When you can cook, make more than you need and freeze the excess. Make sure its something super nutritious. Then, when you can’t cook, just unfreeze one of your pre-prepared meals. That way, you can get all the nutrition you need at a much lower cost than a take-away.
Realsocialskills said:
That is an effective strategy for some people, some of the time. Especially when you use paper plates to eat the food.
It’s not completely effective for most people who have this problem, but it can be useful.
Some thoughts on how to do this:
- Freeze the food in individual portion sizes, not big tupperware containers
- If you’ve frozen something in a large block, it’s not likely that you’ll be able to eat it when you’re low on spoons
- One way to do this is to use freezer bags to freeze the food. Put a meal-sized amount in each bag. Then press the air out.
- Make sure the bags are freezer bags and not storage bags – freezer bags preserve frozen food better.
- Keep paper plates and plastic silverware on hand
But also keep in mind that this doesn’t work for everyone, and that it’s ok if you need a different strategy, or if you sometimes need a different strategy. Some reasons it might not work:
- It only works if you are often able to cook. Not everyone *has* a time when they are able to cook.
- If you can’t reliably recognize homemade frozen food as edible, freezing food ahead of time won’t be reliably helpful
- Defrosting and heating food might still be too many steps sometimes.
- It’s not always obvious how long to microwave things for
- And it can be really hard to figure out how to heat things evenly
- Freezing food changes the texture in ways that can be a problem for some people
If freezing food works for you, it’s a good strategy. If it doesn’t work for you, or doesn’t always work for you, that’s ok too. It just means you need other strategies.