Thursday 26 July 2012

#49 Eating Healthy; Does it take more time? (05/11/12)

Well, I’m sitting here eating my air popped popcorn with a Kernels Sweet & Salty shaker on it.  It had been measured into a Ziploc baggie for me to take for lunch.  This made me think of a conversation I had last night with my mother in law.  She laughed at the comment I made in my blog about healthy cooking/eating not taking that much more time.  She doesn’t agree. 

That got me to thinking how much time does my wife and I use to cook/eat healthier.  Once a week we cut a lot of veggies and fruit.  It is usually my wife cutting as I’m cleaning the kitchen or something.  Or we share the cutting.  The man hours into cutting is about an hour and a half.  That does our veggies for our lunches for the week and any leftovers goes into a stir fry at the end of the week.  For other dinners we have some frozen mixed veggies for stir fry or whatever was on sale at the time.  We currently have a fairly stocked freezer of frozen veggies. Measuring when cooking meals to make sure portion sizes are correct does take a little extra time, let’s say 10-15 minutes per dinner meal to measure and log the recipe.  We re-use recipes so that adds up to about an hour and a half per week, including all logging of all food.  For snacks we are now making our own prepackaged popcorn to have under 100 calorie snacks on hand.  That will be about an additional 30 minutes per week. 

Overall I think the weekly total for added time would be around 3.5 hours, so an average of 30 minutes a day.  Not usually a constant 30 minutes, but here and there for logging and measuring.  Allowing an extra 5 minutes around meals isn’t that bad.  Planning is a big helper.  Doing healthy on the fly is a little harder, depending on what you have on hand for groceries. 

In the end, I think the extra 30 minutes a day is well worth the trade now, to gain the years at the end of your life later. 

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