I'm really surprised at how many people don't cook, don't know how to cook, don't want to cook and avoid cooking when they reach adulthood. How do people maintain their health without knowing how to boil and egg or make a soup or roast a chicken? It's just surprising that's all, for me I feel like if I had to constantly eat out, rely on prepackaged foods and make sandwiches all the time my health would be in great peril. I enjoy a restaurant meal out or chinese take out as much as the next guy but relying on this daily would take its toll.
Anyone else passionate about cooking? Or if you're one of the people who does not cook or prepare food at home, how do you do so while maintaining a level of high nutrition?
I'm back at 3FC after a bit of a break; still trying to gain control over behaviors that led to a partial regain that has been tough to get a hold of.
This topic brought me out of lurking because I am passionate to the point of evangelism about it. For me, I could NOT have lost 100+ pounds without shifting most of my dinners to home-cooked meals. I love restaurants as much as anyone - ethnic food of all kinds and fine dining - but I know from years of practice now what a challenge it is to eat on plan with restaurant food. It is possible to do, but extremely challenging. For one thing, restaurant food almost never has the amount of vegetables I want - I found I did best eating dinners that were 2/3 or 3/4 vegetables. So I figured out ways to eat home-cooked dinners five or six days a week, and save eating out for one dinner and one lunch on the weekend.
All of that said, I try to think with compassion about people who do not have cooking habits and feel overwhelmed or intimidated or wonder how they will find the time. For one thing, cooking is actually much harder and much more of a production for people who do it less often. If you are not a person who cooks as a matter of course, you likely do not have staple ingredients in your home at all times, so every time you want to cook it's a big complicated trip to the grocery store to buy packages of things you will only use a little of. You likely do not have good quality equipment, like sharp knives or heavy-bottom pots, that actually make cooking a whole lot easier than it seems when you are using bad equipment. You likely do not have a repertoire of techniques and flavor-combinations that you are facile with, so that you can improvise away from recipes when you need to.
All of these things make cooking MUCH harder than it has to be, so it feels like a huge mountain to climb for a person who isn't used to doing it.
Second, cooking is an investment of time. It is obvious that calling for takeout and eating right out of the container takes less prep and cleaning time than preparing your own meals. And that time has to come from somewhere. For me, as a person without children, it came out of time that I used to spend on hobbies and avocations - it is simply true that in the years since I started losing weight and maintaining my loss, I have had to cut down on the number of "extra-curriculars" and give less time to the ones I kept. I've had the luxury to do that. If you are a busy parent or caretaker for someone else, with barely enough time to keep it all together even if you are eating takeout or microwaved dinners every day, trying to figure out where the time for real food preparation must be extremely daunting. I have tremendous sympathy for that.
I am always happy to talk to people about cooking, to teach relatively simple techniques for creating food with flavor and not a lot of added calories, without too much complexity of preparation. I'm happy to talk to people about what's in my pantry so that often all I have to do at the grocery store is buy some fresh vegetables and maybe a protein and I'm ready to cook dinners for the whole week. But I understand that the barrier to entry, if you are not already a person with the habit of cooking, can be quite high.
One last comment - this post is already so long I doubt anyone will have read it - having developed good cooking habits during my years of active weight loss, fortunately those habits stuck even during the times when I had trouble keeping on plan in other areas of my life. That has kept my regain from being a lot worse than it was. Cooking has served me extremely well.
I learned to cook as a child, by the time I was 14, I cooked dinner every night for my family. I can't imagine not cooking yet I do know that a lot of people my age don't cook (I turn 40 next year y'all). Now cooking does take time but I've found a lot of ways to simplify it. Grocery shopping takes time but I've even found a local purchaser that will delivery vegetables/fruits from local farms (or even not so local, depends on season). I find grocery shopping therapeutic though, being able to choose what I get to eat and also cooking can be therapeutic.
I know it may be rough for those that didn't learn how to cook when they were young but it is doable, I've known a lot of people who have been able to do it. To choose the foods that go into your meal is something you can control.
I agree that not cooking is just another hurdle to losing/maintaining healthy weight. But I also have understanding for those who don't know how. I can think of a good many children whose parents don't cook so they don't observe and absorb those behaviors. I was raised on fast food and prepackaged food. I only learned to cook for myself in my late 20's through a lot of trial and error and intentional habit making. It's been such a gift to myself. But not everyone gets that opportunity.
Carter I love cooking too, passionately! And yet I curse my love of cooking everyday when I have to do the dishes. But what is the alternative? You all have sympathy for those that can't cook but I don't get it. I'm a busy mom, I work, I run my own business, and I still have to cook and clean the house. It's a responsibility. I grew up with home cooked food but I didn't cook anything myself until my mid 20's. You learn. You pick up skills as you go on. Ok so at first I burned my omelette. I suppose some people give up at that point and decide to pick up an egg sandwich rather than eat rubbery eggs. OR you can learn how to cook a freaking egg. These days there are no excuses, there are YouTube videos, cooking blogs,and the food channel. Go take a basic cooking class. It's like driving, you learn how to drive so you can affordable get around. You're not going to rely on taxis forever.
I have a friend who relies entirely on her mom for home cooked food. She is 40 and picks up food from her mothers house once a week to stock her freezer. Now she has a very young daughter who is relying on these meals. But her mother is in her 70s, how long can she rely on this convenience?
Nope, nope, nope. Hate cooking, just find it annoying, never liked it. Fortunately, I don't find this a barrier to good health, lots of simple things are very tasty -- combos of veggies and beans and salads are easy and healthful and tasty. So for myself, I cook as little as possible because that suits me just fine. Roasting a big pan of tasty veg or baking a sweet potato is about as much effort as I want to put in, but that is fine for my tastebuds, my health, and my waistline.
Almost all of my cooking is for other people, so I know how to do the basics (the very, very basics) just fine. I roast chickens, and make curries, and bake meatloafs, and make-a da spicy meatballs, and blah blah blah. It's just that I find cooking about as fun as scrubbing the toilets. Necessary since other people rely on me for eats, but nothing I want to prolong.
I don't really mind cooking. Don't love it and don't hate it.. I will say prior to getting into dieting though, I didn't know how. I've learned a few things over time... I still just go by exact recipes. I can't just throw things together and have them taste good unless it's a salad, basically. I have no common sense when it comes to what spices pair with what. To this day I still also suck at making eggs. They either come out a little yolk-y (and I hate that) or way too dry.
Basically cooking was not something that was taught to me for home life stuff. My "I can cook this" recipe list was restricted to Mac and Cheese, and grilled cheese sandwiches when I moved out of my parents at 18. The only time we even did home cooked stuff was during the holidays, and maybe every so often on the weekend. I basically lived off of hot pockets, ramen noodles, and mac and cheese from when I was around 14 on. Before that we did mac and cheese a lot, some basic spaghetti (boil noodles and add a jar of sauce), and lots of the cheapy chicken pot pies you can pick up for around 1 dollar each at the store. Basically I had to learn the importance of cooking on my own, so learning it was severely delayed and took something drastic to point it out.
I can bake, but I don't find it very similar.. baking is made to follow recipes to a T, cooking seems to have a bit more diversity with spices. I do get warm fuzzies when I make something that is nummy now though. I am trying to get my son into the kitchen more too. He'll help me make smoothies or add stuff for recipes. I figure the poor eating habits I learned as a kid carried over into adulthood. Cooking never really had importance placed on it until I started trying to lose weight, so I want to hopefully change that priority a little bit for him.
I don't think cooking is overrated. I don't know many people who cook, honestly. Most people I know get by on take out and minimal prep. I get it that some people don't like cooking. But for example I HATE laundry. But that doesn't mean I get to opt out of it lol. I expect that every morning when I go into my closet there will be a pair of clean socks in my drawer. So regardless of what I like to do with my time I have to resort to washing my clothes.
And if you have kids, what do you do? How do you teach them to be healthy, self reliant and live affordably if you're feeding them sandwiches and take out every day?
Last edited by Palestrina; 12-15-2014 at 07:11 AM.
Do they still teach Home Economics in high school? They taught the cooking basics in there. And how to sew. And balance a check book. And other useful, practical things, like making a macrame plant hanger. Just curious, since I don't have kids myself. I had fun in that class.
If I had kids I'd teach them to cook the basics, for sure, same as I'd teach them how to iron and do the laundry and manage their money. My parents can both cook and my mom's an excellent baker (oooo, I especially hate baking, blech!) so I definitely learned in my home, I just didn't care for it myself. My brother got all the cooking love, however, he loooooves to cook. I got all the love of books instead.
When I was in high school (uhh over 20 years ago), home ec was an optional class that I didn't even know existed. I remember 1 of my friends saying she was in it and I was surprised it was a class. My schedule was packed at the time though so I couldn't have taken it if I wanted to.
And cooking doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't mean slaving on a stove for hours. Honestly, I use a pressure cooker and a rice cooker for most of my cooking. A slow cooker is another easy way to cook without much effort.
And if you have kids, what do you do? How do you teach them to be healthy, self reliant and live affordably if you're feeding them sandwiches and take out every day?
You don't teach them that if it's not what you're doing, to answer simply. It's why I'm spending time with my son in the kitchen now because I didn't get that with my childhood at all. I'd bake with my grandma or mom during holidays, but that was it, not cooking. My family had 5 kids at my dad's, and 4 at my mother's. Pretty much all we ate was prepackaged stuff you microwaved, or fast food my parent's picked up on the way home from work (as all four of my parents worked at least 40 hours each week with an hour and a half commute each way). Those eating habits stayed with me until I decided I wanted to lose weight and actually started looking into cooking healthy meals. It's silly looking back now, but there was a time when I didn't have a microwave and I literally was scared because I'd never really used a stove to cook ramen and such. It was daunting because I'd never done it, not because cooking ramen on the stove is hard.
As far as home economics. I took that about 11 years ago now. It was an optional class that most people didn't take. For ours we actually focused on the financial part. They taught us how to make a budget, had us pretend to look for houses and groceries using newspaper ads.. and then "live" off that budget for a few months while the teacher would hand out "emergency" stuff to some of the people. We also learned interview skills, and how to build a very basic resume. No cooking though.
Preparing my meals from scratch made a huge difference in my health and also helped me lose over 100 pounds. Sometimes that involves cooking complicated recipes, sometimes it just means trimming fresh vegetables for a simple meal. The point is to eliminate processed foods and know what I'm putting in my body. It's fun, too
While i have the time and do enjoy cooking, i recognize that not everyone does have the time. Friends who work two jobs, handle homework trying to get through classroom or online classes, have kids' homework to assist with or check over, in addition to everything else...sometimes the hours, even minutes, just aren't there, using public transit from job to job, and stopping for fresh take out from a market that doesn't HAVE fresh takeout in some cities is just not a viable option. Be careful before judging anyone...we know not their situations. To some, cooking is a luxury, as is using a full amount of detergent in a load of laundry, or being able to sit down on the way home from the night job. Be proud and pleased with your choices, but be wary of thinking everyone has the same amount of time, availability of product, and the same ability.
Last edited by nationalparker; 12-15-2014 at 10:55 PM.
Cooking for your Health
