57. Simplify Your Eating Habits

It’s only fair to confess that my idea of gourmet cooking is slicing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the diagonal. I realize my opinions about simple eating habits may not appeal to the gourmets out there—but once we started to simplify, I decided to cut, by at least half, the time I spent in the kitchen cooking. Now, it’s ten minutes, max, from fridge to table. (I mean, why should I spend a lot of time cooking when our favorite meal in all the world is a bag of blue corn tortilla chips with fresh guacamole?)

In addition to cutting our meal preparation time in half, I had two other objectives when it came to simplifying our eating habits:

One, even though at heart I really am a junk-food junkie, I wanted our diet to be healthy and nutritious. To us that meant primarily fresh fruits and vegetables and grains.

Two, I wanted it to be low in calories, fat, and cholesterol. Again, that meant fresh fruits and vegetables, in as close to their natural state as possible—no whipped, frothy, sugary concoctions for the fruit, and no cheese sauces or gravies for the veggies. It also meant cutting back on meats, especially red meats.

Also, I wanted to eliminate processed foods from our diet entirely.

Now, our meals look something like this:

Breakfast: fresh squeezed orange juice or fruit in season, and homemade granolas, or fresh homemade oat bran muffins. (For a simple recipe for delicious fresh fruit muffins see #61.)

Lunch: Fresh fruit and/or vegetable crudités, with whole-grain bread sandwiches, such as sliced roasted turkey or avocado, tomato, and sprouts.

Dinner: Huge fresh salad or cold soup, such as gazpacho in summer; or hearty veggie soup and salad in winter; or steamed veggies with rice dishes.

There are no surprises here. This is basically the diet food and health specialists have been recommending for years. The real surprise to us was that in simplifying our diet in this way, not only did we cut our meal preparation time in half, we also cut our monthly food bill by more than half. I’m constantly amazed, as I go through the grocery store with our computerized shopping list (#4), at all the things we don’t buy. And now that we’ve come close to eliminating packaged foods from our diet, we have greatly reduced the amount of trash we have to dispose of each week.