LLH, at some point, you will have to wean off the JC pre-packaged foods anyway. I think the advice to just make those dinners your lunch and cook for the rest of your meals is a good one.
Some of the things I have done to make meal prep very easy when I don't feel like cooking are getting those steamin' bags that Glad and Ziplock make.
- You can prepare meat or veggies in those in just a few minutes. Add in herbs and spices and you have a very tasty dish healthfully prepared.
- When you do lasagna (if you like that), use lean ground turkey and only one layer of noodles. Cut into portions and freeze the portions that you don't have your meal in those zip lock boxes.
- Aquastar at Walmart and Pacifica at Kroger are the two brands I've found single serving size of fish. I like the Pacific salmon and the recipe tilapia. Pacifica has florentine, scallop and pepper and 3 cheese stuffed tilapia, as well as ginger marinated tilapia. These little packages are great because you take them out of the outer plastic and poke a hole in the vacuum packed plastic around the fish, and nuke them for around 4 minutes. TASTY! Serve that with a salad, and there's your healthy, portion controlled lunch or dinner.
- Invest in an inexpensive set of measuring cups. Measure your portions at home, when you aren't quite sure. Do this for as long as it takes for you to get a handle on what one serving of something looks like. It didn't take me more than a week.
- Michelina's Lean Gourmet. Less than $1 at Wal Mart and Kroger and these are pretty tasty. If you look, you can find them with somewhat lower sodium - less than 700mg for a freezer meal is considered pretty good, though not sure how that stacks up against Jenny.
- When you find yourself faced with fast food .... go for McDonald's or Wendy's Asian Chicken Salad. Don't use the crunchy noodles for Wendy's and you make the two salads nearly identical in calories. Use only 1/4 of the pouch of dressing to keep the calories down too. I can't stand BK salads. The ones I've had have been beyond disgusting.
- Denny's. A trick is to ask if you may order off the senior menu. They serve about half the food of their regular equivalent menu items. The grilled shrimp kabobs are really good with the vegetables and salad. Applebee's is awesome for it's WW menu. I LOVE the portabello burger and the other offerings. Very good and filling they are.
I think the best advice I can give you is this - don't get discouraged. Find a way to adapt yourself to healthy eating habits that wean you away from the "diet meals" mentality. Allow yourself to be empowered by making healthy real life choices with less and less dependance on that crutch. A good first step would be to ask at your meetings if JC has a cook book so you can try it on for size. If they do have recipes they make available to members, then you can try one out on the weekend and see for yourself what is a healthy portion. Before the food ever makes it to the table, put one portion on your plate, and put the other single portions into the freezer for future use (portions that aren't going to another person right then, that is
). Take baby steps and pretty soon you will be running a grand race!
God Bless,
mik
