Healthy Eats!

[EvilRoy]

What up Escapists?
How you guys doing?

I could use your help!
See, I'm trying to eat better, lose weight, and get healthy and I could use a lot of help with those goals.
Mostly I need help with eating healthier. I currently eat terribly! My meals are mostly frozen, processed, full of salt and fat.
Its terrible, I'm surprised I'm still alive honestly!

So if you guys could throw some good recipes and tips on eating better I'd appreciate it
Maybe even some exercise tips if anyone here knows anything about that? I don't know jack about proper exercise.

If it means anything I'm 6ft 5in (195-ish cm) and about 280lbs (127 kg).

Looks like you've gotten a lot of good advice in general, but I may as well pile on too. I've had moderate success in my weight loss, going from roughly 260 to 190 and probably back up to 220 (afraid to look) after I stopped exercising due to an injury.

I suggest frozen spinach! It goes oddly well in most dishes given appropriate preparation and adds nutrition and plant "filler" to a meal, so even if you still eat the same portion size you take in less calories overall. Egg beaters are also a good choice (egg in a milk carton), as you can choose the ones with reduced or no yolk and cut out some more calories that way.

I personally cut out bread nearly altogether and had great success in losing weight that way, not because of gluten or carbs or whatever, but because bread is "easy" and has a high calorie density. Having a bun with dinner won't fill you up much extra, but adds anywhere from 100 to 300 calories (plus butter if you eat it) to the meal and requires no real preparation. I simply found it too easy to increase a meal or snack calorie density with the no-thought addition of bread, something that need only be removed from a bag and eaten rather than having to be cut up or microwaved. Bread is still OK, but I only ate it when it was actually part of a recipe - the bun in a burger, or the cubes of bread in a strata. Edit: Tying in to that whole inconvinience deal, I only ever bought exactly enough bread for one mean that night. A bun costs $0.50 from the bulk sections, and a full load of fresh french bread costs like $1.50 so its not like you're really losing money not buying in groups.

Following up from that - buy snack foods that require preparation. Even if its only 20 seconds in the microwave, having to actually take that inconvenient step helped discourage me from bothering. This won't help everyone, but I have an issue with "no reason eating" and adding inconvenience keeps my fingers out of the pantry. Consider freezing your standard snacks so you have to wait for them to thaw or warm them up before eating.

Lastly, keep an eye on your daily nutritional requirements for all the different vitamins. As a flagrant overeater, the first thing that hit me when I started to tone down was mild vitamin deficiencies - before I ate so much that even by accident I was always getting about enough of each, but once I started to cut back not having things like enough iron, vitamin A or C, etc. resulted in unpleasant cravings and periods of overeating. Either use something like the aforementioned MyFitnessPal to keep track, or start taking multivitamins to top yourself up.

As far as recipies go, I have a few go-to items (a lot of citrus and chicken, or egg white strata, or carefully portioned noodles), but your best bet is to google "diabetic recipes". Those are awesome, because diabetics have to be intensely careful about what they eat, so everything from easy ways to size portions to daily meal plans for full servings are available to everyone.

 

[Augustine]

Easy.
Go get the "Good and Cheap" book/pdf by Leanne Brown.
It was a kickstarter project, with the pdf of the whole resulting book avaliable for FREE on the website.
Awesome recipes therein.

My favorite is the simple roasted vegetables recipe. Ever since I cooked it, all the people want me to cook now is those roasted veggies (and people who ask aren't really health nuts, it's just tasty).

Simple.
Cheap.
Healthy.
Yummy.

 

[Little Woodsman]

I think one of the first things you need to ask yourself if why you don't cook.

Oh, and I just wanted to answer this real quick.
I still live with family and they don't usually let me cook.
I only got my own car recently so until now I haven't been able to go out and buy my own ingredients and just ended up eating whatever my family bought or what I could get at work.
And when I did manage to get my own groceries my family put up this huge stink about how they didn't like how the stuff I cooked smelled and looked and wouldn't let me use things I needed to make and store my food.
It sucked.

Well this just got exponentially harder.....

Your living situation makes most of the dietary advice I was going to give problematic to say the least, but there are still some things you can do.
I'm pretty sure that your family wouldn't object to you keeping some basic healthier options that don't require cooking available. Make sure that there are some raw vegetables like carrot or celery sticks around, same for fresh fruits like bananas, oranges, apples and grapes. Having the healthier choices like fruits & vegetables *available* when you feel like a snack and at dessert time at least gives you the opportunity to make the better choice.

As for exercise, Richard Simmons actually hit the nub of the problem decades ago when he pointed out that what everyone needs to do is find a form of exercise that they *enjoy*. When people have a form of exercise that they enjoy, they make excuses to go and *do* it, rather than excuses to *avoid* it.
Mess around with some different things, try a few sports see if there are martial arts classes easily available in your area.
If you choose some form of 'regimented' exercise like calisthenics or weight lifting use a spiral notebook to keep track of your progress-- when you get discouraged (almost everyone does) you can look back at how you've progressed over time and see how well you are actually doing. With whatever type of exercise you choose remember to start small and slow and build over time (injuring yourself or burning out all of your enthusiasm immediately will torpedo your plans quicker than anything).

You didn't mention specifically if soda is one of the things you have a problem with in your diet, but everyone is right that it is terrible for you. If you do indulge in soda and are having problems quitting let me know and I'll tell you the method that worked for me.

Many people have also mentioned that having a small indulgence every once in a while is fine and they are very correct. What you are trying to do is change your overall trends and make better choices.

If you snack while watching movies/tv opt for healthier choices, carrot sticks, celery, cauliflower florets or fresh fruit.

Avoid boredom. People in industrialized nations snack when we are bored.

And always remember, we are all here to back you up & offer our internet-type support!

VIVA LA SHEEP!!

{EDIT} I totally forgot to mention-- if you use ketchup at all, try substituting tomato sauce instead. It has a tangier taste without all the added sugar.

 

[tippy2k2]

#1. Look at the first three ingredients; if sugar is one of them, you're eating a desert. This was one of my killers with even my "healthy" food like granola bars. Most of them have so much sugar in them that it's virtually pointless to be eating them versus a Snickers. In her words, you want "Dietary Fiber" to be high and "Sugars" to be low. She also said that you can go nuts with veggies and fruit (fruit has a lot of sugar but it's natural sugar versus the stuff you get from pop; it's sugar your body is designed to break apart).

I brought a Nature Valley granola bar to work today and you made me look at the ingredients.
Second ingredient, sugar... dammit.

Don't feel too bad; I had my own "Fuck me..." moment when I looked through my food after my Nutrition lesson too

If it helps, two brands of much healthier granola bars that I've now tried is Kashi and KIND. I thought the KIND bars were better tasting and price-wise, both are only slightly more expensive (like...a quarter at the store I go to) than the sugary granola bars. Frankly, I'd just do what I did; find a few and give them a go. Just look for low sugar (7 g KIND; 5 g Kashi; 13g Nature Valley) and high dietary fiber (3 g KIND; 4 g Kashi; 1 g Nature Valley) when you're looking at granola bars.

It sucks because those Nature Valley ones are sooooo goooooood but sacrifices must be made if I want to become Ryan Gossling by 2016 :,(

 

[NPC009]

Since the word "nutritionist" keeps popping up in this thread I feel that I should give people a piece of advice:

Don't listen to nutritionists. "Nutritionist" is not a protected term, and anyone can claim to be a nutritionist without actually having any specific eduction or skills dealing with nutrition. If you want to talk to a professional about nutrition then you want a "dietitian."

Whoops. I thought nutritionist was the English equivalent of a certified dietitian in my country. That's were I went, which could I explain my I didn't get any extreme advice. Sorry for the confusion.

 

[Little Woodsman]

So if quitting soda is an issue for anyone, well different things work for different people but here's what worked for me.

I started by switching from soda to sweetened iced tea. The different taste took a little bit to get used to, but it was still sweet and had caffeine so it wasn't that hard. I mixed my own in gallon batches, and (here's the key part) I used an *unsweetened* tea mix and added my own sugar, carefully measuring how much I was putting in. When I started, I was using 24 teaspoons of sugar in a 1 gallon batch of tea. Once I was accustomed to the taste of the sweetened tea I started mixing the batches with 23 & 1/2 teaspoons of sugar. Once I was used to the slightly-less-sweet version (took about 10 -14 days) I dropped the sugar down to 23 teaspoons and kept proceeding like that, decreasing the sugar by about 1/2 a teaspoon every 12 days or so. Once I got to the point when I was only putting about 8 teaspoons in to a gallon batch, it was easy to just stop putting the sugar in completely. Once I was used to the unsweetened tea, sweet tea and soda tasted awful to me, I stayed off of drinks with sugar for about a decade.
If you use this method be sure to get some kind of container so that you can bring some of the tea to work/school with you and be less tempted to get soda there.

Something else that might help: the next time you are at the grocery store pick up a six-pack of cans of orange juice, and a six pack of tomato juice. Keep some at home and take some to work/school with you. One of the big problems with soda consumption in our country is that soda tends to be easily available everywhere and healthier options don't. It's really difficult to make the better choice if you have to go out of your way for it, and the worse choice is easily available. So make it easy on yourself and make the better option something that you have right with you and have already paid for.

Hope this helps!