Let me tell you the biggest secret there is about weight loss. Ok, it’s not a secret. In fact it’s so obvious that many people seem not to notice it. It’s especially visible here in London, where majority of people will go and buy white bread sandwich, pasta based meal, greasy burger or wrap for lunch. Then, other than terrible snacks, they won’t eat anything till evening. That’s just wrong on so many levels.
Before I get to the point, let me just note that I have absolutely nothing against buying meals for lunch, I love burgers and wraps and I eat pasta or noodles regularly. That being said, I just cannot understand how one can make it an everyday habit. Another thing is, while I’m talking about weight loss here, everything is still true for slim person trying only to maintain current weight.
The secret
Are you ready for this? Ok, so the secret is: COOK! Stop eating up any lunch crap food that you happen to buy and plan your meals up front. But firstly, let’s cover all possible excuses:
“I Don’t have time for that!” You actually do, it takes around 1 - 2 hours to shop all required products and you can cook meals for few days in another hour.
“I can’t cook!”. If you can operate watch (read numbers), then you will be fine. It really is that easy.
“I’m just too lazy to do it!” Well, if you can’t even do that, then perhaps you should try with electric ab toner, that will give you 8 pack while you watch another season of Got Talent. Ripped couch potato. For sarcasm blind people: it doesn’t work that way.
Still here? Great, then let’s elaborate. The idea is to prepare meals up front for few days. Depending on what you cook, it will stay fresh for 2 to 5 days. In other words - it’s enough to organise two cooking sessions per week to cover lunches (and possibly dinners) for whole week.
Requirements
There is only one thing that you have to do - go shopping (captain obvious strikes back). I don’t mean your local store, but proper shopping that will fill your fridge for whole week. From my experience I can tell that this takes some experience, after all you don’t want to throw away unused food, nor starve on next friday. That comes with time.
My usual weekly shopping list:
- around 2kg of chicken breasts,
- tuna
- almond milk
- coconut milk
- various berries (raspberries, blueberries, blackberries)
- some good Indian sauce (vindaloo or jalfrezi) with no preservatives or artificial ingredients
- thai curry sauce, again with no preservatives or artificial ingredients salad
- olives
- tomatoes
- eggs
- bananas
- apples
- spinach
- various fruits and vegetables, whatever I fancy at the time.
Above list is for two people (and I eat around 70% of that :D) and it’s around 60 - 70 pounds. Have you noticed that there is no bread on the list? Yep, no sandwiches.
I will need to go for bigger shopping once a month, when I buy (among others) pasta, rice, oatmeal, muesli, almonds and other nuts, protein shakes, protein snack bars and various supplements.
Cooking
For this week I've prepared:
- Thai curry chicken with rice
- spicy chicken with mango and rice
- salmon with carrot and peas
- tuna with eggs and beans
- grilled chicken with sweet potatoes and olives
I will probably have to cook something on Wednesday or Thursday, also I’m planning to buy lunch once, probably some Japanese noodles or katsu curry.
Supplements and additional proteins.
Because I cycle a lot on top of my regular trainings, I take vitamins every day. On top of that I use L-carnitine (daily), L-creatine (before training session) and whey protein (breakfast and after exercise).
I’ll try to post few recipes sometime this week. Meanwhile, I need to pack all that food in containers!