggies and meat bits (I use Morningstar brand fake-meat strips but I assume real meat equivalents exist). Takes about ten minutes to make a meal, you can mix up the vegetables and any sauces you want to use on the whole thing.
I go out for a warm meal every so often. I just don't want to have to do that every day or to have to learn how to cook.
Before this I drank Soylent for around 2 years, I'm not the kind of person to get bored by lack of variety in food. I just wanted something easier and healthier than Soylent.
It's good that you found a way to plan meals that works for you and I am not saying that you should stop.
What I am saying is that most people value the variety of food and actually want their food to taste good so I think your plan is not suitable for the vast majority of people.
I mean I am also one of those people who "eat to live" instead of "live to eat" but your plan is just way too extreme. Even I can feel the difference in my mood when I manage to cook every day and get a decent variety of food.
I started to meal prep every sunday and just prepare food that I then heat for dinner and that worked pretty good for me.
I've been hearing about more and more people doing things like this, but I have to ask (serious question, and I'm not trying to be snarky): do you not enjoy eating food? Eating such boring and repetitive meals every day sounds absolutely horrible to me. Granted, I cook almost every day and really enjoy making and eating varied meals packed with flavor, but even then—do you not get bored at all? Do you not get pleasure from eating cooked meals? I think I would go mental on this kind of diet, but I'm starting to think that maybe I'm an outlier, and most people are happy to simply fill their stomachs.
Sure, I enjoy a nice steak like anyone else. But I don't feel the need to have warm meals everyday, and it's certainly not worth the effort to me.
The only part of the diet I actually find "boring" is the vegetables. I like everything else, I specifically picked foods from each category I enjoyed enough to eat daily. E.g. I tried several kinds of raspberries and decided I didn't like them enough to have daily.
I can still add variety. Maybe once a week I'll go out and grab a tuna salad, and somewhat less often I'll have a steak salad. And the other week I bought a pack of ice cream sandwiches and had 2-3/day till it was finished, and had less elsewhere to compensate. I may gradually add more things in as I experiment, but this is my base diet, one I can be comfortable knowing it's nutritious.
I started at 170, and I'm 5'8 and mid-20s. Down to low 150s now, will probably stop around 130-140 which is closer to the bottom of the healthy range, and then go up to 17-800 calorie range.
It’s 8 eggs a day (soft boiled in a $20 egg steamer)... lots of bok choy or broccoli in avocado oil (oil for calories)... rice... and protein shakes. I microwave the veggies.
Protein shake recipe is Greek yogurt from Costco, frozen berries, oatmeal, a scoop of pea protein, avocado oil.
I combine the two to get 3000 calories a day.
I enjoy food sometimes, like the first few bites, but to me hunger is a disease and eating is a chore. I’ve always had a poor appetite and low-ish (21) BMI.
If price is your goal you can do better. The melons (expensive) can be replaced with a breakfast of oats (one of the cheapest, healthiest sources of carbs). This can be more filling too. The cottage cheese and sardines can be replaced with chicken breast, or, even cheaper, whey protein.
cottage cheese is typically high in casein, not whey protein. You can buy casein protein powder just like whey, but it is not as easy to mix. My preferred casein alternative is greek yogurt. Oikos makes a high protein one that has 15g of protein. In this study you can see the effects of both whey and casein protein intake -> https://sci-hub.tw/10.1159/000012817. Protip: Eat your greek yogurt or cottage cheese just before bed as it takes upwards of 8 hours for your system to digest casein (2 for whey), helping provide your body with additional protein during sleep. (preserves lean muscle mass)
To echo some of the other sibling comments about this lifestyle- if you're going to over-optimize nutrition like this, and under-prioritize taste, couldn't you just eat Soylent or Huel or another over-optimized food substitute?
I did Soylent for a while, but I wanted something more natural and in line with the traditional "pyramid". Soylent was sort of my default until I bothered to learn the bare minimum about nutrition.
Here's my cheap, fast, and healthy diet that doesn't require any cooking. I started a few months ago and it's very effective in losing weight and saving time.
Half of a pound container of cottage cheese, plus a large melon (cantaloupe or honeydew are easy to cut once you learn how) for breakfast. One can of sardines for lunch. Another can of sardines, plus a can of vegetables for dinner.
One bottle of water at each meal plus 1-2 more throughout the day. Whenever hungry in between meals, snack on almonds.
You can buy a week or so worth of everything at a time, and some like the fish, vegetables, and nuts can be bought in bulk for months. Effectively no work to prepare anything, the trickiest is really the melons, you can substitute to bananas or grapes for easier fruit but higher carbs. And you can always eat out a meal every few days, estimate how much it makes up and eat that much less.
This costs roughly $10/day, and I'm targeting 1200 calories, which is the minimum recommendation for men. I track everything with an app and allow myself to go slightly higher if I'm hungry at the end of the day. There's about 3-400 calories buffer for those almonds, which I sometimes use for coffee with milk, or for various alternative snacks (e.g. granola bars in bulk turn out to be extremely cheap on a per calorie basis). And then there's a buffer between 1200 and the roughly 17-1800 I'd be at for breakeven, so if I splurge once a week I just don't lose weight that day but I'm not gaining anything.