Too many people who need to go on a proper diet make the excuse that they don’t have time to prepare good quality food. They insist that preparing healthy meals takes an awful lot of time, without actually trying to go through the process and finding out how they can streamline it and make it faster. As a result, they remain fat and out of shape, with astronomical blood glucose and disease risk levels. These people could not find the time to eat healthy, so pretty soon they will have to find the time to be sick and stay in the hospital. They will also be spending so much money that they will easily regret not spending the little extra time needed to prepare healthy meals.
A healthy meal consists of real, whole foods. It could include beef, chicken, pork, or fish, a few fruits and a good amount of vegetables. Using as few ingredients in the main dishes as possible ensures that you can track effectively the things you will be eating. It also means you can save money by not buying the ingredients you don’t want in your food – artificial additives, unhealthy sugars, and a host of expensive flavorings packed with sodium and artificial flavors.
Getting food is much harder with the train coming in.
Cooking up a healthy meal doesn’t take as much time as you think it does. In fact, it becomes easier over time. The first step is always planning what you want to eat for the week. You should know how many meals per day you will be eating and what your serving sizes will be so you can buy the right amount of ingredients for your meals. If you will be eating fourteen 100g servings of beef every week, you should buy about 1 1/2 kgs of beef on grocery day to get you enough beef. You need to make these rough calculations so you can budget for your food as well and see if you can buy in bulk – it’s not good to be spending too much when you can spend less by buying bulk. Planning should only take you at most half an hour every week.
Once you have the exact list of groceries you need to buy, go on to the grocery and try to find foods on sale to save you some cash. This would take around an hour, depending on how much you will be buying.
With the ingredients in hand, it’s time to cook. A quick rinse of everything you will be cooking should be enough to wash away any unneeded stuff from your food’s surface. Cooking preparations could go from an hour to two hours, depending on how many servings you will be preparing. The cooking itself could take another hour or so. Once the food is cooked, you can put them in glass containers and keep them in the freezer for convenient reheating over the week, which could only take up to 10 minutes every day.
Cooking once a week and just reheating will save you time and remove any doubts that you can eat a healthy meal with just a small time investment every week. This routine would only total 4-6 hours every Saturday, and will save you time by helping you prevent the need to be bedridden later on in life.
Learn more about the Benefits of a Proper Nutritional Program.
Photo Credit: duron123, freedigitalphotos.net
