Well now - that there is a perfectly good reason to purchase a little tv to have on your kitchen counter

Great post!

I am still learning a lot about cooking so my lunches are still pretty simple. But I often cook up 4oz cuts of chicken breast on Sunday for lunches all week. Cut/measure the meat, season, and throw in the oven for 45 mins. I also will steam up my veggie of choice for the week.

When it's all done I have baked chicken and steamed veggies for lunch at work. Add on a piece of fruit and maybe a string cheese and I'm good to go!

It's so worth the effort. When I don't plan it's just too easy to make poor choices.

I agree that it can seem daunting and yes, I know my way around a kitchen, so it might be a little easier for me. But it's not impossible to learn and you don't have to multitask the way I did.

Even something as simple as making the 5 pb sandwiches, putting carrots in a baggie, and boiling some eggs ahead of time - takes less than 10 mins.

Or taking it one step further, baking or grilling 5 chicken breasts on Sunday afternoon.

Something that simple that takes less than 15 minutes total can make a huge difference in success or failure for eating healthy over the week.

I know for me, if I am hungry during the day and don't have something already fixed, the temptation to eat a handful of crackers or grab something from a candy machine instead is pretty high. But knowing that I have a fridge full of already prepared, snack sized items that I can reach into the fridge and grab really helps.

And knowing that I have things prepped for meals the rest of the week also helps. When I come home from the gym after a long day and don't *want* to cook, it's easier to take a pre-grilled chicken breast and slice it over a bed of spinach and call it good.

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Great thread. I don't work full time so I don't need to plan out and cook a whole week ahead but I can still do things like pre-bag veggie snacks for the fridge so when I open it and am hungry the healthy food is one of the "easy" things to grab. Being prepared definitely helps with eating right!

I delayed looking at this thread because I thought it was yet another person complaining about not having enough time! haha. Should've looked at the OP and known better! Glad I checked it out.
Great job on your planning, PC! You're so organized. I have to get something like this planned out for the week. Meals are becoming haphazard. Healthy, but not well planned. Great inspiration!

Great post PhotoChick! I was one of those "don't have time" excuse users big time myself. Until I actually tried it that is I don't do my whole menu for the week on Sundays but basic stuff I do - like the boiled eggs and a pot of oats or prepping some dried beans. But I do put together my next days food while dinner is cooking. By the time din-din is done, my lunch bag is tucked in the fridge ready to grab and go in the morning. Imagine my surprise to find that boiling up a pot of whole wheat pasta and chopping a few veggies, adding a little feta cheese, and a drizzle of olive oil it actually takes the same amount of time as fixing a pan of Hamburger Helper. And, surprise, surprise - I'm a pretty good cook. DH hasn't missed the packaged processed or fast food dinners one bit.

Yup, along with the complaints about the grocery bill being higher trying to buy the healthier foods. DH had a few minutes of grumbling about the grocery bill but when I pointed out to him how much we had been spending on fast food or eating out every month, he realized we now actually spend less on food than we used to.

It really is all just excuses but I think we have to keep in mind how impossible it all seemed when we started out too. I know, in my case anyway, I was so on the verge of a serious depression that just the idea of not knowing how to choose fresh fruit and veggies that were ripe at the grocery store made me feel like such a loser I was actually afraid to try. It's always easier to make excuses than it is to make changes. It really took my fear of growing even fatter, and being fat forever getting bigger than my fear of looking stupid in the produce section to get me to learn to cook *real* food.

It's true that cooking, food prep, menu planning are skills that can be learned, but they're also becoming lost skills for a variety of reasons (convenience foods, I believe, being one of them - which isn't to say I think they shouldn't exist). They skills aren't difficult to master, but if you have no idea where to start, then reliance on packaged foods become not just a convenience but a necessity.

Shopping, cooking, and eating on a tight budget in as healthy a way as possible is one of my top priorities, with my husband and I both on disability with health and weight issues. I've been told it's impossible on budgets larger than ours, and when I tell those people how I've done it, usually there's no more than one or two tips they're willing to try - the rest is "too extreme," like going to more than one grocery store.

I've even been asked how to peel a carrot when I say that whole carrots are generally cheaper than baby carrots (I do buy baby carrots for snacking, but generally use whole carrots for stews). I guess because I was peeling carrots at 4, I assumed everyone knew how to do it, at least in theory... vegetable peeler in one hand, carrot in the other... What's a vegetable peeler, you mean a knife?....

I love making soups because to me they're one of the easiest things in the world to make. They take a lot of time, but very little of it is my time. If I make them in a crockpot, I don't even have to be there, but even in a soup pot on the stove, the simmering doesn't require much monitoring, so a soup may take 6 hours or more to cook (not so much because it has to, as because I started it a lot earlier than I planned on eating it), might require no more than 15 minutes of my time.

I think it's harder to eat a healthy diet on convenience foods. It's not impossible, or even extremely compicated, but it does require a different kind of shopping. It's a skill that isn't often taught though either. So we're losing the "old ways," of home cooking, but we're not necessarily learning a good new way either.

I saw a commercial on Saturday morning cartoons teaching kids to read nutrition labels, and I was really impressed. When I was a kid, it was already starting to be less common for even girls to know the cooking basics or want to. And while they were taught in school, they were considered a class smart girls didn't take and boys took because they were gay or wanted to meet dumb girls.

My grandmother and mother taught me to cook, sew, do laundry, crochet, do needlepoint (and ironing - was a skill they attempted to teach me, but the only thing I ever mastered were squares - sheets, pillocases and handkerchiefs), and my dad taught me and my brother woodworking. I was four when pretty most of the lessons begun, but my sisters 14 and 16 years younger than me, learned a lot fewer of the "domestic" arts. Less interest, less need.

For weight loss and health, cooking skills aren't necessary, but they come in handy. And while cooking skills may not be necessary, planning skills pretty much are, and a good grasp of basic nutrition sure helps also.

Wait.... you have NEXT week's dinner planned?? Oh now I'm really impressed! I dont even have TONIGHT's dinner planned.

This is how I am too...I need to have things packed ahead of time with 5 kids in and out of the house so when I buy my fresh fruit and veggies I go ahead and pack them in snack baggies so I can just grab and go! If I don't I spend more time looking to see what I can grab and will go for one of those fiber one bars or something...makes no sense to me why I do it lol!

I work from home but I think that is worse than going to work somewhere else sometimes esp with food

Thanks for the recipe for the baked oats Photochick!

Great thread!! I am a SAHM so I dont do a whole lot of prep on the weekends but I do sit down and write up a menu that we use for the week!!

It saves a lot of time and I never have to ponder over what I am going to make for dinner. And it helps me stay away from the pre-packeged foods.

You know .. the whole cooking thing is interesting to me.

On the one hand, I love Food Network because I get so many great ideas from it. On the other hand, I do think that the plethora of cooking shows has created this idea in people's heads that everything they fix needs to be "gourmet" food. Or that you have to have a huge array of different pots and pans and gadgets to cook. Or that you have to stock up on exotic ingredients.

Even the basic shows tend to foster this attitude to a degree.

I think it's a shame, because even if you don't like to cook, cooking doesn't have to be hard or a chore. Believe me, as much as I like to cook, there are some weeks where I'm super busy and stressed and juggling 20 different things and the idea of coming home in the evening and making a meal fills me with dread. I'm no different from anyone else out there in that respect.

I wish more people were taught the very basics of how to fix a simple, nutritious meal. Even for a lot of people the concept of balancing veggie, carb, protein is so foreign, and that just blows my mind.

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My FH loves the whole wheat pita pizzas I make him. So he always asks when am I going to make them again. He won't use the oven himself. One night while I was at work, I came home and he ate the last of the pitas [which I wanted to use for work lunches, since he left my WW bread untied and it got moldy]. I asked him if he actually used the oven, and he said "NOPE! 30 seconds in the microwave!".

When I did our food shopping, I bought him 2 things of whole wheat pitas and a set of the WW for my own for this week.

Hehheh. My husband loves cheese - any kind of cheese with a passion.

One day I bought a wheel of Laughing Cow cheese for my snacks. I came home the next day and he'd eaten all but one of them. I have to admit I pitched a bit of a fit about it. A drawer full of cheddar and feta and blue cheese and he ate MY Laughing Cow.

So now with a sheepish look on his face, he'll ask me "is it ok if I have one of your cheeses".

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Thanks for the thread, Photo. I do okay planning ahead, but I was sweating tonight---between Girl Scouts, soccer and the gym, I was a little stressed about dinner.

Well, after reading your thread, I attacked my problem by planning ahead. I have chicken in the crockpot with BBQ sauce, butternut squash roasting in the oven that can be reheated later, and 16 eggs boiling on the stove for snacks this week. I made enough chicken and squash that it will stretch for a few meal. Sometimes just looking at cooking a different way can help folks plan ahead.

As for learning to cook, I owe it all to Racheal Ray. I have the skills to move on and be creative and healthy, but I seriously didn't know how to time pasta to be done when the meat/sauce or veggies were done until I watched marathons of 30 minute meals. I could cook ONE thing at a time, but simultaneously? Forget it! Now I can multitask in the kitchen and it was a learned skill for me.

My butternut squash smells GOOOOODDD!!!!

Wow! Really? I assumed everyone knew how to do that too. Of course, I no longer peel carrots (just scrub 'em), but still.