I am mildly malnourished. I am far too thin for my height/age and I do not eat in sufficient volume or sufficiently healthily.
Cost is the major prohibiting factor. I live at home, but I pay for most of what I consume. (Breakfast/lunch.) I am working full time, saving for college.
Food preparation in advance is an option, but I tell myself I don’t have the time to do so. Plus buying pre-prepared food is easier and I lack the motivation to make food if I can just buy it.
If I try to prohibit myself from spending (leaving my money/debit card in my car or at home) then I’ll more than likely just not eat.
When it comes to preparing food at home, if there is something unhealthy, but gives the illusion of being filling, I will more than likely take that instead of taking the time to make something.
Also, slightly tangential, but still related: I can’t eat food that has not-food parts. Examples: apples, I will cut up beforehand and eat only after slicing and discarding the nonedible parts. On meat that has a small amount of fat, I have to completely trim and remove it before starting to eat. I cannot even touch ribs, even though I know I’d like the taste, nor chicken with bones.
Can you eat grapes, or do the stems give you trouble? Consider keeping canned fruit around (peaches, pears, mandarin oranges, pineapple, &c) or dried fruit (raisins, dates, craisins, papaya, whatever) as a way to get fruit that does not include non-food parts. Similar options exist with vegetables. Frozen also works—frozen cherries are already pitted for you just like canned ones.
Keep simple stuff around: for instance, buy hummus, spreadable cheese, guacamole, cold cuts, etc., and keep a sliced loaf of bread in the freezer. At will, break off an arbitrary number of slices, toast bread, put stuff on it, nom.
Hardboil eggs—you can do an entire layer of eggs (how many that is depends on pot size) in half an hour, during most of which time you don’t have to be doing anything, and they keep really well. (Put eggs in a single layer in pot. Cover with cold water, plus an inch above the top of the eggs. Bring to a rolling boil, then remove from heat, cover, time 15 minutes, and then drain them and put them in cold water with some ice to bring the temperature down. Store in fridge. To eat, peel (thereby removing all nonedible parts) and take a bite; good with salt, better with salt and also other spices.)
Grapes are fine if I pick them off the stems and discard first. Canned fruit is actually a good idea. Those single-serving Dole fruit cups also come to mind as something I can toss in a bag with a spoon, no preparation necessary.
And actually, the hardboiled eggs all-at-once thing seems like a good idea. I think it’d be easier to prepare in advance if it’s a one-time investment of an hour total prep/cook time every week rather than 15 minutes the night before every day. Even building a half dozen sandwhiches Sunday evening seems like less of an investment than making one an evening. Any other ideas for batch food-making?
I give this exact advice often enough that I should just put it on a website.
Bean soup/stew
Buy a bag of dried beans, put them in a pot with as much water as the instructions on the bag suggest, bring to a boil, then simmer until the beans are soft. You will probably want to add some salt at some point.
Ways to add some variety to this dish, all of them optional:
Use different kinds of beans
Before putting in the beans and water, sautee some stew/soup-type veggies in the same pot pot (e.g. chopped onion, carrot, celery, chopped tomato). Then add the beans and water.
When the beans are almost done, add some leafy greens (kale, chard, etc.) or chopped scallions/chives/&c to the pot.
Before adding the beans and water, cook a little bit of chopped garlic or other spices in the pot with a little bit of oil.
Before adding the beans and water, fry up some chopped bacon or turkey bacon, chopped sausage, or anchovies (use low heat for anchovies).
After adding the beans, add a little bit of cured meat (e.g. prosciutto, bresaola, etc.).
Add a couple of bay leaves with the beans and water.
For the meats, a little bit goes a long way and you may not need extra salt.
Pasta
Follow the instructions on the box (but remember to salt the water heavily, at least a full teaspoon, probably more) to cook the pasta. When it’s done, drain it in a colander. Optional: You can stir in a little bit of grated Parmagiano or other hard cheese for added flavor and protein/fat; if you don’t want a “cheesy” pasta just stop adding cheese when it doesn’t seem to be absorbed into the pasta anymore.
For sauce, here are some options (add spices to any of them if/when it seems like it might be a good idea):
Use pre-made pasta sauce
Brown some garlic in a little olive oil or butter, add anchovies at a low heat, then once they dissolve in the heat add some chopped tomatoes.
Sautee some subset of (chopped onion, chopped carrot, chopped celery) then add either chopped tomatoes or canned crushed tomatoes or canned tomato puree.
Cook some fresh or frozen veggies with a little oil and maybe some spices, then
mix in with the pasta
Some non-batch items you might try are baked potatoes. All you have to remember is punch a couple of tiny holes in the top so it doesn’t explode. You can make them anywhere you have at least a microwave by putting them in for 7-10 minutes depending on the power of the microwave.
I can vouch for the Pasta recipes with great enthusiasm.
Another food I’d recommend for ease of eating and cheapness, is Shepherdess pie, Shepherd’s pie with the meat replaced with vegetables, which I personally prefer. Linkage!
I suspect that the most useful component of advice may often be mentioning the relevant search term or the name of the relevant field. Cf. Lukeprog’s point about not being able to find good resources about the neuroscience of desire until he found the term “neuroeconomics.”
I should give advice like that more often, e.g. “google ‘batch cooking’.” There are often implementation details available elsewhere.
Soup is easy to make in batches; legume-based soups freeze well and others freeze at least tolerably. Measure out servings into (well-sealed) tupperwares and freeze them; chuck one into your backpack come morning. Pasta salad, potato salad, egg salad, or tuna salad can also be made in large amounts—they won’t freeze as nicely, so you’d want to put them next to your frozen soup or one of those things that you put in lunchboxes to keep stuff cold.
The last time I made lasagna, I made 5 of them—one we baked and ate that night (and as leftovers over the next few days), and the others we wrapped and froze. This requires you to have several Pyrex baking pans (currently 10-15 US$ each), and substantial freezer space (both of which we already had), but the work required for making 5 pans was perhaps 2x making a single pan, and if we are hungry and don’t want to cook we can just take a pan out and bake it, dinner in 30 minutes with no effort. Baked and refrigerated they last several days, enough to eat over several lunches and dinners. Enchiladas also work well for this. Both make a nice alternative to the classic frozen stews, soups, and chilis.
I’m assuming that by ‘pre-prepared’ you mean something like TV dinners or pizza from a restaurant. If that’s the case, you can look for things that are close to pre-prepared without being as expensive as that. My go-to meal solution in that vein is microwavable rice or pasta (example), possibly with things added to it. A packet of cheddar-broccoli rice or pasta with a can of tuna mixed in makes a nice casserole-type thing, for example, or a packet of pasta alfredo with a can of chicken mixed in. You can also mix in veggies (canned or frozen are probably most convenient) in addition to the small amount that most of those packets have. This takes less than 5 minutes to put together, cooks in 10-15, and even with added things shouldn’t come to more than $3 or so per instance - $1 or less per instance if you look for sales on the packets and don’t add anything. If you don’t mind bland food or taking the time to add spices by hand, you can do something similar even less expensively by buying large boxes of instant mashed potatoes or instant rice, or instant oatmeal for breakfast.
On Sunday night cook for your family. Cook them chicken breasts, or steak, or pork loins. Cook 6 extra (or, if your mom is willing have her cook these with sunday’s dinner). This is your lunch the rest of the week. Before the meat is even cool put it in ziplocks and put it in the refridgerator.
At the same time buy a bunch of carrots, celery, bell peppers and green beans. Buy a bunch of cans of various kinds of beans—go to the Save-A-Lot or whatever store the poor folks in your city go to. Kidney Beans, Black Beans, whatever. Cut up the celery, carrots and bell peppers and put it in baggies with a bit of water to keep it fresh. Green beans you can cook or not as you want. Get two gallons of WHOLE milk, a big tub of Protein powder and some way to mix it, and a dozen eggs. While you’re cooking the meat and cutting the vegetables Sunday night, hard boil the eggs. You can find protein powder on the internet delivered much cheaper than you can buy it from GNC. Oh, get Whey protein, not Soy. Unless you want tits of your very own.
Breakfast is 2 hard boiled eggs and a 16 ounce protein powder milkshake. There is a phenomenal amount of nutrition in that. Lots of calories too.
Lunch is whatever meat is left over from Sunday dinner and a couple bags of fresh vegetables. (I would suggest varying the type of meat to cover more bases nutrient wise, but chicken seems to generally be the cheapest per pound).
I’m assuming you eat dinner with your family? This will fill in enough of the other micronutrients you need that you should be ok.
This should take about 1 hour on Sunday to do the prep and cooking, and about 10 minutes a day to mix the shake and pull stuff out of the fridge. If you have extra money you can do stuff like squash (cook one on Sunday, eat it all week) etc. Chili and stew are other things you can make in bulk on your one day and eat the rest of the time
Aim for getting about 200 grams of protein a day (that’s grams of protein, not grams of meat use www.nutritiondata.com to sort out what you need).
Buying in bulk saves you money. Cooking them all at once saves you time. Putting them in the fridge saves the food. Having it all prepared saves you from having to think about it.
Oh, and two or three times a week stop by the gym and pick heavy shit up and put it back down for a while. This will solve the thin part.
This doesn’t address the “minimal effort” issue as much as I’d like (driving to stores and buying counts as much as preparing food, as well as searching online and doing online ordering), though it is admittedly very akratic. But you seem to be of the “just balls up and do it” persuasion, so I won’t object there.
Having pre-prepared eggs in the morning (instead of at lunch as others suggested), along with better meals instead at lunch seems like, well, a better idea. I think I’ll start a routine of that this Sunday.
Oh, and there’s a Costco in town, so bulk purchases aren’t that difficult.
As per the excercise: a year or two ago when I was sailing for 6 hours a day, every day of the week for 4-5 weeks of the sumer, I was the thinnest I’ve been in some time. But I was FIT. I’m not sure of the science of it all, but I’m not a weakling. I can do a dozen pullups… fairly successfully. Building an excessive amount of muscle mass isn’t something I’m too into (being weightlifter-buff is unappealing, but being martial-artist strong is more ideal, if that makes any sense). I just want to eat healthier and not waste away entirely :/
Oh, but semi-related, my cardio is utter garbage. I can sprint faster than most people I know who run regularly, but I’m coughing and wheezing ten times quicker. And no, I don’t smoke nor live with smokers.
Could be exercise induced asthma. I got an inhaler for that, used it a few times, and it let me push myself to the point where I could develop actual muscles there. I can job a couple miles without problem now, and haven’t used the inhaler in months. I have no clue how typical this result is, mind. I still occasionally find it implausibly successful >.>
I am mildly malnourished. I am far too thin for my height/age and I do not eat in sufficient volume or sufficiently healthily.
Cost is the major prohibiting factor. I live at home, but I pay for most of what I consume. (Breakfast/lunch.) I am working full time, saving for college.
Food preparation in advance is an option, but I tell myself I don’t have the time to do so. Plus buying pre-prepared food is easier and I lack the motivation to make food if I can just buy it.
If I try to prohibit myself from spending (leaving my money/debit card in my car or at home) then I’ll more than likely just not eat.
When it comes to preparing food at home, if there is something unhealthy, but gives the illusion of being filling, I will more than likely take that instead of taking the time to make something.
Also, slightly tangential, but still related: I can’t eat food that has not-food parts. Examples: apples, I will cut up beforehand and eat only after slicing and discarding the nonedible parts. On meat that has a small amount of fat, I have to completely trim and remove it before starting to eat. I cannot even touch ribs, even though I know I’d like the taste, nor chicken with bones.
Can you eat grapes, or do the stems give you trouble? Consider keeping canned fruit around (peaches, pears, mandarin oranges, pineapple, &c) or dried fruit (raisins, dates, craisins, papaya, whatever) as a way to get fruit that does not include non-food parts. Similar options exist with vegetables. Frozen also works—frozen cherries are already pitted for you just like canned ones.
Keep simple stuff around: for instance, buy hummus, spreadable cheese, guacamole, cold cuts, etc., and keep a sliced loaf of bread in the freezer. At will, break off an arbitrary number of slices, toast bread, put stuff on it, nom.
Hardboil eggs—you can do an entire layer of eggs (how many that is depends on pot size) in half an hour, during most of which time you don’t have to be doing anything, and they keep really well. (Put eggs in a single layer in pot. Cover with cold water, plus an inch above the top of the eggs. Bring to a rolling boil, then remove from heat, cover, time 15 minutes, and then drain them and put them in cold water with some ice to bring the temperature down. Store in fridge. To eat, peel (thereby removing all nonedible parts) and take a bite; good with salt, better with salt and also other spices.)
Grapes are fine if I pick them off the stems and discard first. Canned fruit is actually a good idea. Those single-serving Dole fruit cups also come to mind as something I can toss in a bag with a spoon, no preparation necessary.
And actually, the hardboiled eggs all-at-once thing seems like a good idea. I think it’d be easier to prepare in advance if it’s a one-time investment of an hour total prep/cook time every week rather than 15 minutes the night before every day. Even building a half dozen sandwhiches Sunday evening seems like less of an investment than making one an evening. Any other ideas for batch food-making?
I give this exact advice often enough that I should just put it on a website.
Bean soup/stew
Buy a bag of dried beans, put them in a pot with as much water as the instructions on the bag suggest, bring to a boil, then simmer until the beans are soft. You will probably want to add some salt at some point.
Ways to add some variety to this dish, all of them optional:
Use different kinds of beans
Before putting in the beans and water, sautee some stew/soup-type veggies in the same pot pot (e.g. chopped onion, carrot, celery, chopped tomato). Then add the beans and water.
When the beans are almost done, add some leafy greens (kale, chard, etc.) or chopped scallions/chives/&c to the pot.
Before adding the beans and water, cook a little bit of chopped garlic or other spices in the pot with a little bit of oil.
Before adding the beans and water, fry up some chopped bacon or turkey bacon, chopped sausage, or anchovies (use low heat for anchovies).
After adding the beans, add a little bit of cured meat (e.g. prosciutto, bresaola, etc.).
Add a couple of bay leaves with the beans and water.
For the meats, a little bit goes a long way and you may not need extra salt.
Pasta
Follow the instructions on the box (but remember to salt the water heavily, at least a full teaspoon, probably more) to cook the pasta. When it’s done, drain it in a colander. Optional: You can stir in a little bit of grated Parmagiano or other hard cheese for added flavor and protein/fat; if you don’t want a “cheesy” pasta just stop adding cheese when it doesn’t seem to be absorbed into the pasta anymore.
For sauce, here are some options (add spices to any of them if/when it seems like it might be a good idea):
Use pre-made pasta sauce
Brown some garlic in a little olive oil or butter, add anchovies at a low heat, then once they dissolve in the heat add some chopped tomatoes.
Sautee some subset of (chopped onion, chopped carrot, chopped celery) then add either chopped tomatoes or canned crushed tomatoes or canned tomato puree.
Cook some fresh or frozen veggies with a little oil and maybe some spices, then mix in with the pasta
Also, I found the results-to-effort ratio on this mac-and-cheese recipe to be quite satisfactory.
Some non-batch items you might try are baked potatoes. All you have to remember is punch a couple of tiny holes in the top so it doesn’t explode. You can make them anywhere you have at least a microwave by putting them in for 7-10 minutes depending on the power of the microwave.
I can vouch for the Pasta recipes with great enthusiasm.
Another food I’d recommend for ease of eating and cheapness, is Shepherdess pie, Shepherd’s pie with the meat replaced with vegetables, which I personally prefer. Linkage!
http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/5397/shepherdess-pie.aspx
I did a google search for ‘batch cooking’, and this result may be of interest to you.
http://www.netmums.com/food/Batch_cooking_and_freezing.721/
I suspect that the most useful component of advice may often be mentioning the relevant search term or the name of the relevant field. Cf. Lukeprog’s point about not being able to find good resources about the neuroscience of desire until he found the term “neuroeconomics.”
I should give advice like that more often, e.g. “google ‘batch cooking’.” There are often implementation details available elsewhere.
Soup is easy to make in batches; legume-based soups freeze well and others freeze at least tolerably. Measure out servings into (well-sealed) tupperwares and freeze them; chuck one into your backpack come morning. Pasta salad, potato salad, egg salad, or tuna salad can also be made in large amounts—they won’t freeze as nicely, so you’d want to put them next to your frozen soup or one of those things that you put in lunchboxes to keep stuff cold.
The last time I made lasagna, I made 5 of them—one we baked and ate that night (and as leftovers over the next few days), and the others we wrapped and froze. This requires you to have several Pyrex baking pans (currently 10-15 US$ each), and substantial freezer space (both of which we already had), but the work required for making 5 pans was perhaps 2x making a single pan, and if we are hungry and don’t want to cook we can just take a pan out and bake it, dinner in 30 minutes with no effort. Baked and refrigerated they last several days, enough to eat over several lunches and dinners. Enchiladas also work well for this. Both make a nice alternative to the classic frozen stews, soups, and chilis.
I’m assuming that by ‘pre-prepared’ you mean something like TV dinners or pizza from a restaurant. If that’s the case, you can look for things that are close to pre-prepared without being as expensive as that. My go-to meal solution in that vein is microwavable rice or pasta (example), possibly with things added to it. A packet of cheddar-broccoli rice or pasta with a can of tuna mixed in makes a nice casserole-type thing, for example, or a packet of pasta alfredo with a can of chicken mixed in. You can also mix in veggies (canned or frozen are probably most convenient) in addition to the small amount that most of those packets have. This takes less than 5 minutes to put together, cooks in 10-15, and even with added things shouldn’t come to more than $3 or so per instance - $1 or less per instance if you look for sales on the packets and don’t add anything. If you don’t mind bland food or taking the time to add spices by hand, you can do something similar even less expensively by buying large boxes of instant mashed potatoes or instant rice, or instant oatmeal for breakfast.
On Sunday night cook for your family. Cook them chicken breasts, or steak, or pork loins. Cook 6 extra (or, if your mom is willing have her cook these with sunday’s dinner). This is your lunch the rest of the week. Before the meat is even cool put it in ziplocks and put it in the refridgerator.
At the same time buy a bunch of carrots, celery, bell peppers and green beans. Buy a bunch of cans of various kinds of beans—go to the Save-A-Lot or whatever store the poor folks in your city go to. Kidney Beans, Black Beans, whatever. Cut up the celery, carrots and bell peppers and put it in baggies with a bit of water to keep it fresh. Green beans you can cook or not as you want. Get two gallons of WHOLE milk, a big tub of Protein powder and some way to mix it, and a dozen eggs. While you’re cooking the meat and cutting the vegetables Sunday night, hard boil the eggs. You can find protein powder on the internet delivered much cheaper than you can buy it from GNC. Oh, get Whey protein, not Soy. Unless you want tits of your very own.
Breakfast is 2 hard boiled eggs and a 16 ounce protein powder milkshake. There is a phenomenal amount of nutrition in that. Lots of calories too.
Lunch is whatever meat is left over from Sunday dinner and a couple bags of fresh vegetables. (I would suggest varying the type of meat to cover more bases nutrient wise, but chicken seems to generally be the cheapest per pound).
I’m assuming you eat dinner with your family? This will fill in enough of the other micronutrients you need that you should be ok.
This should take about 1 hour on Sunday to do the prep and cooking, and about 10 minutes a day to mix the shake and pull stuff out of the fridge. If you have extra money you can do stuff like squash (cook one on Sunday, eat it all week) etc. Chili and stew are other things you can make in bulk on your one day and eat the rest of the time
Aim for getting about 200 grams of protein a day (that’s grams of protein, not grams of meat use www.nutritiondata.com to sort out what you need).
Buying in bulk saves you money. Cooking them all at once saves you time. Putting them in the fridge saves the food. Having it all prepared saves you from having to think about it.
Oh, and two or three times a week stop by the gym and pick heavy shit up and put it back down for a while. This will solve the thin part.
This doesn’t address the “minimal effort” issue as much as I’d like (driving to stores and buying counts as much as preparing food, as well as searching online and doing online ordering), though it is admittedly very akratic. But you seem to be of the “just balls up and do it” persuasion, so I won’t object there.
Having pre-prepared eggs in the morning (instead of at lunch as others suggested), along with better meals instead at lunch seems like, well, a better idea. I think I’ll start a routine of that this Sunday.
Oh, and there’s a Costco in town, so bulk purchases aren’t that difficult.
As per the excercise: a year or two ago when I was sailing for 6 hours a day, every day of the week for 4-5 weeks of the sumer, I was the thinnest I’ve been in some time. But I was FIT. I’m not sure of the science of it all, but I’m not a weakling. I can do a dozen pullups… fairly successfully. Building an excessive amount of muscle mass isn’t something I’m too into (being weightlifter-buff is unappealing, but being martial-artist strong is more ideal, if that makes any sense). I just want to eat healthier and not waste away entirely :/
Oh, but semi-related, my cardio is utter garbage. I can sprint faster than most people I know who run regularly, but I’m coughing and wheezing ten times quicker. And no, I don’t smoke nor live with smokers.
Could be exercise induced asthma. I got an inhaler for that, used it a few times, and it let me push myself to the point where I could develop actual muscles there. I can job a couple miles without problem now, and haven’t used the inhaler in months. I have no clue how typical this result is, mind. I still occasionally find it implausibly successful >.>