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Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

The point about prep being time-consuming is no joke. I recently (maybe 4 months ago) started a fairly strict whole food diet, and the prep is insane. Whole vegetables take real time to wash, clean up, store, and prep for cooking. Then you need to cook it.

But like the potato diet, it's extremely easy to stay full and lose weight. Unlike the potato diet, there's a ton of variety. It also seems to have completely reversed a decline in health I'd been experiencing for over 5 years and I suspect the potato diet wouldn't have had the same effect, haha.

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Where I live there’s lots of pre-washed, frozen vegetables at supermarkets. We have an automated pressure cooker where we can just throw the vegs in and let them steam for 7-8 minutes. We have a huge freezer and can quickly prepare brokkoli, spinach, carrots, peas, mushrooms, etc. You can also pressure cook potatoes with the peel on, takes ca 20m including warmup time.

> We have a huge freezer

Ah, yeah – I have a very small one. I've been thinking about upgrading for years to a chest freezer. It's probably time to just do it.

Can recommend. We went for a vertical one (Bosch GSN33VWEP) because we didn’t have enough room for a chest, plus we thought that the UX is better - and I still think it is.

Wow, thanks for the tip! I had no idea that's even a thing, and I have the perfect spot to put one. I can't believe I didn't think to even look these up. Part of my hesitation with a chest freezer was where I'd put it, because I'd almost certainly need to keep it outside (which means building an enclosure, getting power to it, etc).

Thanks!

Glad to help! If you‘ll take another tip, I‘d recommend to get a „no frost“ one (if they are available in your area). We had „low frost“ ones before and had to defrost them every couple months, which can be a real hassle when it’s currently full. The „no frost“ usually really means you never have to defrost.

Prep time is the biggest concern I am aware of on the nutritional side. My best answer to this category of excuses is to amortize the prep time by making more of whatever and then freezing the leftovers in meal-sized containers.

Buying an instant pot & a box of those 2-cup pyrex storage bowls was the best series of personal health choices I've ever made. Granted, not all food works out with a round trip through the freezer, but most things do.

I still do eat things that cannot be frozen (well), such as eggs+bacon+toast, but the core of my nutritional needs are available in my freezer at all times (with approximately 1-2 weeks of buffer). Having a small buffer keeps me absolutely calm regarding my next meal source. I do not wait until all my frozen food is gone before I prepare the next batch. If I didn't have the buffer, my cycle would probably break and I'd start eating Burger King and other related trash for lunch again.

YMMV, but I got great returns on investing in a proper chef’s knife, and learning how to use and maintain it properly. There’s a real pleasure in dicing an onion or whatever in seconds. Knowing I can do that helps lower the ‘activation energy’ of cooking versus takeout, as does just generally loosening up about cooking.

My favorite meals are often thrown together in 20 minutes with zero planning, and certainly no recipe. Knowing a few fundamentals (see Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat) gets you a long way.

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