Eating healthy is not expensive

I heard some guy on TV the other night on one of those 'Why am I so fat?' shows saying how he knows one of his problems is not eating healthy foods but that it's so expensive. I am tired of this excuse, people.

For starters, you can look at This is Why You're Fat, a blog of stuff people eat that they know by just looking at it, they shouldn't be eating it. But it does point up one American view of food that is unhealthy but it's so EASY. Wrap some nutritionless white bread around some meat product and possibly fry it and there's a meal.

So healthy eating is not so much expensive as it is time-consuming compared to the lazy person's way of getting calories into themselves. Plus Americans have come to think that they haven't had a meal if they aren't stuffed and uncomfortable and farting and belching on the couch afterward.

The time spent digesting a bunch of crap AFTER the meal could have been time better spent in conceiving and producing a healthy meal. All that thought! It's so time-consuming!!

And it's not as if healthy eating is depriving yourself of delicious food. It's just adjusting your tastebuds so that you enjoy good food instead of thinking that fat + salt + carbs = delicious.

And it's not as if every single thing you consume has to be fresh-pickt, organic and raw. It just should be prepared as close to the bottom of the food chain as you can. "Prepared foods" have a bad reputation for a reason.

But enough with the chastising. Let's get down to the advice. And the problem with the advice is usually that there's too much of it. Which just makes you bogged down in the details and it all gets so overwhelming and you give up.

(And let me say right off that I am not a dietitian nor do I play one on TV. I just have many years of family and single-person food prep behind me.)

So here we go.

First, figure out some meals. Sit down, possibly with a cookbook (or not, if this is too scary), and decide on some full meals for a week. Or start with 3 days, if this is too much thought.

Think about a meal as a protein, a carb and a vegetable. And remember, if it's got a sauce on it, it probably doesn't need it and is just adding calories/fat/salt.

Eat Healthy America is a good online cookbook, even if it is sponsored by a prepared foods company, General Mills.

Uh oh, gotta go and I didn't even get to the what exactly you should eat yet. More later...

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