Minimalist Diet
My goal in recent weeks has been for me is to find a ultra cheap, healthy, no hassle diet.
This has lead me on a journey all over the internet and finally finding a guy who decides that he can blend the bare essentials and that is enough! I haven’t gone that far (yet) but I have asked myself almost the same question which is;
Am I able to create a diet where I get;
- 100% RDA of all vitamins & nutrients.
- Obtain the right amount of calories for my weight & the amount of exercise I do.
- Less than 10 Minutes prep time for each meal.
- Cheap.
- Ingredients that I could potentially grow in my garden (Optional)
- Organic (Optional)
I am still yet to find a diet that specifically maps out these with actual meals you can prepare quickly & meets all of these requirements. Surely this is the holy grail of diets, unless of course you enjoy spending hours in the kitchen, burning money & eating grease.
To get me started I went straight to fitday.com which allows you track food you have eaten or are going to eat. I spent a while researching the foods that are rife with nutrients & tried different combinations to come up with the least amount of foods, that give you 100% RDA & correctly balanced between protein, carbs & fat. This in itself is a surprisingly challenging task. There are so many healthy foods that don’t really have much in them so I found it was a constant battle to try and keep the list of foods short as well as being healthy.
The Results
After much difficulty, I am almost there. I managed to come up with a 6 day food plan that allows you to get MOST of your RDA for all vitamins, low daily calorie intake, 5 fruit & veg daily, paleolithic (ish), & even follows the mitochondria ladys Ted talk to the letter. I also managed to incorporate a system where certain vegetables can be rotated without comprimising the 100% RDA to give you more variety on different days. I then multiplied all the food portions by 5 to get a 30 day plan. With my system I can just rotate some of the foods to mix it up so I can keep the meals interesting.
The only issue where I have seemingly failed is cost.. Buying organic is always expensive.
The cheapest way I found to do it was to order a fruit & veg box every fortnight, & get locally grown organic fruit and veg. This has allowed me to keep the cost down.
The ongoing plan is to make this even better so if anyone is interested in knowing more about the diet I created then please let me know in the comments & I can provide more info. It would be great if people wanted to help refine the system & help make it cheaper or more diverse.
Here is an example of one of the days. (This one was slightly lacking in vitamin e & sodium, but its almost there!)
