I can hear the wailing start already.
Nooooooooo! I'd rather deal with a Zombie Apocalypse!
I used to be like that. I had every excuse in the book. For my first few years, I coped with a "apartment stove" which worked unreliably. I could only have one pan fitting on top and the oven would not accommodate a standard cookie sheet. Even now, my skills are not top-notch, my tools are only middling, my talent rather sparse, and my kitchen is tiny and has about as much counterspace as a Barbie dream home. But none of that matters.
Why do we persist in resisting this simple key to stunning success?
We don't understand convenience. When we don't cook, what do we eat? Cheap food, boxed food, frozen food, fast food, and takeout food; all based on the concept of Stretching. And right there is the problem. Just like Mom trying to feed hungry kids on a budget, companies that want to sell us food may have different motivations, but their methods are the same. It is based on
streeeeeeeetching the real, more expensive, meat and vegetables with cheap carbs like noodles, rice, or bread. This path is closed on low carbing -- because it's what got us fat.
So we try to adapt these habits to low carb. We get takeout salads or explore the grocery store salad bar. We get a fast food burger and throw away the bun. We grab deli meat and cheese for rollups, we target every rotisserie chicken place in a ten mile radius and practice saying "No Thank You" to all the starchy-sugary sides. Sooner or later we get tired of being bored and hungry and broke and scream
there's nothing to eat on this diet! and we give up.
Our attempts to cobble together an eating plan based on protein shakes, Frankenfoods, and the least bad three choices from a menu of hundreds wears us down and wears us out. Low carb is, right down at the base, a diet based on Real Food. If that's how you've been trying to Low Carb,
you haven't been Low Carbing! You've been sticking your toe in the water and pretending you're swimming the English Channel.
We don't understand comfort. So this is where our Fear of Cooking has left us: dependent on Other People's Cooking. And unless it's our own Mum who loves Atkins and knows all the things we hate, Other People's Cooking is a compromise we make. This is not a situation we are in by choice. This is a situation we are in because we refuse to change. Grabbing dinner on the way home, or bringing a Lean Cuisine to work every day, or looking at the teenager in the paper hat as our own personal chef: we think we had already optimized our eating. Now we have to rethink the entire thing?
Exactly.
We turned to low carbing because so much of our old way of eating wasn't working. We had digestive upsets, we went around in a tired, cranky, fog, we were always searching for food and we were always just at the edge of satisfaction… only never quite reaching it. And, of course, there's the size issue. Male or female, twenty pounds to lose or two hundred, we are just plain sick of shopping from specialized catalogs, never finding the right outfit, and avoiding mirrors as though we were bitten by Dracula himself. We got tired of waiting for our Real Life to arrive, and rightly so.
If we resist the CHANGE of
eating differently, we will never arrive at our GOAL of
living differently. There's absolutely no comfort in that.
We don't understand time. We tell ourselves we have to eat this prefab, boxed, standing-in-line kind of way because we don't have time to cook. I sympathize. I know what it's like to be a full-time student and a full-time worker, and/or we throw some kids into that mix; it's tough to find time for anything. What I discovered is that I can trade my standing-in-the-takeout line time, or my idling-in-the-drivethrough time, or my waiting-at-the-microwave time; into standing-in-my-own-kitchen time. This time-swap is a perspective switch that opens up incredible vistas to us.
The problem is that we view our time standing around waiting for our food to come to us as somehow, Still-Our-Time. But it's not! I discovered that if I spent that same time in the kitchen, grilling some meat and nuking some frozen veggies with butter on it, it took about the same amount of time… but it really was MY time in a way those standing around times was not.
If something needed to sit in the oven, I set the timer, and sat down at my own computer to cruise the web, check my email, Facebook my peeps: all those things I was trying to save time to get to. I learned it was fun to crank up the funky music and cook enough on a Sunday afternoon to feed me for a whole week; I make my own frozen dinners, my own work lunches. Sure, there will be rushed times: that's when we grab something from the deli counter or ditch the bun on the fast food burger. By keeping these procedures in reserve, we won't be tired of them when we really need them.
Spending time in my own home, with my guy and my cats and my stuff: that's so much more enjoyable than sitting in the drivethrough hoping they get it right. Cooking actually saves me time; and gives me
more Me-Time.
We don't understand hunger. If we separated out any of those prefab meals into its components, there would be a big heap of flour, another of sugar, another of starch; and off to the side, a little mound of meat and vegetables and fat. Is it any wonder people keep coming back to fast food places, and cannot get enough? It's because... they are not getting enough! If the only thing that turns off our appetite is real food, and when we eat a "big meal" we only get doll-sized portions of real food, it is no wonder that we find ourselves hungry, later. From that big spaghetti meal with slabs of bread to Mom's favorite casserole, we gnaw our way through a mound of cheap carbs only to want to do it again a few hours later.
Now that I am enjoying fresh, delicious, food on a regular basis, I realize how much my body was actually craving such meals. The fact that my body so rarely got what it was actually craving stands right beside the "blood sugar roller coaster" (caused by those stretcher carbs) in why I used to be so hungry, so much of the time.
Get it? I'm an "okay" cook: and what I make is so incredibly delicious I don't want that prefab junk anymore!
Get started with the Recipe Forums. Fantastic resource. And of course, there's the whole world wide web: just aching to run a video for you about sauteeing or mincing.
Learning something new to achieve our heartfelt goals. What a concept!