Of course, I am gradually switching to a healthy diet, not buying any poison in the store at the level of all sorts of tasty things or beer, etc. Any advice on what food is worth buying and what is better to avoid? I just want to feel, so to speak, in good shape because I am tired of being a sluggish zombie.
I don’t really trust AI so I wanted to ask you. You can also recommend something else if you want.
Just about anything can be made with or without questionable additives. What sorts of things do you want to eat?
You can buy bread with preservatives that stays ‘fresh’ for weeks, but bread made with just water, flour, yeast and salt generally starts getting hard the next day and moldy in around a week (depending on climate +/-). Whole grain bread is dense, more flavorful, and will not rise as much as white bread because the bran and the nutrient rich wheat germ break up the long-chain gluten structure.
So do you pick a bread that lasts or one that molds? Do you pick white bread because it is fluffy or whole wheat because it has more vitamins?
Maybe you don’t eat bread. Well, the same applies to rice. Most white rices are fortified to make up for the vitamins lost in milling, but whole-grain (brown) rice is tougher, has a stronger flavor, and is less fluffy. Which would you prefer?
Thank you very much, I just don’t understand all this very well, so your answer was extremely useful for me. By the way, is it better to bake bread yourself or buy it in a store? It’s just that store-bought bread is either so to speak airy, or some kind of empty, like sand, or something in between.
Regular store bread has lots of preservatives. I do not think you want that. Many small bakeries make good basic breads without preservatives, but they are usually expensive. If you can afford that price, buy it! Making bread takes a lot of time, but it is cheap, If you can afford that time, make it! Personally, I like whole-grain flavors for almost everything from sandwich bread to fried rice … but not for the rice in sushi.
Whether you bake or buy, I’d suggest moving toward whole grain bread. Looking at the amount of fiber per serving is a good way to assess how ‘whole’ a bread from the store is.
I’m not sure how lazy you are, or how much you like to experiment, but someone on Lemmy mentioned Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. While it isn’t hyperbole, it will be a while before you reach this speed.
The big points for me are that most of the steps are, “do something else while stuff happens.” There is no kneading and no need for special tools, although a big container you can mostly seal and something that can withstand having water poured into it while being at oven temperatures are a big help. A mixer with a dough hook is also helpful if you don’t want to put in the effort to mix by hand, but a bowl, plastic wrap, a wooden spoon, and measuring spoons and cups are all you need.
I liked the results enough to buy their book, and everything I’ve made has turned out at worst alright (which isnt a whole lot because…lazy). Depending on the recipe, you can store the dough in the fridge for a couple weeks (do this regularly), or you can parbake and freeze loaves (never done this). Before doing this, I had only made bread in a bread machine, which never worked out too well for me, or helping my mom with kneading decades ago, which I hated.
If you buy raw beef, chicken, and or pork, you can prepare it to your own liking. That’s the best way to avoid unhealthy foods: don’t eat them.
Eating healthy, starts with preparing your own food, and it continuous with making sure that you balance the things you eat to make a healthy diet.
Yes, I am gradually learning, although at first it was awkward, especially with meat, but it was worth it.
Hey, send me a DM, I’ll give you my recipe collection and you can ask for tips any time you like.
i started on a quest like yours about 15ish years ago because of diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, drowsiness, headaches, bloating, etc. and; if it could back and start all over again; i would start with the crockpot.
soups/stews in particular are super easy with almost always delicious results and dirt cheap; you just throw in a bunch of stuff that seems like would go good together into the pot and let time do the rest for you. my creations almost always involve garlic, onions, and some kind of lentil (usually black beans) and even those three by themselves are delicious. (if you add in salt the very beginning you’ll end up using less salt overall).
every few months/years insuppressible cravings for fast food usually make me fall off this wagon and that generally feeling of zombiness; like you’re feeling right now; is usually enough to push me back onto the wagon. this time around i’ve been off the wagon long enough for those health metrics to show a significant decline and that coupled with both the general shitty feeling and the tariffs are pushing me back onto the wagon. i wish someone had advice to share with me on this.
Learn to cook.
Find 3 or 4 meals that are healthy and get very good at them. That will make it easier to add new recipes and expand your repitoire.
The key to eating healthy is to find healthy foods that are reasonably inexpensive that you can eat as is, or cook simply and quickly with minimal chance of ruining it.
For drinks, water first and foremost, with maybe milk/juice occasionally.
For breakfast, toast/bagel and fruit, or maybe a granola, yogurt, and frozen berry parfait
For lunch, something like pretzels, mixed nuts/raisins (the hidden gem in any healthy diet), cheese and an apple/grapes.
Both of these meals are quick, healthy and require no cooking. The trick is dinner.
What I recommend is having a three piece meal, a carb so your not hungry, and then a vegetables and a protein for nutrition, all cooked separately.
For carb, pasta is fine, rice is better, but best would be an ancient grain like quinoa or farro, which nutritionally blow them out of the water.
For veggies, sweet potatoes and sauted spinach are nutrition kings, but anything is good.
Finally, steer clear of red meat for the most part for your protein. Beans, chicken, turkey and wild caught fish are your friends.
An absolutely killer meal is something like quinoa (boiled), sweet potato (sliced and boiled or baked whole), spinach (sautéd first), and turkey (sautéd second)
Nutritional, filling, two pots, one pan, about 20 minutes total, and the only thing you need to watch is the pan, and spinach/turkey don’t burn fast anyway.
But the most important thing is what you don’t buy. Most people, including me, have poor impulse control when we’re hungry. So go shopping full, and then don’t buy yourself anything unhealthy, because you will eat it later.
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Ideally avoid sugar as much as possible. This also includes simple carbohydrates like you would find in bread and other grain. Sugar acts like any drug, once your dependant on it you only feel normal when you have sugar in your system.
Fats are a really good sauce of long lasting energy which lasts throughout the day, pretty much all natural fats are healthy including saturated fats like butter, contrary to popular belief. Processed fats like what’s found in vegetable oils on the other hand are bad.
That is a ton of misinformation
Starting off with stating that bread and other grain are only simple carbohydrates when whole grains are an easy source of complex carbs. And while sugar can be addictive it’s literally a nutrient that our body needs and if we fail to eat it, our body will just break down protein to produce it
Then while fats may by a good source of energy (because they offer 9 calories per gram) they are also an easy way to over consume calories because they are so dense.
Saturated fats are still problematic and try and look for some articles published outside of the U.S.
Then you start talking about vegetable oils being bad when olive oil has been the gold standard for healthy oil. There has been a ton of misinformation going around about seed oils trying to make them into the devil but again look for some RFK free Studies
“Recent research studied the diet and health of over 200,000 people in the US for around 30 years. The researchers found that people who consumed more plant oils (including seed oils) were less likely to die from cardiovascular disease or cancer over the course of the study. On the other hand, those with a higher intake of butter were more likely to die during the same period.”
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whole grains are an easy source of complex carbs
This is just my opinion but I wouldn’t consider wholegrain a source of complex carbs. It still spikes your blood sugar levels a lot. Actuall complex carbs lie in vegetables mainly especially leaf vegetables.
Saturated fats are still problematic and try and look for some articles published outside of the U.S.
I’m not going to lie it was difficult to find a non u.s. but here is a comprehensive European review compiling many studies finding that there is no reasonably correlation between saturated fats and cardiovascular disease or heart attack.
Then while fats may by a good source of energy (because they offer 9 calories per gram) they are also an easy way to over consume calories because they are so dense.
This is true when you eat straight butter but when you have it with meat or dairy or other natural sources of fat it’s generally lower volume
Also olive oil is not a vegetable oil you can search it up. I agree olive oil is healthy, that’s because it’s not a vegetable oil.
Did you read the article you linked? It doesn’t talk about saturated fats being good but instead talks about the protective effects of olive oil, nuts, and omega 3s. The best part about it is they talk about how the linoleic acid is one of the protective elements and linoleic acid is the “scary” thing about seed oils as they are our primary source of linoleic acid… as a whole though it wasn’t a study or even a meta review it was just an editorial as in no data was actually analyzed
By definition olive oil is a vegetable oil unless you want to go by taxonomic terms where it would be a fruit oil (since vegetables are not a term in official taxonomy which is why tomatoes are also fruits)
Whole grains are also by definition complex carbs
A pound of bacon (16 strips) is over 2400 calories and can be consumed fairly easily by the average person in a single sitting especially if you contrast that to eating lower fat food like chicken breast which you would need to eat 4.5 pounds of or rice that you would need to eat over 3 cups of (uncooked) to get the same amount of calories. I am not saying fats are evil but the argument that they fill you up faster is just wrong
Sorry I linked the wrong article, i’ve corrected it so you can read one I meant to link.
