I happen to enjoy cooking, so I put effort into making meals on the weekends and I make enough to be able to eat them as leftovers midweek. Lots of meals taste better after a night or two in the fridge.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Make your own junk food that isn’t actually junk, like, I make a bunch of bean burritos and freeze them, or fill an ice cube tray with pasta sauce and pop out and nuke the cubes to add to some pasta.
I never thought of freezing pasta sauce in cubes but that's pretty brilliant.
It works well the bolognese or other particularly saucey sauces, not sure how it could work with something like carbonara. Also, weird thing, you can put pasta sauce on things other than pasta (?!?!) such as potatoes or eggs.
I used to have this issue, but I solved it with meditation (sort of). This does sound extreme, but it worked for me - even though I was going to the gym every single weekday, I still felt like shit most of the time because of the junk food eating habit I had on the weekends (like you) and I decided enough was enough. Whenever I felt the urge to eat junkfood, I simply meditated. The first few weekends it was really fucking weird... in my mind I was thinking "I'm hungry, why am the fuck am I meditating...", but after a while my desire to eat junkfood really just plummeted, aswell as an overall increase in energy allowing me to cook something better.
This was honestly really extreme and I do not know how I actually pulled it off without 'relapsing'. It is not necessary, and I only recommend it if it's a serious issue for you, which it was for me (and judging by your explanation, it is not a big issue).
Another method I used is what TMPM calls snack city (youtube video) where it's healthy junkfood. So muffin bites, fries, chicken, etc, all pre-cooked on a single day, then stored in a freezer with easy heatups via a microwave, oven or airfryer, with low-calorie and high-protein focus.
tl;dr I meditated like crazy and stalled my junk food addiction. Easy way to replace junkfood is with 'healthy' junkfood -> video - easy and fast meal prep that will last you more than a day. Well worth it.
I don't think the meditation is going to work for me but I really need to figure out some healthy junk food like you suggested! I have a bunch of premade quesadillas in the freezer but with all that cheese they're not too healthy, and I cook them with butter so that isn't great either.
Yeah I kind of went crazy with it, but it solved my issues so - it is what it is lol. Josh's youtube channel has a TON of meal prep recipes and snack recipes that I'm sure you'll enjoy. Hope this helps.
To me this sounds like the preparation you do during the week maybe is a bit tiring or boring or both, so that even if you like the food you cook, the process is a chore. I'd include grocery shopping in "the process".
If true, then you are amazing to keep on top of everything during the week, but it may provide some clues for arranging your weekend food into something you're happier with.
Maybe you need simpler, faster recipes for the weekdays so you're less fed up with cooking by the weekend? Maybe you need things which are more fun to cook, or which have more pleasurable sensory aspects, both in the preparation and in the eating? Maybe you could make some extra food during the week, that you can reheat or just turf onto a plate at the weekends?
Is it possible you are too strict during the week? Or that you're not really getting enough calories over the week? What happens if you are more relaxed about how healthy your weekday meals are? What happens if you have small amounts of junky stuff during the week?
So actually I meal prep on Sunday morning and eat the same thing M-F which I'm ok with but 5 days is my limit and I don't think the food would still be good by the next Saturday and Sunday anyway. But maybe you're on to something and even though I think I'm ok with the same dinner every day, maybe I need to make like 4 days worth of food then do a quick and easy 3 day meal prep on Thursday to switch it up. Maybe it's at least partially a psychological thing that I wasn't even aware was happening.
Just curious, do you dislike cooking? Or are you really short on time every day? Because if you don't hate cooking, and you love eating, then there's no reason not to just cook fresh and something different daily. If time is an issue, then there are plenty of quick recipes with simple ingredients that you can use to whip up a dish in no time at all - Jamie Oliver has a few books and shows on this (15 Minute Meals / 5 Ingredients – Quick & Easy Food etc), if you need some inspiration.
Once you get into the habit of cooking fresh daily, then you won't really differentiate between weekends and weekdays. Instead, you may even see weekends as a chance to cook those elaborate and fancy dishes you don't have the time for during the weekends, or experiment with a new cuisine or even a cooking technique that you haven't employed before.
Having the right gear also helps save a lot of time, such as a pressure cooker or an instant pot, an air fryer etc. Try and get your kitchen equipped with all the essentials, optimize the way you organize and access your ingredients, spices etc. Watch a few cooking shows like MasterChef to get ideas on how to streamline your kitchen and workbench, how to multi-task etc to get things done in the shortest possible time.
No, I actually like cooking but I have a problem with having enough energy. I also wake up by 5 am every day and I'm just tired after work. I meal prep so I have something good available and don't have to think and act when I'm tired. I also have an issue with overeating more and eating more junk food when I'm tired so it helps with that.
I guess I also don't want to have to plan and deal with making 5 to 7 separate meals every week, planning all that, buying that many groceries. I only cook for myself so that seems really like an excessive amount of shopping and cooking and things to buy when I can do it once and be done.
Edit: you know what I absolutely loathe though is cleaning and doing dishes and that's high on the list of reasons not to cook every day. The cooking is nice but nothing that goes along with it is.
I’d include grocery shopping in “the process”.
Personally, this was the most exhausting part of cooking for me. My recipes are often complicated and call for a lot of somewhat obscure ingredients. Then the risk of forgetting something or buying the wrong thing is also there. Half the time, by the time I start actually cooking I'm already a little bit tired just because I could not find lime oil or whatever for the life of me.
I've started ordering all my ingredients for pickup now. I get a search bar so I'm not walking down isles hoping I'm in the right one, and I can check it against the recipe easily. I can pick it up on my bike ride and it just feels so much better.
count your calories and you can eat what you want
There's a diet out there focused around eating one meal a day as form of intermittent fasting and that's typically what I do on weekends.
Though honestly it has a lot to do with me absolutely wrecking my sleep schedule on weekends and sleeping in.
Oooh interesting. Does that mess your sleep schedule up during the week too? I'm always up bright and early every day.
Staying up late on the weekends? A little bit.
If you are referring to the food no. That doesn't really effect me besides being hungry when I wake up
Yep I meant the sleep schedule being different on weekends.
Practicing intuitive eating repaired my relationship with food after 8 years of (maybe disordered) keto dieting. Then, I had to challenge body image issues—ongoing—but I feel so much better in my body and my relationship to food and movement than when I strictly dieted and exercised.
Wait do you did keto for 8 years? I can't even fathom the willpower that must have taken. I've tried intuitive eating in the past and I don't tend to have a great time with mindfulness and impulse control but I really should incorporate at least some aspects of it because I definitely have had my moments where I sat there asking myself why I was eating when I wasn't hungry... then took another bite.
Yep. I was a keto "success" story, felt like I could maintain lazy keto forever.
Then it hit me that I was literally scared of pasta.
I have friends that eat when they are hungry and aren't guilty after having a milkshake. They never diet. They don't stress about food or think about calories or macronutrients. They seem fine and often are athletic!
I wanted to get more of that. It cost me my flat stomach, but honestly just being able to enjoy good food without binging + binge regret is worth it alone. There are other benefits, too, but going anti-diet does require a different king of mental hardiness and effectively makes you counter culture.
It's not easy telling people that I don't want to lose weight or that I'm not watching what I eat. I try to avoid it. If they press it, I end up having to defend the idea that people can do what they want? I dunno. It's a whole paradigm shift.
Anyway, I have mostly become one of the aforementioned people. I eat to my heart's content and some might think I moderate when watching from afar, but IE is truly "no food rules". When you don't restrict, food becomes more neutral and thus regulation can become internal instead of a mental game of willpower and calorie/carb math.
I truly think it's the best thing I've done for myself in years but I am always reluctant to spread the word because everyone's journey with their body is hyper personal. Being anti-diet doesn't mean you persecute people who do diet...that would be mean. Everyone is just doing their best.
My partner has had similar issues - being scared of pasta definitely rings true. When you start to think about it and notice it, the amount of mental energy and emotion people expend worrying about food is pretty awful. The diet industry's advertising is extraordinarily pervasive too.
I'm glad you feel like you can talk about it here. Online spaces are so often aggressive to the idea that food shouldn't be constantly top of mind.
I just sorta stumbled into intuitive eating years ago, and i agree with it being one of the best things i've ever done for myself.
It's so wild now to hear people worry about what they eat and i'm just, like.. i start feeling sick of snacks after a fifth of a bag of chips, what i crave is a bucket full of nice balanced pasta salad!
There are so many things like this where people think you just have to suffer and push through with willpower, when in fact we have had perfect solutions since forever and modern society has just made people forget this, and purely coincidentally this has allowed companies to sell products and services.
My wife and I meal prep M-F as well. We solved the weekend problem by ordering children portions or splitting a single adult order. The portion sizes served adults are far too large. When going to a sit down restaurant, we usually leave with leftovers.
It's usually 2 or 3 meals on the plate!
I don't know what eating like a little piggy means in your situation, but in mine, that meant going upwards of 5000 kcal surplus than my normal intake. Still mostly from healthy food (like nuts, I am addicted to nuts XD). Which I never really obsessed about, since I tend to use great amounts of energy some days of the week (cycling alone can go upwards of 3000 kcal some days). I really don't like diets either. All I 've ever done, and still do, is try to understand what is good for me, why and in which amounts. I find food (all aspects of it, even having pots with the herbs I use most often when cooking) one of the greatest joys of life, along with movement (simple stuff, walking, running, cycling, swimming). And while I find their relation fascinating and I experiment a lot (been on keto for a year or so), I prefer joy and understanding being the guiding forces, not simple discipline and blindly following rules I don't completely understand towards goals I don't really care about.
There are a few things I 've learnt over the years that are pretty easy for me to follow, especially since I 've seen how badly they affect my mood when I don't.
- Super processed foods are not worth it (i.e. energy drinks).
- Processed foods cannot be a foundation for health, but won't harm me once in a while (i.e. flour products).
- I don't eat sugar. But I don't obsess about it either. i.e. prefer water melon to ice cream, but I get the latter a few times in the summer.
- Some carb sources can be very dense in nutrients (i.e. oats & legumes), don't mess my insulin levels, so they make a good foundation as a carb source. They are also cheap, easy to prepare, and there are so many of them.
- Super easy (takes less 1 minute to prepare), super dense in nutrients daily breakfast with oats, nuts, seeds, cocoa, cinnamon, raisins. It's packed with things I won't need to care about later in the day (i.e. magnesium).
- No supplements (part of the "eat real food" axiom).
Even though I can handle carbs well (mostly thanks to decades in different sports and a pretty active life), I like to think that respecting the metabolic pathway our body uses to metabolize them will allow me to keep using it without issues later in life. Besides just feeling better when I do (no cravings, no crashes, no insulin related side-effects).
Overall I have a pretty good sense of what each food I eat contains (in every sense you can think of, macros/micros/phytochemicals/lipid types/amino-acid profiles/energy/water/fiber -its been almost 2 decades I look up every food I introduce) and do 2 simple things. Reloading glycogen stores (slowly) between days of long rides on the bike is ok. No bike or very diminished activity after a few days? Turn to foods that mostly contain fats (which also allow me to skip meals way easier) with fresh vegetables (limited carbs). Which is what I tend to do in weekends.
I enjoy cooking, or even preparing the materials I will cook beforehand. Got my own tofu, which I tend to make close to 3kg (really hard pressed, the way I like it) each time and lasts for a few months divided in portions, in the freezer. My own tempeh and seitan. All low (close to zero) carb/ low energy protein sources. These and eggs, are really easy to prepare in stir fries and can be really delicious.
Btw, I went from 96kg to 84 in 5ish months following the stuff I just wrote. Flat stomach isn't something you lose or get with one meal, it takes bad habits to lose, and good habits to maintain. And I am not mentioning flat stomach as something related to the image of the body. I am mentioning it as an indicator of health. Having your vital organs take up the space they need to perform optimally, especially during movement, feels great.
Finally, if you read this far, don't beat yourself up! It's a learning process and it looks like you are doing fine. Don't rush it either, habits take time to form, but can last a lifetime. The more you develop one good habit, the less effort it requires, freeing your focus to form the next one. Don't try to change everything at once. And it shouldn't feel bad, or else it's not sustainable. Takes time, but it's totally worth it!
I try to set a time in which I can't eat junk food until. Start with after lunch say 1pm and then try to extend that each day / weekend. I find having rules that I can judge myself on is better than goals when it comes to junk food.
I'm going to try that, thank you!
I do the same thing.. but on purpose. M-F is my healthy meal prep, and the weekend is when I go wild and allow myself to eat out a lot and get whatever I'd like. It's like a treat for making it through the week.
I'm thinking of cutting back on my weekend eating out tho (cost reasons), so I might need to start prepping something a little different for the weekend to keep myself in check.
I'm liking the idea of freezing more healthy junk food. Maybe that would help you cut back on eating out too.
It's easiest to not eat junk by just not buying junk to begin with. I noticed I stopped eating TV dinners as often when I started taking them off my grocery list. That forces me to think about what I want to make. Might be as simple as whole wheat pasta for dinner with a smoothie (unflavored yogurt, milk, frozen berries, a banana, and spinach).
While I've certainly done it myself, I've noticed my SO tends to go to town on certain snacks like chips or Ritz over regular meals. This has helped me also realize that it would be beneficial to myself to also cut down on the amount of snacks foods I have. Going too far in the other direction (just having raw ingredients only) also incetivizes eating out though, so a balance must be struck.
I am also extremely guilty of going to town on junk food. I'll wolf down ab entire bag of chips if I have one so I usually avoid buying them lol
I just always eat easy to prepare stuff that satisfies me more than junk food does anyways, the idea that junk food is somehow better feels like astroturfing from mcdonalds to me.
Why not just prepare meals for the weekend too?
Yeah I ate Wendy's the other day and my stomach actually hurt and I was really questioning my life choices lol
Look into Soylent: powder food that you simply mix with water. I pretty much only use my stove to keep my coffee warm these days.
I'll Google it but is that an actual product? This isn't just a Soylent Green is people joke?
They swear it's not made of people. It's definitely made with soy protein and a proprietary blend of vitamins. Certainly not people. No way. Who told you that? What's their last name, and where do they live?
I drink and get takeaways on Friday or Saturday then fast Sunday.
Do you feel like the fasting is good for you or is it more of a punishment for the 2 prior days?
Fasting for 24 hours is barely noticeable. I might get a bit hungry towards the end of the night but I drink water and I'm in bed by 10pm so it's fine.
Oh gotcha. I'd be all cranky and dizzy and probably have a headache by then lol