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Comment by drilldrive | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the best way to lose weight is to make your own food for your whole diet, keeping processed foods to an absolute minimum. This alongside being aware of drinking mostly water instead of sugary drinks and keeping snacking to a minimum should lead to more gripability on one's diet, since tracking what one eats is much easier to remember when one cooks his own food. If this doesn't quite work, perform a calorie calculation once to be sure it lines with the dietary calculators to actually decrease caloric intake.

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The key to eating well is to make healthy eating take less effort than unhealthy eating. I like to cook large portions and save leftovers in the freezer. It takes only 4 mins to prepare a good meal from the freezer. This is a lot less effort than getting dressed, going outside, increasing my covid exposure risk, paying money, and getting unhealthy food.

I've tried a lot of different freezer containers. Nowadays, I use Rubbermaid Take-Along Food Storage Containers in 0.5 cup and 1.2 cup "twist & seal" styles. They're cheap and super durable. I clean them in a dishwasher. They are brittle when frozen so heat them a bit before opening.

A happy discovery: Make brown rice taste amazing by cooking it with some sticky rice. I cook 300g brown rice, 100g sticky rice, and 600mL water in an Instant Pot pressure cooker. This makes about 10 0.5-cup servings. The rice tastes great with Japanese curry, stir-fried veggies & tofu, veggies with chorizo and sausage, etc.

Another happy discovery: Cut meal prep time in half by cooking veggies separately in the microwave. You can ensure each one is cooked just enough. And you'll make less indoor air pollution. Use a large glass bowl with a wide lip to avoid burning your fingers. Use frozen ingredients to eliminate even the washing & cutting work. If you're making food to freeze, undercook the veggies since they will get cooked again during reheating.

I want to buy a squat round 1.2-cup food container, with a hole in the middle, and not brittle when frozen. The non-brittle material lets me eliminate the initial heating before opening the container. The hole in the frozen food block allows even heating in the microwave, letting me eliminate the step of separating the food. Does this product exist?

It's relatively easy to overeat when cooking your own meals, that's not a panacea, especially if the real problem is one of self-control.

Yeah I should be clear I have never had problems with overeating myself so I am coming at the issue with an outwards viewpoint. I have been 6'7" and 190-200 pounds for all my adult life, and have cooked most all my own meals since I moved for university, so at least for being weight consistent I haven't had much trouble. I moreso have observed that snacking foods + sugary drinks + fast food leads to a partial negligence of the diet, we often eat too fast and eat hard-to-estimate caloric worth quantities to recognize in our gut we are full enough.

Snack foods do tend to be calorie dense.

And preparing meals certainly puts oneself in better control over what goes in.

It's just been my experience that as a bachelor preparing meals for individual consumption, particularly as the ability to make tasty meals improves, weight gain is still a problem. It's challenging to make single servings from scratch without going even a little overboard, and for me at least, it's all getting eaten in one sitting.

Cooking for me has become viewed more as just a DIY form of JIT-processed food. It tends to be healthier than food processed by someone else, for lack of preservatives and less salt/sugars, and higher quality ingredients, but the cooking process still tends to produce something more calorically dense and unnaturally delicious I have difficulty resisting overeating.

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