how to eat healthy when you have no time
If you’re struggling with:
- The temptation to rely on fast food for convenience
- Finding time to prepare healthy meals with a busy schedule
- Exhaustion that reduces your motivation to cook healthily
- The belief that healthy meals are expensive
This post will help you overcome all these challenges and even make your healthy meals even healthier.
Preparing a healthy meal shouldn’t be a complicated task.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite!
How to be quicker at cooking?
#1. Make Simple Meals
We don’t need to complicate the cooking process.
Aim to keep your meals as simple as possible, using just a few ingredients and straightforward cooking methods. This approach not only saves you time, energy, and resources but is also healthier and gentler on your digestion. For example, preparing my food is as easy and simple as boiling it in plain water—because that’s exactly what I do. My meals are simply boiled food. When I want to prepare chickpeas for lunch, I simply use chickpeas and water (adding a little salt at the end).
In contrast, a complicated dish can be discouraging, stressful, chaotic, time-consuming, and even negatively affect your digestion.
“In these days, domestic duties claim almost the whole time of the housekeeper. How much better it would be for the health of the household, if the table preparations were more simple.”—Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene, 73, 1890
#2. Avoid Eating Too Many Kinds of Food at One Meal
I stick to three, or at most four, different items on my plate.
By avoiding excessive preparations for the table, you can save a significant amount of time, money, and even make your healthy meals even healthier. Your wallet and your stomach will thank you. “The variety of food at one meal causes unpleasantness, and destroys the good which each article, if taken alone, would do the system.”—Letter 54, 1896
If you often feel bloated after eating, try reducing the variety of foods you eat at once and see if that doesn’t help.
“So many varieties are introduced into the stomach that fermentation is the result.”—Manuscript 86, 1897 “The serving of a great variety of dishes absorbs time, money, and taxing labor, without accomplishing any good. It may be fashionable to have half a dozen courses at a meal, but the custom is ruinous to health.”—Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene, 73, 1890 “Do not have too great a variety at a meal; three or four dishes are a plenty. At the next meal you can have a change.”—The Review and Herald, July 29, 1884
So, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have variety in your diet.
For example, today for breakfast, I had a small portion of peas, a carrot, oats (cooked oats), and dates. For lunch, I ate brown rice, beans, and some walnuts. For dinner, I might have fruits (or vegetables)—up to three or four. As you can see, each meal is different and includes a variety of foods. So, just because I don’t overwhelm each meal with 5, 6, or 7 different items doesn’t mean my diet lacks variety.
This approach saves me time in the kitchen and makes my healthy food stays healthy.
“There should not be many kinds at any one meal, but all meals should not be composed of the same kinds of food without variation. Food should be prepared with simplicity, yet with a nicety which will invite the appetite.”—Testimonies for the Church 2:63, 1868
#3. Avoid spicy condiments
I avoid using spicy condiments in my meals because they irritate our stomach.
“In this fast age, the less exciting the food, the better. Condiments are injurious in their nature. Mustard, pepper, spices, pickles, and other things of a like character, irritate the stomach and make the blood feverish and impure. The inflamed condition of the drunkard’s stomach is often pictured as illustrating the effect of alcoholic liquors. A similarly inflamed condition is produced by the use of irritating condiments. Soon ordinary food does not satisfy the appetite. The system feels a want, a craving, for something more stimulating.”—The Ministry of Healing, 325, 1905
By avoiding spicy condiments, I not only save time in the kitchen but also save money since I don’t need to buy them.
#4. Limit Yourself to at most three meals a Day
By not having to prepare extra meals or snacks, you can spend less time in the kitchen and more time on other things.
#5. Don’t Eat Fried Food
Boil, don’t fry.
I don’t even sauté onions and garlic.
Having to flip the food and clean greasy pans and dishes just takes too much time. In contrast, when you boil the food, you simply toss the ingredients into the liquid and let them cook. It’s so much simpler and quicker!
It’s healthier and one of the most effective ways to save time in the kitchen.
#6. What Is the Fastest and Easiest Way to Peel Garlic?
The fastest way to peel garlic is not to peel it.
While preparing a meal, I came up with this new way to save time when peeling garlic that could also boost your dish’s nutritional value. Excited, I asked, “Hey, have you ever heard of people drinking garlic skin tea?” The person I was talking to said he’d heard of garlic tea but not about using the skin. But by then, it was already too late—my meal was boiling with unpeeled garlic cloves.
“Well, if I survive, I’ll let you know if it’s worth trying!”
But before I ate it, I did some research on DuckDuckGo and saw that there’s a Sri Lankan dish that uses unpeeled garlic. I also found that some people even drink garlic skin tea. So, I went ahead and enjoyed my meal with unpeeled garlic cloves (just the layer closest to the flesh).
And I feel perfectly fine!
It’s like a garlic skin tea, except that the tea is absorbed by the food inside the pot. You simply throw the unpeeled cloves into the pot—no cutting, no peeling—saving a lot of time and preserving the peel’s nutrients.
Nice!
#7. Cooking and Eating in the Same pot
One-pot meals make clean-up easier and save you time.
By eating straight out of the pot, there’s no need to serve or transfer the meal to a plate—simply take the pot off the heat and enjoy your meal right away. By cooking everything in the same pot, you won’t have to wash more pots. Cooking and eating with just one pot saves you time and effort, as well as water and detergent, since you’ll only need to clean the single pot you cooked with.
You can adopt this style of cooking even if you don’t live alone.
Most people resist healthy eating and are unlikely to adopt the healthy eating habits discussed in this post. So, as someone committed to a healthy lifestyle, you’ll need to prepare your own meals. As a matter of conscience, you may not want to cook for others the unhealthy foods that harm their bodies, and they likely won’t appreciate the wholesome meals you create (because of the perverted taste buds). So, why not turn this necessity of cooking for yourself alone into an opportunity?
Get a small pot just for yourself and then enjoy your healthy, one-pot meals!
#8. Cook Using a Fireless Cooker
A fireless cooker is basically a large thermal box.
I wrote about how this cooking method works and how you can easily build one with materials you already have at home in a dedicated post, but the concept is: the fireless cooker traps heat from boiling food, allowing you to harness that heat to finish the cooking process without needing to consume more fuel.
Apart from saving money on cooking gas, it can also save you time.
In a way, the food spend less time cooking. You simply bring it to a boil, turn off the fire, and place the pot into the fireless cooker. From there, you’re free to do other things while the heat trapped in the fireless cooker finishes the cooking process. You don’t need to keep up a fire, watch the food, or anything else.
As slow cooking better preserves nutrients and flavor, the pattern continues: you save time and make meals healthier.
This cooking method is also recommended by professional cooks.
Amid rising energy costs, Italian cooks are turning to fireless cooking to save gas. Families and even several restaurants have adopted this ancient method of cooking as well (source: NPR). Chef Tiziana Tacchi explains that, instead of using a flame under the pot, a fireless cooker surrounds the entire pot with an even, homogeneous heat, improving the quality of meals and leading to a more refined cooking process. We can see that even chefs and professional cooks use this method.
So, you can save even more time in the kitchen by using this cooking method that also enhances flavor, preserves more nutrients, and saves cooking gas.
If you want to know more about fireless cooking, please read this other post of mine: The Fireless Cooker: Save Cooking Gas with Materials You Already Have at Home.
To Recap
- Keep it simple with your meals.
- Stick to fewer types of food at once.
- Skip spicy condiments.
- Try to eat just three meals a day.
- Say no to fried foods.
- Use unpeeled garlic in your cooking.
- Cook and eat straight from the same pot.
- Cook using a fireless cooker
No wonder that whenever I cook with other people, I always end up waiting for them to finish preparing their meal!
Thanks for reading! 🙂
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Until next time, God willing.
Take care!
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