Thanks for the question, by the way.  Happy to share a few thoughts on the subject.

According to Consumer Reports, both NutriSystem and Jenny Craig are helpful, if somewhat expensive home delivery food.  It arrives as a collection of little boxes in a big box, you divide it up day by day, adding your veggies and eat it, you lose weight.

But they’re expensive.  NutriSystem will set you back $350/month if you want to include its frozen food along with all the shelf stable mini MRE’s, and JC is reportedly up near $600/month.

So can you create a similar system for yourself with Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, and Healthy Choice?  Yes.  If you eat less than you need to eat to stay as large as you are, you will get smaller.  You can eat LC’s or you can eat Twinkies and Red Bull, in the right number of calories, and you’ll lose weight.  As far as taste, I’m going to go with the general googled opinion that they’re all pretty much not your mama’s cooking but are acceptable, especially if your determination to lose weight produces an acceptance of iffy little packaged simulations of food.

Do you need these?  Absolutely not.  Here’s the big problem — they’re all asking you to temporarily Go On A Diet, lose a lot of weight, then Go Off The Diet and suddenly need to know how to cook.  It’s a recipe for failure for many, because the thing you do to lose the weight is not the same thing you do to keep the weight off.

What’s better?  We keep coming back here to the idea of learning to make some really simple things well, in quantity, and dealing those out to yourself day by day.  Stir some chicken breast in a pan, put some broccoli in a steamer bag, make a pot of brown rice, buy some bags of frozen veggies and something special to throw on the grill, and you’ve got lunches for a week for about 4 day’s worth of the cost of all frozen meals all the time.  You can do the same thing with any protein and carb combination.  And you’ll have some fun and use up some of that excess mental bandwidth left over from not being so consumed by food.

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The Chef’s Pick line is LC’s attempt to give us something resembling really good restaurant meals, appropriately spiced, pretty, with memorable ingredients and a savory experience.

This particular meal is confusing; a really good red chili sauce, but thickened with something vaguely not food, maybe corn starch — plenty of sauce, enough to cover my pile of veggies which makes this into an actual meal, but somehow the big chunks of beef on the pretty picture did not make it into my bowl.  It’s not a mistake, these things are weighed and tabulated and cross-checked before the package is sealed.  There were, count ‘em, four little rectangles of meat.

Frozen beef meals have issues, which is why there are so many chicken entrees at LC.  It’s hard to get a good cut of meat in there in an assembly line way at an affordable price, and the freezing process takes out some of the flavor.   But hey, the sauce is good and plentiful and actually spicy enough that you may not like it if you’re not a chili sauce kind of person.

The potatoes were whippy and actually had a nice little chipotle zing mixed in with the sweetness, and were enough of a pleasurable experience that they set me in search of something more like this: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/grilled-chipotle-sweet-potatoes/detail.aspx which is sitting happily in my Grilling folder waiting its turn.

The quantity was fair; with only 2 grams of fiber and 17 grams of protein it would not have been filling without the vegetables.

All in all, better than the generalized bland, numb, deprivational experience of living on freezer meals; quite a bit better than some, and an interesting good try.

We’ll give it a 6.5 out of 10.  7 out of 10 when you add green beans to use up the extra sauce.

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Image via Wikipedia

Yes, there are studies that would indicate a modest increase in metabolism and somewhat better success overall.  There’s always somewhat of an artifact in studies like this; people who report that they habitually drink their several cups of tea are likely also pretty habitual about control of their dietary intake too, so you never know exactly what it is you’re measuring.

Green tea is from the same plant as black tea, just not cured the same way.  So it’s not magic, though it’s long been associated with health.  Try some, see for yourself … Remember, if something HELPS with your intake control, or not, you’re still RESPONSIBLE for what you put in your mouth, and taking that responsibility instead of letting it default to irresponsibility is part of taking care of you.

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Ask yourself right now, what is the next thing I need to take care of.  Getting a healthy dinner for tonight?  Picking out those nicer new workout clothes? Getting through the next hour without hitting the donut stand?

Whatever it is, identify that and go take care of it.  You might even have several next things, one for each area of your life change project.  That’s fine, because you are not currently immediately responsible for the totality of the project so much as for getting things done, one at a time.

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via Preschoolers Homemade Lunch Replaced With Nuggets | Fox News.

You’ll have to make the call yourself on this one.

Doc:  Let go of that, you may as well shoot heroin, it feels much better for a lot longer.

Is your kitchen short on space?  There are all kinds of ways to add more, from additional shelving, to hanging your pots and pans, to major kitchen rehab or remodeling.

But the easiest, possibly most productive way is to go through the storage you have in your kitchen and eliminate stuff you don’t need to be right at hand.

Appliances you use, but not monthly, can be moved elsewhere in your home.

Food that’s notably past its use-by date — byebye.

Stuff you bought to feed your cravings that you wound up not needing to eat — byebye indeed.

If you really get into the kitchen renewal thing, take everything, every single thing, out of everywhere in your kitchen, decide where the best place to keep everything is, get you some inexpensive racks-dividers-plastic drawers-storage containers-etc, and put it all in where you want it.

You may find your kitchen has a lot more room than you thought.

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Cut the field to table time from a week down to a couple minutes. Taste and nutritional benefits there

Eliminates waste from spoilage of packaged fresh food.

You know what you’re eating. Our only additives are free Starbucks coffee grounds and vegetative table scraps.

Cut your dependence on the distribution system. Two years ago we had a five day regional power outage. No gas pumps, no truck distribution, no incoming salad, no trash pickup. We learned to keep the gas tank at least half full, but we had plenty of food set aside, and we had plenty of salad still.

Unrelated side conversation. We were one day from having no city water, which btw is when urban-suburban life breaks down completely. A close call. We were one day from bugging out to gramma #2′s, as gramma #1, 100 miles away and our planned gathering spot, was without too. Always have enough gas in the car to get to your emergency spot. It would have saved me several hours in the gas line.