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Comment by thefounder | Hacker News Reader

I know fast-food and microwaveable tv dinners are cheap and "worry free" but you pay the price with your health. Consider it like achool abuse. You get away with it several times but eventually your health will deteriorate.

You have to want to eat healthy and set the appropriate mindset. For example instead to order that fastfood crap just eat some simple raw, "spartan" food(bananas, boiled meat or even fried meat etc). I have some good experience with that working long hours on my own startup(s) without distractions.

I doubt you don't have 30 minutes to "prepare" your dinner. After all you don't really prepare much. Just boil or fry whatever raw food you have.

Of course convincing kids to eat not very tasty food may be a different story but it's doable because I've seen that too.

At some point you may start to appreciate the simple food and hate when the chefs put you sugar and all kinds of "flavours" in your food.

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I can say with 100% certainty there was not 30 minutes to cook dinner alone.

At a certain point you’re balancing how much sleep you need to perform at work (4-5 hours) and the amount of time you’d spend commuting and working (~16 hours a day). When you throw in errands, cleaning, maintenance, and maybe 30 minutes in passing period leisure, there really isn’t time to cook.

And yes, to your point, you will eventually rack up a ton up health problems with this lifestyle… to the articles point, being poor is expensive. It you have the option to not be poor, definitely take it!!

Depends really how you trade speed for complexity. To be honest at the end of the meal I had no more than 2-3 items to wash. Of course this means your dinner will look and taste "poor" but it's way "better" than the microwave pizza/dinner.

If you have kids perhaps the solution is for each one to wash its own plate(s). My point is that you can be poor and eat healthy but you have to want that.

We _definitely_ wanted it. Badly. It was not a case of “not wanting it.” It was a case of:

- a lack of time

— a lack of resources (just two folks, no expendable income)

- a lack of cognitive energy, probably stress induced from managing the above two.

I think this is a particularly rich western country thing though, the method of being poor you describe works great when you have an extended family who can pool resources. But for a single mom and young child, you can’t smart your way out of it. It’s like trying to optimize a triple a game to run on twenty year old hardware —- just ain’t the cycles, have to reduce the workload.

>> - a lack of cognitive energy, probably stress induced from managing the above two.

I think this is really the most important point. We know we should do better but we lack the cognitive energy. I can totally understand it.

Getting yourself on the right track is hard but at least you can develop a mental story you can control and stay "in the zone". I can't imagine how hard it is being poor and single with children, always being distracted by thousands of small issues.

The cognitive energy is the least important point by a country mile. Again, you can’t optimize your way out of severe poverty. It is not a problem of mental fortitude, self induced or not. I feel like statements like the one I’m replying to miss the point entirely.

It’s a problem with not having enough time or money to eat well. That’s the take away. The cognitive stress is just a bonus.

Put another way, we totally could have eaten better if we had more time or money. It’s highly unlikely we could have eaten better if we had more mental fortitude.

To reinforce that point, my mom was a very fit person who prioritized eating well before becoming poor. Ran, mountain biked, ski-ed.

After I got money, pretty much all my disposable goes into health and food to fuel. Lift, cycle, surf, run. In high school, I wrestled explicitly because coach would buy me food. It wasn’t mental fortitude or will that was lacking.

It was just time and money.

This is a really arrogant attitude that reeks of the 'pull yourself up by your bootstrap' bullshit.

IDK if it’s arrogance — it can be interpreted that way, but I think a more generous interpretation is that it’s really hard for people who haven’t been poor and chronically food insecure to understand what it’s like and the situations that lead to it. Which makes it hard for the conversations to be productive.

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