The 6th Rule of Eating Healthy
A while back I talked about my five simple rules for healthy eating. Well, now I’m going to add a sixth rule based on my experience over the past few weeks. This new rule is: “A robot may not injure a human being or-” Wait no, that’s the first rule of Robotics! What was I saying before I deviated into science fiction trivia? Ahh yes, the 6th rule of eating healthy, Stop Going To Restaurants!
How Did I Get Here?
If you’ve been reading 60 in 3 for a while, you know that my wife and I are both very busy people. So for most of our time together, we’ve depended on restuarants for our meals. I always thought this was ok, especially since I would only order the healthy options on the menu, and I justified things by saying I really didn’t have time to make my own food. I mean, we both busy Silicon Valley professionals! Where were we going to find the time to cook food?
Well, over the past few months, we’ve been trying to cut back on our food spending. My wife is busy launching her new company and I’m paying a lot of money for my graduate school. Which means we have more expenses and less revenue than usual. Before anyone worries, we’re fine, but we did decide to cut down on some spending, one part of which was food.
How Did We Start?
First of all, let me give full credit to my wife here as she is the one who led this effort, while I followed happily behind. That said and as with most things, we started small. We stopped going out to dinners and started eating at home. Overtime, we started replacing lunches and breakfasts with more home prepared foods. Before all of this, I was eating about 12 meals a week at restaurants. That’s 6 dinners and 6 lunches. These days I’m eating about 2 meals a week outside the house.
What Are We Eating?
Our meals are relatively simple but tasty and very fun to prepare together. I really enjoy making salads while she likes making more sophisticated dishes like cassaroles and soups. Almost all of our meals are vegetarian, although I will occasionally BBQ the organic meat we buy at the farmer’s market.
Some examples from the past two weeks:
- Breakfast - Omelet with tomatoes, zucchini, onion and a bit of hot sauce for me.
- Breakfast - Wrap with cheese, hummus, tomatoes, cucumber (our first home grown vegetable)
- Breakfast - Freshly picked figs from our tree along with a few slices of cheese
- Lunch - Cheese, hummus, onion and cucumber on whole wheat bread
- Lunch - Pasta leftovers from the previous day
- Dinner - Vegetable soup that my wife made from scratch
- Dinner - Freshly made veggie salad and some grilled venison sausages
The Results?
First in terms of health, I feel much better. Plus I’ve lost about 3lbs this month. I think this is the last little change I needed to make in my lifestyle to really get to where I need to be healthwise. I also feel less bloated after lunch which is really helping me in the gym. Instead of one big restuarant lunch, I usually eat something I brought from home at around 11am, hit the gym at 2pm and then eat another home prepared meal at 4pm. I’m eating the same amount but I’m able to split it up better.
Second, our expenses have gone down considerably. I looked at our recent month’s spending and we’re spending about 50% as much as we did before. That’s pretty considerable when you think about it. We were able to cut our food budget by 50% while still eating healthy and tasty meals.
Third, our time together has improved. Rather than spending time at a restuarant, we spend it together at home. We don’t always cook and eat meals together, but when we do, it’s a far better experience than going to a restuarant.
Where Do We Find The Time?
Strangely enough, this actually saves time. It takes us less time to make our own food than it does to pick a restaurant, go there, get seated, order food, eat, ask for the check, pay and then go home. MUCH LESS TIME! Same applies at work. Sure, I spend an extra 15 minutes in the morning preparing my meals, but I save about an hour of time which I would spend going out to get food during the day. My work gets done faster which means I go home earlier.
Do We Still Go Out?
Sure. On Monday, we both had a craving for Vietnamese food. Since neither one of us knows anything about cooking Vietnamese food, we walked over to our local downtown and had some. However, note that this was a response to a specific desire. We wanted Vietnamese food, so we went out and got some. It was not the usual, “time to eat, so let’s pick out a restaurant and go there.”
How Can You Do This?
It’s simple. Start small. Replace just one meal a week with something you can easily make at home. Sandwiches are good, salads are better and maybe you could try out some scrambled eggs. None of these things require a lot of thought, skill or preparation time. Once you gain some confidence, try out new things like grilling, BBQing, stewing and so on. Believe me, it’s not that hard. The key is keeping your ingredients simple and healthy. It’s hard to go wrong with that as your starting point.
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It’s only been a couple of months, but I’m thinking this is going to become another permanent part of our lives. We’ve managed to save money, be healthier, spend more quality time together and gain more useful time in our lives. There’s absolutely no downside here.
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Gal - good to read about you taking such positive steps. I am on holiday at the moment so naturally am eating in restaurants 3 times a day. So far it has been 5 days and already I am putting my other half under pressure to let me buy food from the markets for some of our meals! I have an innate distrust of restaurants because however plain a dish you order they seem to somehow use large amounts of salt, oil, sugar etc so that you feel different to how you would after a similar home cooked meal. And to add insult to injury, it costs 4 times as much. Hope it continues to go well for you both.
My wife and I actually implemented this as a way to both save money and eat more healthily. We eat out once a week together at a nice restaurant on Sunday (which we call our “Caturday”). I still do eat lunches out 3 days a week when I commute down to work, but I only eat salads from a “healthy” fast-food place (3 unit chain, great Gyro salad).
My husband and I cut down on our restaurant eating quite a while ago. Not only is restaurant eating expensive, but you never can quite trust someone else’s cooking. I’m sure you’ve seen the news articles about them testing the fat and calorie content of so-called Light Entrees and finding that the Restaurant industry is made up of a bunch of liars.
My husband has a bento box for his lunches at work, that I pack up for him the day before. It has four compartments, so he can get in a good mix of healthy foods, usually a fruit, a vegetable, a protein and a grain. I usually make extra dinner so that I have leftovers to store for his lunches, and it’s really made a huge difference for us, both in weight loss and in economy. Previously, he used to eat microwaved tv-dinners for lunch, which can be ok for you, if you don’t mind horrible sodium intakes.
We do this as well, and with a family of 4 the savings really adds up quickly. We’ve been traveling more this summer (mostly road trips), and eating out really kills our budget.