I’ve always loved to cook, but for a long time mostly neglected ingredient quality, and gradually gained weight. Cleaning up my diet was a gradual shift over the course of years, with a few big bursts of effort focused on improving specific aspects (most recently in January 2020, I eliminated most refined grains, refined sugar, and processed oils). I do have defined exceptions: I don’t try to apply the same standards to food I don’t make myself at home, for example. Now two years later I’m traveling full time and using a different set of grocery stores every few weeks, and a lot of times none of the products or brands I’m used to are available. I was recently in a town with only one grocery store, and it didn’t carry any lettuce or other leafy vegetables at all. So you improvise, and compromise, and do the best you can with what you’ve got. If you understand why you’re doing things a certain way (in terms of cooking technique, and meal planning strategy, and diet composition), you’ll know which rules are best to bend or break, and how much it’s worth investing in sticking to a plan. I’ve also lost 25 lbs in the six months since hitting the road, so I would say that consistent access to top-quality ingredients is not critical, but knowing how to make use of what’s available is.
On cooking technique, and substituting based on what’s available, I recommend: Anything by Alton Brown, everything by Kenji Lopez-Alt, Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking,” and “The Flavor Bible.” The first two, don’t worry so much about the recipes, instead look to where and how they got to the recipes. Realize there’s a whole spectrum of ways to do things, with differing levels of difficulty, and while they often push to find the best result, there’s an 80⁄20 rule level of making your own cooking life really good and relatively easy with a bit of thought and practice. On the third, it’s basically showing you the organic chemistry of what happens to food during cooking, and once you understand that, recipes stop being black boxes and start making sense. The last one is a reference book that is good for figuring out what flavors and ingredients go together, and can be substituted for each other, and is good for getting ideas to use what you’ve got to make a dish work.
On how to get good quality food: try watching Bobby Parrish/FlavCity. Not because I think you need to eat the way he says, but because he has a philosophy of eating, and puts out videos where he keeps going to different grocery stores, searches the aisles for new products, and highlights the ones that meet his standards. This includes places like Dollar General and Aldi, not just places like Whole Foods, and he makes it a point to remind people that it’s fine to use the best available, or best you can afford, and also highlights what he thinks are the best available options in categories he personally avoids. He also has a series on the least-bad options at different fast food chains, where he talks through his reasoning.
And on what to eat: for me, any diet that demands an all-or-nothing shift is unworkable. In 2017 I lost 20 lbs eating keto, and got a boost in energy and mental clarity. But after six months, a too-carby meal would give me major side effects for the rest of the day. Thanksgiving? Birthday party? Work trip? Too bad! My body couldn’t handle temporary interruptions. So I stopped, and gained most of it back, and tried other ways. Intermittent fasting doesn’t have that problem, and still gets me into ketosis for most of each day, and it’s been working for me for the past year and a half.
Lastly: planning! At the start of a week, before grocery shopping, I try to figure out what things I want to eat. Not for each specific meal. Just “I need to use up [ingredient] by [day], maybe I’ll turn it into [dish], in which case I’ll need to buy [x y z]. I’ll have time to cook on these days and not those.” Then you’ll have to adapt if [x y z aren’t available at the store, but that gets easy with practice. If I can, I lump a bunch of meal prep tasks together (like washing and cutting veggies right after I buy them for the week) to save net time and dishes. And I keep some quick-but-healthy-enough options on hand (figure out what freezes well, and what store-bought boxed or frozen meals are fairly clean and still tasty to you) for when I just don’t wanna eat what I planned, or a recipe doesn’t work out.
I’ve always loved to cook, but for a long time mostly neglected ingredient quality, and gradually gained weight. Cleaning up my diet was a gradual shift over the course of years, with a few big bursts of effort focused on improving specific aspects (most recently in January 2020, I eliminated most refined grains, refined sugar, and processed oils). I do have defined exceptions: I don’t try to apply the same standards to food I don’t make myself at home, for example. Now two years later I’m traveling full time and using a different set of grocery stores every few weeks, and a lot of times none of the products or brands I’m used to are available. I was recently in a town with only one grocery store, and it didn’t carry any lettuce or other leafy vegetables at all. So you improvise, and compromise, and do the best you can with what you’ve got. If you understand why you’re doing things a certain way (in terms of cooking technique, and meal planning strategy, and diet composition), you’ll know which rules are best to bend or break, and how much it’s worth investing in sticking to a plan. I’ve also lost 25 lbs in the six months since hitting the road, so I would say that consistent access to top-quality ingredients is not critical, but knowing how to make use of what’s available is.
On cooking technique, and substituting based on what’s available, I recommend: Anything by Alton Brown, everything by Kenji Lopez-Alt, Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking,” and “The Flavor Bible.” The first two, don’t worry so much about the recipes, instead look to where and how they got to the recipes. Realize there’s a whole spectrum of ways to do things, with differing levels of difficulty, and while they often push to find the best result, there’s an 80⁄20 rule level of making your own cooking life really good and relatively easy with a bit of thought and practice. On the third, it’s basically showing you the organic chemistry of what happens to food during cooking, and once you understand that, recipes stop being black boxes and start making sense. The last one is a reference book that is good for figuring out what flavors and ingredients go together, and can be substituted for each other, and is good for getting ideas to use what you’ve got to make a dish work.
On how to get good quality food: try watching Bobby Parrish/FlavCity. Not because I think you need to eat the way he says, but because he has a philosophy of eating, and puts out videos where he keeps going to different grocery stores, searches the aisles for new products, and highlights the ones that meet his standards. This includes places like Dollar General and Aldi, not just places like Whole Foods, and he makes it a point to remind people that it’s fine to use the best available, or best you can afford, and also highlights what he thinks are the best available options in categories he personally avoids. He also has a series on the least-bad options at different fast food chains, where he talks through his reasoning.
And on what to eat: for me, any diet that demands an all-or-nothing shift is unworkable. In 2017 I lost 20 lbs eating keto, and got a boost in energy and mental clarity. But after six months, a too-carby meal would give me major side effects for the rest of the day. Thanksgiving? Birthday party? Work trip? Too bad! My body couldn’t handle temporary interruptions. So I stopped, and gained most of it back, and tried other ways. Intermittent fasting doesn’t have that problem, and still gets me into ketosis for most of each day, and it’s been working for me for the past year and a half.
Lastly: planning! At the start of a week, before grocery shopping, I try to figure out what things I want to eat. Not for each specific meal. Just “I need to use up [ingredient] by [day], maybe I’ll turn it into [dish], in which case I’ll need to buy [x y z]. I’ll have time to cook on these days and not those.” Then you’ll have to adapt if [x y z aren’t available at the store, but that gets easy with practice. If I can, I lump a bunch of meal prep tasks together (like washing and cutting veggies right after I buy them for the week) to save net time and dishes. And I keep some quick-but-healthy-enough options on hand (figure out what freezes well, and what store-bought boxed or frozen meals are fairly clean and still tasty to you) for when I just don’t wanna eat what I planned, or a recipe doesn’t work out.