Let’s make this absolutely clear: fast food is going to help you lose fat quicker and I am going to tell you how right now.
When you think of fast food. What comes to mind?
McDonalds? Subway? KFC? Mr Singh’s Pizza? Where does your mind go with fast food?
Before I go into how fast food can help you, let me just build out a little context for you. Right now, what is the biggest challenge you are facing with achieving your goal? The most common one I hear is time. Time to train, time to walk, time to get active.
We established recently, you only really need 3-4 lots of 45 minute of exercise at a moderate intensity to really improve your health, lower your blood pressure, improve your fasting blood glucose levels and reduce your resting heart rate.
Thats a maximum of 180 minutes and you don’t need the gym for that.
Thats 1.79% of your week- so in reality, the time factor isn’t a problem here. So then what else are you struggling with? Honestly? I don’t think it's not knowing which foods are going to be productive or less productive for you.
Without demonising foods, it's pretty clear that we all know that eating some veggies, a good quality source of protein, a little dietary fat and some carbohydrates will be lower calorie and higher in nutrients compared to a packet of biscuits, a box of jalebi and 3 samosa.
It’s more like the time surrounding the purchasing of quality ingredients, the time spent preparing foods and even boxing it up to take with you on your commute to work, for lunch time or sitting down and eating in the evening.
Let's work this out for a second, a trip to the supermarket, preparing some nutritious meals for lunch and maybe dinner in advance, we are looking at anywhere between 2-3 hours for 3-5 days.
Then sitting down each day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Ideally we should be taking between 10-20 minutes to sit down, focus on the food and consume it mindfully.
Potentially the preparation time of each meal, whether its boxing it up or heating it up, we are looking at another 5 mins per meal so 15 minutes per day.
Now we are looking at 11.75 hours per week which is around 7%.
Still it doesn’t seem like a lot on paper. But this is definitely higher than the time it takes you to exercise, so let's focus on how we can speed this up for you and make fast food work for you.
Indian food is obviously really unhealthy for you right? It's all just carbs and fats and sugars and oils. It's terrible for fat loss.
WRONG.
We established this so many times, but you can prepare indian food, batch cook it and it tastes incredibly good and will easily fit into your nutritional targets.
And, we can make Indian food ridiculously quickly with what I am going to share today.
The reason that this tip works for you is it means you are going to be eating delicious meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Why is that important?
Well the other issue people face when trying to lose body fat, is they get bored of bland meals, foods that have so little taste and doesn’t excite them. We don’t need thousands of journal articles to understand the key concept of adherence. If you can enjoy your food, you are more likely to stick to it. If you can prepare your own food.
The advice I am going to share today will reduce your food preparation time by an hour, making your meals fast food and it will overcome the barrier of boredom.
So let's talk about how we can make food fast and how this fast food will dramatically improve your chances of success in this journey.
Most Indian dishes have the same base. Let me break the typical ingredients down:
Mustard Seeds
Cumin Seeds
Onion
Garlic
Ginger
Coriander
If you want to dramatically speed up the process of cooking delicious and nutritious meals, you can prep all these in advance.
Quickly dry fry the mustard and cumin seeds, pop in the onion and sweat them out, drop in the ginger, garlic and coriander and in next to no time at all you have a huge pan full of the base of each curry, dal, sabji or even a killer omelette.
Then once prepped in bulk, freeze it!
You only need 100g of this to cook 6 servings of methi chicken for example which is literally only 20 calories, add in a little canned tomato and some haldi and masala thats only 18 calories.
So your fresh methi chicken for example, you can prep in 25 minutes for 6 days worth of meals.
Pair this with a salad and some roti and the calorie intake of this meal? 500 calories.
Compare this to the walk to KFC, the wait in the que let's say a conservate 25 minutes, do this 5 times a week, thats like 2 hours a week just travelling to get food and waiting for it and thats just one meal of your day, then the zinger burger meal with a drink, 1120 calories.
Change the narrative on what fast food is and break the cycle because seriously, Indian food is not only one of the healthiest culinary choices you can make, its also going to keep you on track for longer in your journey and its going to give you the impetus to positively influence your family and community by breaking down barriers to better health and happiness.
