Home-Cooked Diet Meal Plan with Once-a-Month Cooking

You know the kind - they're in the freezer case and have pretty pictures of the tiny meals you'll find inside the little cardboard box.

It's easy to throw one in the microwave, and you know exactly how many calories you're getting, every time.

In fact, when I'm dieting, I just about have to use pre-portioned meals at work - because if I don't I'll end up at the local lunch counter, ordering something that is way too expensive, and much too fattening.

When I look around the lunchroom at work, I can see that at least half the women, (and many of the men), are eating out of those familiar packages.

Millions of people eat those frozen meals, and the companies that make them are piling up a fortune. I'm sure that you've bought a few of them, yourself.

I still take a pre-portioned, microwave-able meal to work, so I'm not tempted to eat something that isn't on my diet.

But I don't stand in front of the freezer case at the grocery store any more, trying to find some diet meals that happens to be on sale.

When I need to watch my calories, my meals still include lots of veggies, something the supermarket brands often leave out - so I'm satisfied when my lunch is over, and I'm not tempted to make a stop at the candy machine on my way back to my desk.

Sometimes I add a delicious fruit smoothie I bring from home - or I have a whole-meal salad instead of a hot lunch.

For me, natural weight loss is more important that fast or quick weight loss - I want my diet food to be healthy, too.

My secret? I cook once every two or three weeks, and fill my freezer with delicious diet meals that are actually more nutritious, more flavorful, and more enjoyable than the national brands.

And I make sure that I'm following the suggestions of some of the nation's top nutritional experts, so I know I'm getting the vitamins and fiber that everyone needs to lose weight and stay healthy.

Yes. On a recent Saturday afternoon I cooked an entire freezer-full of healthy Easy-Does-It frozen meals, in just a few hours. Here’s what they cost, along with the cost of similar commercial meals:

Healthy Choice® Sweet and Sour Chicken.......... Easy-Does-It Sweet and Sour Chicken.................

Healthy Choice® Country Herb Chicken............. Easy-Does-It Country Herb Chicken...................

Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine® Chicken & Vegetables Easy-Does-It Chicken & Vegetables.....................

Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine® Honey Roasted Pork Easy-Does-It Honey Roasted Pork.......................

The estimates for my costs tend to be a little high, because I’m not sure how much a teaspoon of mustard or two tablespoons of soy sauce really costs. “Not much” seems like the right answer, but calculators don’t know what to do with that kind of number.

Using only four recipes, and spending only about 2 ½ hours total, I filled my freezer with 27 meals, (enough for 5 ½ weeks-worth of lunches at the office!) for only $29.22. The same number of mass-produced meals would have cost $88.23!

Frankly, when I first added up these numbers, I couldn’t believe I’d done it right, so I ran it through the calculator several more times.

Note: I recently revised The Easy-Does-It Diet ebook and added many more recipes. You can find a full list of recipes in the current edition here.

If people are actually buying those mass-produced diet meals (and I know...