and how to learn to organize your cooking time

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One of the main reasons you might be gaining weight is because of the lack of cooking: Weight loss management starts in your kitchen.

You know my motto: you have to eat to lose weight. But when you don’t cook your own meals, you end buying precooked or highly processed food, full of nasty and non-weight loss management friendly ingredients or simply not the best food combination to lose weight.

The moment you cook your own meals you can make them balanced and therefore weight loss management friendly, and, more important, you can avoid the nasty and addictive ingredients that are making you overweight, tired, unhappy and sick.

There could be several reasons why you don’t get into the kitchen too often. It might be because the simple idea of cooking scares you, you never learned how to cook, you think is awfully difficult, or that you don’t have the time or simply, because you just don’t like cooking.

I can help you with all of this. 

Let’s start organizing your cooking time, for weight loss management sake!

No matter what or how you cook, it won’t be useful if you don’t find the time and energy to cook it. Once you can find some time to cook (or at least prepare some decent meals), we can work later on learning some tips to make cooking easier and even try to find the fun on it or at least not feel bored while cooking.  

Find One Hour a Day in Total

The good news is that if you can manage to find one hour a day to cook, including preparation, cooking and clean up, you’ll be able to create a healthy eating plan to lose weight for at least that day (even more when you start to get super-efficient!). That is all you need! So next time when you get home instead of landing in front of TV, grab a celery stick to munch and create a few nice meals that will make you feel great!

But you need to be very focused during that time. Give it the same importance in terms of concentration as you would give a task at work, or the importance you recommend your children give to homework.

Just think about the basic dishes you already know how to cook and master them or learn some other basic ones.

Or Find Bonus Days with Extra Time

If you cannot manage one hour a day, try to find some additional time on a specific day or over the weekend to cook meals for the rest of the week.

Let’s say on Wednesdays night, between dropping your son at swim team and picking up your daughter from a ballet rehearsal, you have two hours to cook dinner.

Don’t spend them preparing a super fancy dinner and eat from a box the rest of the week. Use the time extra you have available to prepare meals for the other days of the week when you don’t have time to cook and keep the meals ready in the refrigerator or freezer.

Leave the fancy dinner for the weekend (if you have time and energy) or to the restaurant.

Learn Some Helpful Tips to Save You Time

Are you having a barbecue over the weekend? Cook some extra sausages and zucchini to have ready for one lunch, and some chicken drumsticks and kettle corn to have for dinner. Barbecue adds different flavors not adding pounds, which will give you the opportunity to change your diet.

Either way, you should always try to cook extra food to keep it ready in the refrigerator or the freezer to use when you don’t have time to cook, you are exhausted, or any other special or emergency situation. Ready-to-use vegetables are also a big ally.

If you are able to make “close” to home-made or prepared meals, you’ll see results on your weight loss efforts and a great healthy improvement.

Remember that there is no room for snack-based meals or highly manufactured or precooked meals. 

And the most important tip: learn to cook easy, fast and healthy recipes that help you lose weight. 

You can find many ideas in my healthy filling meals "series". For example, this is a great recipe for a healthy dinner for weight loss: creamy cauliflower puree. 

(Remember that skipping dinner is never a good idea, learn why here!)

All the recipes are my usual family meals, and all of them are SUPER:

• easy

• quick

• yummy and 

• weight loss management friendly.

You can check out other recipes here.

Don't forget that in order to succeed with your cooking for weight loss management you need first to master your healthy grocery shopping (you can learn some tips here) and to get practice stocking healthy food so you always have it available. And remember that the secret to create  healthy filling meals  is the right combination of the nutrition groups. Learn more about it here.