Start Cooking Healthy Meals

If you want to change your diet and start losing weight/improving your shape, then often the best strategy is to start eating healthier meals.

And one of the best ways to do that is to start cooking more meals of your own. This way, you can know exactly what ingredients are going into your meals, you can choose to eat more vegetables and you can even save money.

But this where many people come stuck. Unfortunately, learning to cook isn’t all that easy and often the best laid plans end up going awry. Read on and we’ll see why that is and what you can do about it.

The Problem with Cookbooks

A good place many of us will start when trying to learn to cook is with a cookbook. This seems logical after all! Specifically, most of us will want to look for a cookbook that provides simple and quick meals, so we’ll gravitate towards things with titles like “15 Minute Meals.”

Often they promise to be affordable and simple as well as just being fast to make and put on the table.

But in all too many cases, that’s a little bit of wishful thinking. Either the writers are a little removed from the real world and don’t understand the limitations most of us have, or they just didn’t spend much time thinking the books through.

That’s why, very often, you’ll find that your recipe starts with “taking your chopped onion…”

As it happens, an onion doesn’t come chopped – and so leaving the chopping part out of the instructions is actually a little misleading. That just added 2 minutes to your preparation time – as does chopping the peppers, chopping the bacon and washing your chopping board and knife or clearing space.

Another similar problem is when the “simple ingredients” list calls for balsamic vinegar and then the very next recipe lists calls for apple cider vinegar. Cooking quickly gets expensive when you’re expected to buy different seasonings every time you make a meal!

If you have a small kitchen, you can then add struggling with space management and stacks of plates falling over to your list of troubles. We haven’t even touched on the fact that you have to divide the quantities and let loads go to waste if you’re living alone.

What sounds like a 15 minute meal is in fact a 45 minute meal at best that makes a lot of mess.

How to Make it Stick

So with all that in mind, how do you go about making your new diet plan stick? How do you fit cooking into your routine and learn some actually convenient meals that are still healthy?

One trick is to ask your mom for some recipes. She has most likely honed the art of cooking healthy meals quickly having raised you.

Another tip is to not divide the quantity and to instead freeze a lot of what you have left over.

Also don’t be afraid to experiment and to mix up the instructions. If you don’t feel like buying “a sprig of rosemary” then you can probably do without it. Either that or there are pre-packaged bottles of spices that you can use over and over again for a long time to come.

If you want to add some flavour, there are probably cheaper ingredients you can use that will last much longer.

Whenever you read the label and it says “quick recipe” make sure you add at least 20 minutes onto the prep time!