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 >.>
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 >.>