If you had an hour of free time, how would you spend it?
Most of us wouldn’t say sweating over the stove. In fact, some of us do not enjoy or want to cook! And that’s ok, but can be challenging when you want to control your macronutrient intake while on a weight loss journey.
Today, I’ll share five tips for how to eat for weight loss if you hate to cook. Then, I’ll share a full-day, zero-cook menu you can try this week!
1. Pick Prepped Protein
I’m a big fan of batch cooking my protein. You can hard boil a dozen eggs for the week in 10 minutes or cook 5 lunches worth of shredded chicken in the slow cooker.
But some days I don’t want to come close to the kitchen. That’s when items like rotisserie chickens, pulled pork, and marinated beef comes in handy.
Buying one to three meats that are already made can dock hours off your weekly cooking time! You can even whip together a healing Bone Broth Soup. Just add cooked veggies, rice, and rotisserie chicken for a crazy-high-protein meal in minutes. Make high-protein meals in a flash by adding your cooked meat to a bagged salad, a can of soup, or a wrap.
2. Buy Bagged Salads
I’m a big fan of bagged salads. They’re perfect packets, ready to be grabbed and taken with me to work, errands, or my kid’s baseball game.
Mix your bagged salad with your meat (I prep chicken breast once each week and bring that along with me). You can up your nutrition by ditching the dressing packed and subbing in one of your favorites.
I love Bolthouse Farms Classic Ranch or any dressings made by Primal Kitchen or Tessemae’s. These condiment containers keep my dressing from leaking or spilling in my packed lunch.
Don’t stop at salads, though. There are plenty of prepped veggies in the grocery store, like shredded cabbage, julienned carrots, chopped onions, broccoli florets, and cubed squash. You don’t have to buy all your veggies prepped, but if your goal is less time in the kitchen, purchasing a few prepped veggies can help you on extra busy evenings.
3. Prep Your Produce Promptly
Sometimes a simple switch in strategy can cut kitchen time in half! This one will become a favorite of yours after a few weeks.
When you come home from the grocery store, make it a habit to wash and even prep your produce before placing it in the fridge.
First, give them a wash. Briefly soaking your produce in a mixture of water and baking soda breaks down the pesticide compounds and helps them wash away!
Here’s the recipe:
- 1 quart of water
- 2 tsp of baking soda
- A splash of vinegar
A 30-second soak is all you need! Make as many batches of this solution as needed. Soak all your produce in this solution, rinse, and let air dry.
Then, prep or store them in a paper-towel lined dish in the fridge so they’re ready to eat!
Completing all the washing and chopping at once will save you so much time throughout the week. Instead of working through this routine each evening, you can finish it all in one swoop.
4. Cook & Cool Your Carbs
Do you know about resistant starches? Even people who demonize carbs recommend resistant starches! They’re a special type of starch that has remarkable healing properties, including improving your metabolism, improving your blood sugar, and even optimizing your gut flora in a way that promotes weight loss.
Here’s a hack: A simple meal prep trick can transform average starches into resistant ones! When your meal includes starchy foods like rice, pasta, and potatoes, cook them and then let them cool.
Here’s how it works: When these starchy foods are cooked and then cooled, the starch in them changes and becomes more resistant. This means that what was once easily digested starch transforms into the resistant type.
This cook-then-cool trick boosts the resistant starch content of the starchy foods you eat. If you’re a fan of potato salad or cold rice dishes, you’re in luck!
Here’s a bonus: You can reheat these foods too. You know that delicious pasta dish you cooked yesterday and stored in the fridge? Or the rice and chicken leftovers you packed up? Warm them up for lunch. The resistant starches in your cooled dish will remain even after you reheat your meal.
5. Know Your Core Four
When it comes to your meals each week, winging it never works. People who put some thought and planning into their weekly food choices do so much better.
That said, weekly meal planning can feel overwhelming and end up taking a ton of time. The “Core Four” trick saves me hours of food-duty every week. Once I found my Core Four, meal planning took minutes.
Learn more about my Core Four method in my e-book here, it’ll help you spend less time in the kitchen!
Here’s how it works: List at least four (but up to 8) meal ideas and their recipes. Pick the ones that are easy to make, high in protein, fit your calorie limit, and a family favorite. These are the four recipes you can return to over and over.
In my family, we typically have a taco-style meal on Tuesdays and a pasta-based meal on Fridays.
This method makes eating and cooking healthy meals much easier.
4 Fast Meals for Less Kitchen Time
A few minutes in the kitchen can be enough when you know the right recipes! Here are four of my favorite fast meals that keep me on track.
- Fajita Bowls
- Easy Italian Sheet Pan Dinner
- Buffalo Chicken Spaghetti Squash
- Veggie-Loaded Pasta Sauce
My Favorite No-Cook Foods
Your grocery store is full of healthy foods that don’t require any kitchen duty! Just be careful to read your labels. Many prepped and packaged foods are full of unnecessary, unhealthy junk. Look for clean, real-food ingredients, or start with my list below!
- Rotisserie chicken
- Kroger’s pulled pork
- Chomps meat sticks
- Starkist tuna creations
- Epic Provisions protein bars
- Kettle & Fire bone broth
- Bagged salads
- Cottage cheese
- Plain greek yogurt or Oikos PRO
- Fruit like berries and apples
- Veggies like snow peas and carrots
- Organic hummus
- Julian Bakery ProGranola
- ONE protein bars
- Raw Rev Vegan Protein Bars
The Full-Day, No-Cook Menu
This menu will get you through the day without a minute at the stove! Try it out on your busy days!
Breakfast: Two Oikos Pro yogurt cups with 1 oz of Nature Valley protein granola and fresh berries
Lunch: Bagged salad (I like Taylor Farm’s Buffalo Ranch Chopped Kit and sometimes swap the dressing for Bolthouse) with 6 oz of rotisserie chicken; an apple; cottage cheese cup
Snack: StarKist tuna creations with Quest protein chips
Dinner: BBQ Stuffed Sweet Potato
Ditch the Kitchen and Still Reach Your Goals!
You don’t have to cook from scratch to lose weight. If you want to learn more about quick, healthy meals I personally use all the time, grab my Core Four Method E-book!
