No, I’m not going to cook my husband. My oven isn’t big enough.
My husband passed morbid obesity about 100 pounds ago, and I could stand to lose a few (like, 40) pounds myself. Obviously we need to change our atrocious eating habits (we’re also going to start walking every day).
The challenge is, on a good week I’ll have maybe $75 to spend on groceries. On a bad week, it’s more like $30. So we eat a lot of baked goods (I’m a good baker) and carbs, with meat more often being the flavoring than the entree. And we have a 10 year old girl who I swear either has a tapeworm or is storing food in her hollow leg.
And just to further complicate matters, I hate most vegetables (nasty, bitter things) and fish (it’s expensive, it smells like fish, and it tastes like fish. Blegh.). Hubby won’t eat tofu. I don’t mind making things from scratch - in fact, I prefer it - but trying to come up with recipes that are whole grain and fruit/tolerable veggie heavy while still being as cheap as, say, my wonderfully delicious and creamy cheesy potato soup with homemade italian bread is baffling me. Plus, we all eat at different times (I work evenings and am gone by the time my daughter gets home from school), and my husband (who suffers panic attacks when he leaves the house) is home 24/7 and prone to boredom eating - I need to stock the kitchen with stuff he can graze on. Help?
I’ve found that herbal tea helps deter me from eating too much at night when I feel like snacking.
This may or not be helpful, but in the evening, I floss and brush my teeth early which keeps me from eating because then I’d have to go to the trouble of flossing and brushing my teeth again which would be annoying.
Pinto beans with onions for flavoring, plus salt and pepper. A pot of beans can last a few days, and give you lots of protein. Maybe a ham hock - they’re pretty cheap. Cook the beans with the ham hock, then fish it out and pick out the little bit of meat that’s on it and put it back in the pot. Serve with brown rice and sliced green onions.
You like to bake? Bake whole grain breads.
Serve sliced tomatoes with scrambled eggs (instead of cheese.) Whole wheat toast. Skip the meat.
Oven fry your (fresh!) potatoes tossed with 2 tsp of olive oil (heart healthy oil) or canola oil - you’ll use less oil. Seasonings can be varied - cumin and chili powder, or cajun seasoning, or just garlic powder, salt and pepper. (Bake at 425° for about 20 minutes.)
One way to start is to switch from white rice to brown, from white pasta to either whole wheat pasta or brown rice pasta, and from white potatoes to yams (the orange ones). We also love kasha (buckwheat), which is actually a fruit, though you cook and eat it like a grain, and it’s an excellent source of protein, not to mention that it binds to cholesterol and strips it from your system! Here’s the nutritional info on kasha.
If you’re interested in trying it, here’s my recipe for kasha pilaf. Just look for Wolff’s Kasha in the Jewish foods aisle. If they don’t sell it in your part of the world, just order a box online and give it a try.
If you hate “most” vegetables, that must mean you like some vegetables. Which ones will you eat?
Also watch for sources of sugar that you might not be thinking about. For instance, instead of cereal with milk, have some fat free yogurt with protein powder and fruit. You still get your dairy, but without the sugars that are in milk. Ketchup is also full of sugar, so eliminate that from your diet. Instead of having a glass of orange juice, have an orange – way less sugar and much better for you.
Roasted, unsalted almonds are a great snack; they’re high in protein and fiber and fill you up quickly. Hard boiled eggs are also a great source of protein and good to snack on.
As for vegetables: make soup. If you have a stick blender, any vegetable can be made palatable by boiling it in a pot with some broth and blending it. Seriously. Try, for instance:
1/2 head cauliflower
2 carrots
1/2 an onion
1 med potato (peeled and chopped)
celery if you like it
some cabbage
Dump in a big pot with water and chicken bouillon, some pepper, maybe some dill
boil till veggies are soft, then use your plunge blender to blend it. Add some beans after blending if you’re so inclined. I promise this will hardly even taste like vegetables at this point, and it keeps well in the fridge.
Also, try this fabulous curried carrot soup:
INGREDIENTS:
* 1 Tablespoon unsalted butter
* 1/2 large onion, coarsley chopped
* 6 carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped
* 1 celery stalk, coarsely chopped
* 1 garlic clove, minced
* 1 teaspoon curry powder
* 8 cups chicken stock or canned chicken broth
* Freshly ground black pepper and salt to taste
* GARNISH: 2 tablespoons chopped chives
METHOD:
In a 3-quart pot, melt the butter, add the chopped vegetables and garlic and sauté for 5 minutes over medium heat, stirring often. Add the curry powder and cook for several minutes more, stirring constantly. Do not allow the curry to burn. Add the stock, turn up the heat to high, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer, uncovered, for 30 minutes. Purée.
This is fantastic even if you hate carrots, I promise.
Take some of the money you have for groceries and go now and buy some pork roast. You should be able to find it on sale because of New Year’s traditions. If you have a freezer at all, pork roasts freeze really well. They are one of the cheapest lean meats you can find.
One of the best ways to get more bang for your grocery buck is a slow cooker. It will enable you to buy and use certain cuts of meat or dry beans or other ingredients that you might not be able to use efficiently otherwise.
Can you list more things you like and dislike? That will help.
It isn’t just the type of food, but the portions. Find out what constitutes a serving of the foods you like, then stick with them. Diets that focus on certain foods usually fail because you either don’t like those foods or you get bored with them. You can have a cheeseburger, just not a half a pound of meat. Try it with all the things you like on it, but eliminate the bun.
Make a pot of the best spaghetti sauce you can find, rich with tomatoes and meats and herbs, then add a couple of cans of white beans and simmer for awhile. It makes a terrific soup and you’ve effectively eliminated the carbs. Just don’t eat a quart of it at a sitting.
A lot of people dislike vegetables because they’ve only had them prepared wrong: overcooked to a tasteless mush, or seasoned wrong, or (blech) out of a can, instead of nice fresh veggies, steamed or lightly stir-fried. And frozen beats canned in my book, if you can’t get or afford fresh.
I love steamed broccoli but can’t stand it raw, and I prefer florets to stalks. Not a huge fan of raw spinach salad, but I love lightly cooked spinach over pasta. And so on.
Yes, please tell us more about your veggie issues.
While not in your husband’s league, I did lose 50 lbs. about 2-1/2 years ago and have kept it off. I have two philosophical/strategic pieces of advice for you, and two practical ones.
Philosophical advice #1:*** Define your goal properly. ***Your goal should not be to “lose weight”. It should be to “lose fat”. One can rapidly lose water weight and lean mass through starvation and purge-style diets. This is not what you want.
Philosophical advice #2:Define your strategy properly. You need to pay attention to HOW you lose this fat. Whatever strategy you adopt needs to be in the context of changing the way you live, not to “lose 100 pounds”. Why do you think so many people, perhaps even the majority of people, who lose a lot of weight end up gaining most or all of it back? Because they adopt unsustainable changes to achieve their goal, and once reached, “go back to normal”. You have to change what “normal” is for you FIRST, not reach your goal and then blithely assume you can then make up a strategy to stay that way. (It’s not impossible, but is very difficult for most people.)
From a practical standpoint: you mention changing your eating habits, and taking up walking, which is good; but you also ask for suggestions on what to stock the kitchen with for his “grazing” and “boredom eating”, which is bad. While increasing your activity level (walking) is a definite plus, it is NOT going to help you lose weight per se unless you change your eating habits. “Boredom eating” and “grazing” (i.e., constantly eating something) are killer habits.
Practical Advice #1:It’s not WHAT YOU EAT that counts, but HOW MUCH YOU EAT. A lot of trashy diet advice focuses on “eat this but not that”, “miracle foods”, “eat as much of this as you want and never eat that” – bollocks! Even the advice that may work, such as eating nothing but celery because it’s a very low-cal food, works only for as long as you can stomach eating nothing but celery. Who the heck can keep that up for the rest of one’s life? Nobody. So who is going to keep off the weight they lose that way with such a strategy? Nobody!
Rule #1 of losing weight and keeping it off: you need to learn to eat only when you are hungry. Not because you’re bored, not because the clock says it’s time to eat, not because someone else is eating something you like, not because football’s on TV and you have a bowl of Doritos on the coffee table.
So don’t worry about “I hate veggies”, “we have mostly carbs”, etc. Carbs are not evil. Veggies are not the Yellow Brick Road to a healthy weight (though they are good for you nutritionally and from a fill-you-up-for-less-calories angle). From the description I think before you even get to the finer points of eating better food choices, you need to get past the much bigger point of eating for no particular reason.
Practical Advice #2:Be scientific about it. Set quantifiable goals, a clear strategy for achieving them, and do weekly reviews of whether or not your strategy is working. You only hit the target that you are aiming for. Do NOT set goals like “I want to lose weight”, or even “I want to lose weight this year”. You need to set short-, medium- and long-term goals that are realistic, and have a clear idea in mind as to how you are going to do it.
How do you do it? By tracking everything you eat, estimating their realistic calorie values, and compare it against how many calories you need to lose weight safely. There are many “rules of thumb” of coming up with this number, you need to see what works for you as everyone is different. But before you can “see if it works for you”, you need to know what “it” is – that’s where keeping track of when and what for everything you eat, and everything you do in terms of exercise, comes in.
After a few months you’ll get a sense of how your body reacts to different foods and exercises, and will internalize the calorie counts of your most commonly eaten foods, so while the first few weeks is a major pain in the butt, it does get easier.
Example: do the math and plan something like the following:
My Body Fat percentage (BF%) as measured by a Tanita scale is now 27%. My plan is to lose 1% of BF every two weeks for the next three months. I have computed my estimated daily maintenance calorie level, given my exercise level and current body composition, is about 2700 calories, so to do this I will eat 85% of this, or 2300 calories per day. I will log my food intake and exercises to make sure I am accurately capturing my intake and activity level.
Then, review your progress every week. If you are not getting the expected results, check your honesty on the activity and the eating log: have you really been eating/doing what you planned? If yes, then you need to change your plan. Eat less, exercise more, and/or some combination of the two, and check again in a week.
This is what I was going to say! I’ve recently learned how to make homemade refried beans (just take those beans you made in the pot and smoosh them up in oil over medium heat). Lunch every day has been refried beans with lettuce and hot sauce over chips. To go healthier, substitute corn tortillas. My grocery bill has been cut in half.
A filling side dish is garlic sesame green beans. Defrost a bag of frozen green beans. Mince 3 cloves of garlic and stir fry in oil quickly. Add the green beans and a few drop of sesame oil. Stir fry quickly until hot. This is super simple and you can do it with almost any vegetable. I actually find frozen works better because the vegetables cook quicker and more evenly (plus no washing and chopping). You can also add some chicken breast to this. If you coat the chicken in cornstarch, it gets that nice crispy texture.
Raid the grocer’s frozen foods for Lean Cuisine etc. Actually I get Michelina’s often get because they’re cheaper. I know you want to make stuff from scratch but they do have some tasty offerings and in a pinch…
I made ham hocks and black-eyed peas the other day. Except I didn’t feel like going to the supermarket, so I went to Pike Place Market (which, incidentally, is a half-mile from my office; so I got a mile walk out of the deal too). They didn’t have ham hocks, so I bought ham shanks. More meat and less fat than hocks. I ate about two cups of beans on Thursday, and I have four baggies of leftovers in the freezer.
I agree those brands can be pretty tasty, but the sodium on those things is through the roof. Not good for someone who probably already has blood pressure problems due to weight. Plus, they’re pretty expensive. The cheapest I’ve ever seen them go for is two dollars. The OP only has a budget of $75 for three people.
A serving of quick oats has about 150 Calories. A tablespoon of strawberry jam (I have a store brand) is 50 Calories. Quick oats are filling, a bowl with a spoonful of jam is tasty and is only 200 Calories, has a decent amount of fiber, and you can buy them inexpensively from the bulk bin at the grocery store.
I’ve tried to incorporate a lot more vegetables in to my ordinary diet and I’ve done this my mixing up a few things that might not work for everyone.
When making macaroni cheese, I’ll throw in any veg going - peas, cauli, sweetcorn, broccoli.
In bolognaise, in goes spinach, extra peppers, and all of the above.
For making things extra creamy, try something like extra light soft cheese to get a nice tang with reduced fat than you would get in real cream. You can use a lot less because the flavour goes a long way.
Spinach soup is a good way to get your greens low-cal. I don’t follow amounts for recipes, so just have a go - spinach, onions, potatoes, vegetable stock, milk(use skimmed), pepper to taste. Yum. To make soups thicker, use cauliflower instead of extra potatoes.
You can normally, with a bit of internet research or asking around your friends, find a way to do a healthy version of your favourite takeaway - a low fat stir fry, a vegetable curry etc.
And try tortilla wraps and pitta bread to satiate your baking cravings. Chicken fajitas…mmmm…just stir fry with select veg that you like, add a bit of spice and wrap up in a tortilla.
I’m hungry now.
Oh, and of course, best wishes for your lifestyle change, there’s no better reason to do it than for your good health.
Yeah, the sodium is a thing to watch. I can get Michelina’s here for 1.09 (used to be .99), so if you figure 21 meals per week, it could be within the budget.
Oops, sorry about that. I’ve now “published” it, so it should be viewable here. If you try it, I’d love to know if you like it. It smells a little like popcorn when it’s cooking. It’s got a great nutty flavor, and the sweetness of the onions makes a wonderful combination.
I was also going to suggest pureeing soups, particularly cauliflower, because it can taste quite similar to potato soup. Your recipe sounds really yummy – I will definitely be trying it. I have one that’s just cauliflower, without the carrots and cabbage, in case marlitharn wants to try it that way, too. It’s published here.
Another way to “disguise” vegetables is to turn them into sandwiches! This toasted spinach sandwich is to die for. Mmmmm. Now I’m hungry.
Oh, and Johnny beat me to the oatmeal thing, but I was going to suggest steel cut. It’s actually healthier, as it’s less processed than rolled oats.
I was going to mention steel-cut, but I forgot. The problem with steel-cut is that it takes a while to cook. For some reason they don’t turn out well when I try cooking them on the stovetop. I use the slow cooker when I make steel-cut. I can start them before I go to bed, and it’s ready in the morning. But even on the stovetop they seem to take a while to cook properly. I haven’t checked the bulk bins to see if they have steel-cut oats. I like McCann’s, which are more expensive but very tasty.
The way I look at it is this: McCann’s is healthier and better tasting than quick oats, but I have to plan ahead. Quick oats are, well, quick and also inexpensive; but they are not as nutritious. I reckon it’s better to have quick oats when I don’t plan ahead, rather to make bacon and eggs. So it’s a trade-off.
Incidentally, I have had Shayna’s cooking many times. You can trust her recipies!
I meant to add that the exercise is critical. Your goal should be 45 minutes of vigorous aerobic-type exercise, six days per week. Seriously. Start at whatever level you can, even if it’s just a walk around the block, but your goal should be as stated above. That, and stop eating crap. But first, get your asses moving and make no excuses for not doing it. The dietary issues will come eventually, as you start feeling better and having more energy, but get moving NOW.
If your husband is reluctant to leave the house, why stock it with food? He’s already depressed, so why enable him? Lay in the hated carrots and celery and say “that’s it, bub.” Sure, he’ll be pissed for awhile because he doesn’t have snack foods, but he’ll get over it. He’ll either have to eat what’s available, or go out to get something different, which doesn’t seem likely. Find a good second-hand treadmill or stationary bike to use when bored.
Look, I’ve been there, and I’m doing something about it. Obesity is just an invitation to high BP, clogged arteries and diabetes. If it doesn’t kill you, it can make you wish you were dead. Since he isn’t working, he can make exercise his job to go to every day, and keep a log of what he’s done and what he’s eaten. It can be a real eye-opener.
There is no simple solution. That’s the bad news: exercise and diet. The good news is that you both can do something about your condition. Good luck.
