Also what do you mean by ‘have a life’? Doesn’t that just mean diet is a lower priority than other things?
If you really don’t have much time, one approach is to improve your diet incrementally. Switch out cereal for oatmeal and fruit. Make another improvement next month. Keep doing this and in a year or so you’ll have a great diet.
Hate to break it to you but fruit is not far removed from sugar. Oatmeal is further but it's still carbs.
Fruit almost always has plenty of fiber in it to modulate sugar absorption long enough that your gut bacteria get most of it. So, fruit is harmless, except grapes, which apparently have had the fiber bred out of them.
I'd assume at least certain fruit would still be dangerous, like grapes, figs, maybe dates. And of course candied fruit too.
> but do we have sufficient sources to back it?
It's not an assumption, it's a well known fact that adding fat or fiber[2] to a high GI food will decrease it's GI. Conversely removing fiber increases it. For example brown rice(50) has a lower GI than white rice(72). The spike/crash in blood sugar from high GI foods is likely to cause carb craving and is linked to obesity/diabetes.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/136/10/2506/4746688
[2] https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/guide/understanding-carbohydr...
But I am assured by numerous online sources that domesticated grapes have vanishingly little fiber, however that came about.
I have encountered a claim that sugar in mango is, uniquely, mostly fructose. But I have been unable to confirm that.
Hate to break it to you, but you don’t need a lot.
Also my point is that you can incrementally improve your diet. Oatmeal and fruit is way better than most packaged cereal. If you know of something better still why not share it, so people can make another incremental improvement?
Is cooking enjoyable? Sure, but spending so much time on it every single day can be a serious burden
Plenty of vegetables can be eaten raw, notably all the "standard" salad vegetables in the west like cucumber, carrot, tomato, avocado, celery, bell pepper and so on. You can eat them in a salad by themselves, or you can make some noodles (thin Asian noodles just require stirring for a few seconds in boiling water) and toss the raw veges in with some seasoning of your choice. Nuts and seeds are easy to add too, and don't require cooking. Tofu doesn't need cooking. If you don't mind eating bread, you can make a sandwich instead of a salad or a noodle bowl. If you are making a breakfast or don't mind oats for dinner, just buy quick oats and add some water, stir it up and eat. Frying an egg doesn't take long, or stir-frying some meat, if you eat those things. No need to put a pot on the stove or chuck something in the oven. Think about how people eat when they are camping, or how short order cooks make food in diners, or how street vendors cook stuff up for you on-the-spot.
I would say most meals you should be able to make within 15 minutes of chopping/prep, plus 5 minutes if it needs to be fried. It's really not that big of an investment.
This is how I cook dinner when its my term, but that is usually just broccoli or cauliflower and pork (stir fried) over rice. My wife takes a lot long with her meal prep...and they taste better.
Restaurants/cafeterias have scale and specialization working for them, you can't compare that to making individual or family meals on your own.
Of course there are also plenty of other dishes that require a longer time to cook, but that's beside the point. The original comment was complaining that it takes "7 hours a day" and causes burnout to prepare a variety of meals that aren't packed with sugar. This is an absurd statement that at best adds nothing to the conversation and at worst discourages people from attempting to develop simple, healthy eating habits.
I have a curry recipe that takes about 3 hours to execute, however it makes about 20 portions which can then be frozen, and reheated. That’s 9 minutes per portion, and reheating it along with some rice from a rice cooker takes 5-6 minutes of attention. I.e. 15 minutes per meal.
My lunch today will be pan fried salmon with crispy skin, a baked potato, and lettuce.
The potato takes at most 2 minutes to scrub and put into a toaster oven. It takes about 2 minutes to rinse and select a few lettuce leaves. The salmon takes about 10 minutes to pin-bone, season, and cook isolaterally. Again, around 15 minutes.
I learned the salmon cooking technique from watching a 10 minute Gordon Ramsay YouTube video. This stuff isn’t rocket science. You don’t have to spend 7 hours a day cooking, but you do have to accumulate learned techniques steadily over time, just like with anything you want to do yourself.
In my neighborhood this need is served by Taquerias.
And this is what I do, but it doesn't meet my caloric needs unfortunately. I really wish I could sustain myself off of just that. Same with some of your other suggestions. I know because I've tried for a while :)
> Think about how people eat when they are camping
People eat like that because they're camping
> I would say most meals you should be able to make within 15 minutes of chopping/prep, plus 5 minutes if it needs to be fried
Yeah that's just not true
If you don't like the taste of any vegetables, or noodles, or porridge/oatmeal, or bread, or fruit, or stir-fried meat, or anything that does not require being stewed or baked or smoked for several hours... then just say so. But then that's a personal preference for the type of food you choose to eat - it doesn't mean that it takes "so much time" to cook nutritional, varied and delicious food. It's fine if you only enjoy a very limited set of foods, but I suspect most people have a broader palate.
From the way you talk, it sounds like a diet full of sugar and quick to prepare processed foods is actually the optimal one for you because your body and mind simply can’t deal with anything else.
If this is the case, then maybe it’s best to enjoy convenient foods, and enjoy ‘living’, and not worry about health consequences because that will only detract from your present enjoyment.
The point is that people keep offering you suggestions because you seem to be saying there is a problem.
You’re obviously wrong that the problem can’t be solved since lots of people have solved it. That isn’t a matter of your experience not matching others.
What we are left with is that you are simply making a choice based on your own priorities and preferences.
I genuinely think that if this is true, you would be better off simply being happy with your choice. That sentiment is about respecting what is true for you and wishing you well.
I imagine there are a lot of people who have similar priorities to you and are just fine with that.
Yes, but that simply isn’t necessary.