It’s been a little over a month since I started ditching some of my favorite unhealthy foods in exchange for much healthier foods, but it’s been a tough trip, and there’s still more progress to be made.
I don’t mean to start out on a negative note, but I think it’s important for setting up what I want to say in this post: I hate cookbooks. I absolutely hate them. I’ve had several over the years, and almost all of them have ended up being given away, because I can’t stand them. First of all, the recipes are almost always too complex, and even when they aren’t too complex, they often come from a time when most people were farming and had a large family. I don’t want to eat beef stew for the next two weeks, thanks.
Moreover, most of these recipes aren’t actually healthy. You might think that baking your own sweets might be healthier than buying them in stores, and you might be right, but people will take all this organic, grass-fed, vegan, etc. bullshit, and then just dump a cup of sugar in it and say presto! I saw rhubarb in a grocery store last month and it looked delicious – I don’t think I had ever actually seen it before – but I of course didn’t buy it because I had no idea how to prepare it, and that’s the sure-fire way to let your produce go bad, wasting money. But when I looked up how best to prepare rhubarb, almost everything I found online involved loads of sugar. I ultimately gave up, and I haven’t seen it in stores since, anyway [I think it’s very seasonal, but maybe I’m just not looking hard enough].
And this has been a big part of my health journey: realizing that most recipes actually suck. Many years ago, I had a few friends who started cooking all of their own meals and trying to be healthy, but they didn’t really see any results from it. I don’t trust traditional recipes much at all these days, and it’s only when you go way back in time that you get away from refined sugar entirely. Besides, most homemade bread recipes add oil. For the longest time I thought that was how bread was supposed to be made, until I realized I could use water instead and get the exact same result, minus the added calories and potentially negative properties, depending on the oil. It was the same situation with adding egg to homemade hamburger buns: it isn’t necessary at all, and contributes nothing to flavor, in my opinion. In fact, I think it ages better without egg, too.
In my opinion, if I can’t make healthy recipes in 15-30 minutes, and have those constitute the majority of my meals, fuck it. Sure, potatoes often take longer in the oven, but as long as you put holes in them properly, that’s a hands-off process. There might be some other foods that take longer, but I’m not going to eat those on a regularly basis, because that’s just too much commitment; moreover, it’s entirely unnecessary.
In the book I bought on healing acid reflux, the recipes it gave at the end are all very simple. This was a huge relief, and it got me making meals quickly. One recipe was incredibly easy: 1 banana, about 1 cup of almond milk [unsweetened], and about 1 cup of blueberries. Blend until smooth, serve. I like to put a little grated ginger in it. It takes about 5 minutes to make. It’s maybe not a whole meal, I might want something else to go with it, or a snack of cashews later, but that’s an example of how easy it can be. I strongly approve. I wish I had known before that it could be this easy, because I was always scared away from healthy eating because I incorrectly associated it with big, complex meals, and I think this is just the illusion of cuisine, which was often more of a treat than a staple anyway. Indian farmers are not eating tikka masala on a daily basis.
Speaking of being scared away from healthy eating, I used to think that “healthy” meant leafy-greens. I often tell this to friends, but salad honestly makes me gag; some of those leafy greens are disgusting to me. I’ve never been able to get over that. Interestingly enough, many people unwittingly cover their salads in sugar in the form of salad dressing, which can sometimes be loaded with garbage ingredients, so that’s not so good, but I often thought there was no way to be truly “healthy” if you didn’t eat those leafy greens. Not true, though. Beans can be healthy, whole grains can be healthy, fruits and vegetables can be healthy, many other foods can be very healthy, and although leafy greens are often healthy, too, there are plenty of other ways to be healthy without them. What a relief! [There are some I at least want to try, but if I ever do become a salad man, it won’t be in the short run, and this is okay: I’ve been discovering new vegetables I like, and this has been huge for me]
Even just having broccoli with your hamburger instead of french fries can be a huge step in nutritional content. I’ve significantly scaled back my consumption of ground beef, but I still follow a pattern of protein with a side of vegetables, and I’m slowly increasing the size of that side of vegetables. I’m hoping in the future to scale back my consumption of protein by substituting potatoes and other foods, but all things in time.
I also used to eat these delicious egg and cheese pitas for breakfast almost every morning, but when I really stopped to heed the ingredients, they were full of white bread, seed oils, and processed cheese, and might possibly have played a role in the development of my condition. I stopped eating those in favor of two boiled or scramble eggs, and although this definitely takes longer, it still only takes maybe 15-20 minutes for a half meal that is super clean ingredient-wise. Not a bad deal, unless you are really in a hurry. For a time I was putting the scrambled eggs with spinach and bread, but I don’t eat that often enough to keep fresh spinach on hand anymore. Trial and error.
It’s also nice when you can cook two things at once. If I make a medium steak or some Whole Foods-esque chicken nuggets (still maybe not the healthiest), I can easily use a small burner on the stove to boil water for broccoli or okra while using the oven or the large burner for the protein. I like to put a little bit of salt on the broccoli, but the okra is fine without, and it works out extremely well for a really nice meal. All you really need is that little bit of time: it’s nothing like when I used to make Asian-style fried chicken, which usually took me 45 minutes to an hour, with quite a lot of hassle.
Right now, my issue is staying away from sugar, though I do think I eat less in general. I discovered an alternative brand of ketchup that has no added sugar, and while it’s still ketchup, it’s really tasty, but kind of expensive, which makes me think twice before using too much of it. I also have some other vegetables I want to try, when I don’t treat myself to some homemade baked fries (which is kind of time-consuming). Another big goal would be to find more viable alternatives to meat for my main meals, as I’m fairly certain I’m already eating plenty of protein, and want to increase my intake of other nutrients.
Building diversity into my diet is going to take awhile. Going back to the subject of cookbooks, though, the other problem I have with them is that they sometimes just list too many recipes. It’s hard to follow, and there are only so many recipes that actually interest me. Ideally, the meals I eat would be so simple I wouldn’t need the recipe book in the first place – I would just know them off the top of my head. For example, with that blueberry smoothie, I don’t usually measure things out explicitly because it’s easy to “eyeball” and difficult to screw up. That’s not the story with my bread, of course, but the more recipes I can “eyeball” the better: it’s just that much less cognitive load to prepare good food. This is the way.
[Side note and funny story: I was at the grocery store the other day and saw they were selling sweet potatoes for $1.70, and I thought, “Ah, man, that’s bullshit!” I turned around later and spent $3.50 on a slice of pie. Eating healthy really can be cheap, if you let it: sugar junk is actually far more expensive than produce]