CougTek said:
Like Handruin wrote, sauce usually have too much minerals. Restaurant food at large tend to be too sodium rich anyway. Cheap frozen meals aren't much better, although those costing 4$ and up are usually better.
Just about anything that's been prepared for you will be heavily salted. Period. When I look at the things I can prepare quickly - cans of soup, sandwiches made with cheese and deli meat, frozen dinners - I see lots and lots and lots of sodium no matter what.
Frozen dinners have the additional problem of not being a particularly satisfying meal - one "Lean Cuisine" or the like isn't going to cut it. I can easily eat two of them (as, I suspect, could any grown man) in a sitting, but then I have to deal with the fact that I've just eaten "two" portions of something (two portions sized for an anorexic teenage girl), and for that matter, now I've gone through my supply of frozen dinners faster (I have a very small freezer, and have to plan what I keep there very carefully).
Generally, if I cook, it's something in the crock pot. Throw a hunk of meat with some water, pepper and onion powder (I don't normally salt anything myself - my family didn't keep it on the table when I was growing up) and maybe some chopped carrots, potato or green pepper, other spices as appropriate. Put it on "low". Come back 12 or 14 hours later to some nice, tender meat of some kind. Maybe heat up some frozen mixed veggies to go with it. I can put together chili or bean soup much the same way. The advantage is that I can eat off whatever came out of the crock pot for three or four days, which is generally exactly long enough to get sick of whatever it is (that would be the disadvantage).
I find it very hard to cook for one person. I actually do LIKE to cook, and I'm pretty good at it... but cooking for one person is just depressing. Nothing like taking 3 hours to make a lasagne, ten minutes to eat it, and 30 more to clean it up!
Diet-wise: I eat a couple granola bars (not the kind with chocolate chips) or a small bag of trail mix (almonds, cashews, peanuts, raisins, some other little dry, crunchy thing and sometimes mixed with dried fruit or m&ms) sometime in the mid-morning. For lunch I'll almost always grab some kind of fast food during the week (my lunch breaks at my trainer job boil down to "how fast can you go and come back?"). On weekends, it depends where I am and who I'm with, but I probably eat lunch out 28 days out of every month. For dinner... maybe I put something on to cook and maybe I grab chinese take-out, heat up a can of soup or some kind of frozen food. Depends. I never have restaurant food delivered.
When I eat lunch out, I don't get fries or soft drinks. Lunch is my big meal, usually.
I try not to keep snacks or "real" soda in my apartment (I do have caffeine-free diet something around, but the taste is off-putting, so a 24-pack lasts me a couple months; I also have some girl scout cookies but I've had those boxes a couple months and they aren't opened, and I have a big tub of "atomic fireballs" cinnamon hardcandies that I might eat three or four of in a week). I do like fruit juices a lot. I try to limit my consumption to something reasonable - an 8 or 12 oz. glass, maybe, in a day.
I drink two or three quarts of icewater a day. One with lunch, one with my evening meal and usually one I sip on throughout the day if I'm at a desk. This is the only change in diet I can think of - I've gradually replaced soda with just water.
If the class I'm teaching is a later class (sometimes they run until 8:30 or later), I try to push lunch to 3PM or so. I usually end up having some kind of snack anyway - some kind of candy bar or a little bag of chips, probably at around 6PM.
This has been my diet for quite some time. Other than the water, I don't know what's different. It's certainly not like I'm working out.
