This is an excerpt from my upcoming book The Weight Loss Habit. Since we’re all stuck at home, can’t go to restaurants, and it’s a time of habit change, it’s a good time to start eating healthier. Here I explain how frozen meals are one of the easiest ways to do that.
Edit:
The book is now available.
There was a period of time where my wife decided to go vegan. It made her feel generally better and healthier, but she ultimately gave it up because it was just too much of a time commitment.
Every day I’d come home from work and she’d be in the kitchen blending smoothies, making pastes, sorting seeds and grains, and doing god knows what to prepare all her meals. She’d stay in the kitchen the entire evening until it was time to go to bed. Eventually she decided, “Screw this. I want my life back,” and switched back to a normal diet just because it was easier.
A lot of people think this is what dieting means: You need to avoid all processed foods, so you have to freshly prepare all of your own meals. Which is fine if you love to cook, or are super fast in the kitchen. But for the rest of us, this can be a huge barrier to losing weight.
We’re busy people, and if we have to devote hours each day to meal prep, we’ll end up not doing it. If we make weight loss – or any habit change – too difficult, the challenge, hassle, and time commitment makes it far more likely that we’ll give up than that we’ll follow through regularly enough to build the habit and succeed.
That’s where frozen meals come in.
Frozen meals are the healthy eater’s best friend:
They tell you exactly how many calories are in them, so you can easily pick out sensible ones when you shop.
There’s an enormous variety so anyone can find some that they like, and have different meals throughout the week.
They’re quick and easy to make. All you have to do is pop them in the oven or microwave.
They’re inexpensive – typically between $1 and $4 a meal, depending on brands and what’s on sale.
And let’s be honest: Most of us aren’t gourmet chefs, so frozen meals are tastier than what 90% of us are capable of making.
You can shove a few weeks worth of meals into your freezer and then not have to worry about it.
You can also put some in your office freezer to have healthy meals at work. [At least, you can do this when you go back to work.]
If your family members or meal-mates have different dietary needs/tastes, you can each have entirely different meals without it being a hassle.
Plus you don’t have to deal with cleaning up the kitchen after cooking.
Also, you don’t have the guilt and wasted money of buying fresh ingredients and then having to throw them away when they go bad because you never got around to using them.
The foodies and health nuts may be appalled by this advice, and scream about preservatives and processed ingredients. But whatever small hypothetical health risks there are from that stuff is dwarfed by the very real and large health problems of obesity. So ignore all that nonsense, and use this extremely easy and convenient way to reduce your calorie intake and lose weight.
[…] The Miracle of Frozen Food […]