Preparation is vital if you're going to succeed at anything. This is arguably more true when we talk about nutrition & body composition. In our modern world, there are plenty of people who will happily accept your lack of nutrition planning and sell you their hyper-palatable, nutrient poor snack foods.
In order to do a better job with planning, a few tools are helpful.
Nutrition Apps
I debated long and hard about including these because I no longer use any of them & I teach my clients to read food labels. A simple calculator is all you really need.
However, apps can be useful in the beginning because they allow you to assess the protein and carbohydrate of common foods, usually just by scanning the barcode on the packaging (until it doesn't work & you have to read the label anyway).
If you are going to use an app to plan your nutrition, the free versions will usually do because, as you'll learn, you won't need to use them for long.
There are a lot of apps out there and most of them will do. Currently the most popular with those I talk to are Cronometer & MyFitnessPal.
Don't get sucked in to the calorie tracking aspect of these apps. There is no question that tracking helps if you're trying to get to super low levels of body fat. However, once you go down that road, you are pretty much stuck with it for life, unless you want to go back to your previous body composition.
Items for your kitchen
Cooking doesn't have to difficult, nor does it need to be time-consuming. It just so happens that I quite enjoy cooking. Much to my wife's delight, I cook a wide range of meals, most of which would not pass the MyPlate test!
Having the following kitchen items makes a big difference.
Tools for Your Kitchen
Kitchen scales.
These are not only used to weigh food so that you can track it. There is a long history of recipes being written based on the weight of the ingredients. A simple digital set makes sense for accuracy.
Slow cooker.
Buying a slow cooker has been a revelation. Knowing that a day is going to be busy & getting home in time to cook, it's great just to throw a few ingredients in the cooker, set it & forget it.
On returning home, the food is waiting for you. I've also stopped cooking a Sunday roast chicken, which meant a couple of hours in the kitchen on my only day off. Instead, I cook it in the slow cooker; delicious!
Knives.
A good set of knives makes food preparation quicker and safer. Different knives are designed for different tasks. Until you use the right knife for the job, you don't realise this.
Also, it's easier to keep a good edge on a good knife. Blunt knives are prone to slipping and cutting you by accident, sharp ones just glide through the food.
Glass or Plastic Storage Tubs.
This is all about preparation. If you can't store it, you can't batch cook food, either for future meals or for take-along lunches.
Recipes.
My mother had a shelf full of recipe books, as did my grandmother. I have a clipboard with handwritten notes print-outs of my favourite recipes gathered from all over the place. I keep promising myself that I'll type them all up neatly sometime but the system works for me, so I'll probably still have the clipboard at age 100!
To begin with, all you need is 10-15 simple recipes that you can cook fairly quickly, meals that you know you're going to enjoy. This will cover 2 weeks of varied eating quite nicely. Then, you have the occasional meal when you try something new. If you like it, add it (in my case, to the clipboard).
Herbs and Spices
A good variety of herbs and spices will mean that you can cook pretty much any recipe without having to run to the supermarket for a missing flavour.
You can also save some time by making spice mixes for your favourite meals (those that come to mind from my cupboard are chilli, fajita, creole & sazon). I'd suggest buying herbs and spices in bulk, especially if you're going to make mixes.
Learn some skills
Consider taking a cooking class if you're not comfortable cooking. If you're going to take control of your health, basic cooking skills are a must. The ability to use a knife properly, being able to boil an egg and a sense of the basics of putting food together will mean fewer disasters in the kitchen and a lot more meals that make you wonder why you ever ordered a takeaway.
Tasks for this lesson:
1. Have a look at your kitchen. If you had to cook a meal from scratch this evening, do you have the basic kitchen tools you'd need.
2. Think about your cooking skills. Do you have 10-15 meals you could cook for dinner? Would you be happy to invite your friends round to eat what you cook? If the answer to either of these is no, make a plan to overcome this.
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