Up until recently, I hated cooking. It's one of the (many) reasons why I was fat. With very little knowledge of how to cook, my diet consisted largely of fast food, restaurants, stuff from the frozen food section of the grocery store, and the type of stuff that you can get at a 7-11. I've always been a picky eater too, so that limited my tolerance to try new things. That's changed, due to two things-a T.V. show that I love, and a bet that I made with my wife.
I started watching You're the Worst a few months ago. I loved the entire story line. For those that have started reading my blog because of my posts about mental illness, you should watch the show. Along with being my type of show (I love shows and movies where the protagonists are morally flawed), they do accurate portrayals of people suffering from PTSD and depression while somehow still being hilarious.
A running gag for the first season and a half was that the only time anyone on the show ever ate was when a breakfast dish was being served. One of the dishes was breakfast lasagna. They didn't say what was in it, but I just thought, "You took the best meal of the day and turned it into FUCKING LASAGNA! I MUST TRY THIS!"
I started looking on the internet for recipes, but didn't find one to my liking. I decided to make it from scratch using all the things I like most about breakfast, and combining it into a dish until I got this:
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| Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair! |
It's not at all healthy, but it's delicious!
Around the time I made that recipe, my wife joked about leaving me, and how I'd never get to eat any of her delicious cooking again. I called her out on that, saying that I can make lasagna just fine (she makes great lasagna, among other things). So we decided to have a contest to see who had the better one. I went looking for recipes on the internet, and found one called, "World's Best Lasagna Recipe". Well, if it's the world's best, it might beat my wife's.
Weeks passed, and we were supposed to have our contest on a Saturday, which is the only day neither of us are working, but I kept getting called into work at the last minute. Eventually, we both lost interest in the contest, but I still wanted to make that lasagna.
I finally got around to making it, and the recipe lived up to its name. It takes well over three hours to make, and it's worth every second of time. The recipe called for canned tomatoes, and I used them despite hating tomatoes (for some reason I've always liked tomato sauce, but not tomatoes themselves).
After that, I decided to start cooking on Thursdays, when I have time off. I made a few nice dishes from recipes I saw from Tasty, but wanted to start cooking healthier stuff, as opposed to high calorie dishes like breakfast lasagna. So I saw this delicious looking dish and decided to try it:
I trimmed the pork chops of most of the fat so they were lean, and cooked it up with garlic mashed cauliflower and a can of peas and carrots. A commenter on the cauliflower recipe said to quadruple the cheese, so I did. Despite me putting way too much garlic in the recipe (what I thought was a clove of garlic turned out to be an entire bulb), my family loved it. The mashed cauliflower had too much garlic for me to enjoy, but they did taste just like mashed potatoes, which was nice.
I also had to be less picky on my foods for that recipe. Because I couldn't find any scallions at my store, I substituted french onions instead. Anyone in my family can tell you how much I hate onions of ANY kind, but I decided to take one for the team and use them.
Despite making these awesome recipes, I was still eating poorly while I worked. When I was working on losing and/or maintaining my weight, I'd make lunches with sirloin steak or chicken, and either wrap them up in tortilla shells, or eat them with a salad. That got old very fast, so I fell back into old habits of eating high calorie carry-out from restaurants, or fast food. It was showing on the scale. I wanted to figure out how to make meals I can take for lunch that are healthy, not just because I wanted to lose weight, but also because my workouts are starting to become murder machines. Between the increased weight on my 5x5 routine and the exercises given to me by my doctor to protect my shoulders, losing weight isn't even my priority for eating healthy. I need to consume lots of protein and healthy food so I'll have energy to finish my workouts. Try doing a 5x5 workout followed by eight shoulder exercises after eating McDonalds all day and see how that goes.
I read about "meal prepping" on some fitness sites and decided to give that a try. Essentially, you take one day making several days worth of food in and store it in bulk. I looked at some recipes and decided to try this one:
I didn't use all of the ingredients because despite trying to get over being picky, I still hate onions. Fucking hate them. I've made my peace with the french onions (so long as they're cooked and in a massive amount of cheese, they're fine), but those and black beans are not happening anytime soon. I used a mix of corn, peas, carrots, broccoli, and green beans. Despite being less vegetables than what the recipe required, I still had a lot of leftover veggies when all was said and done. I also seasoned my chicken differently, using BBQ rub and generic chicken seasoning.
I ordered a portable electric oven off of Amazon so I could reheat them in my car. I tried them today for the first time, and they're delicious! Each meal is around 500 calories and they fill you up.
The healthier eating is paying off. While the real intention behind eating healthier is to become stronger, faster, and better than I was before, it's nice to see that my stomach is starting to shrink, too.
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