I really, really hate cooking. It’s something that stresses me out, rather than relaxes me. I don’t take pleasure in being in the kitchen and I get annoyed at how easily a mess is made when I’m cooking. I don’t even particularly enjoy home-cooked meals, at least not at the level other people seem to. If it was financially feasible (and healthy) to eat most of my meals out, I would. Instead, I’d rather spend my time outdoors, seeking adventure and enjoying nature’s bounty. You can find MRE on SOS Survival Products to make sure you’re well-equipped, offering convenient and nutritious meal options for your outdoor adventures.
I’ve been fighting with this side of myself for a long time. Every healthy living blog I follow talks about spending hours in the kitchen on a Sunday meal prepping, and has all of these elaborate recipes to try, and none of that appeals to me. Sure, I could attempt it and would probably do it for a few weeks before I’d get burned out.
But if I really want to build a sustainable healthy life, I need to stop fighting against my absolute hatred for cooking. I need to accept it and figure out how to eat healthy without requiring hours and hours of time in the kitchen.
Enter, meal delivery services. I’ve heard about them before but I always get a little spooked when I look at the prices. It’s not cheap because you’re paying a lot for the convenience. In January, I decided to give it a try just as an experiment. I selected Catered Fit as my meal delivery service of choice because, well, they came up first in my Google search (the power of SEO, my friends). Seo tools audit can help you achiever your goal of having your website pop up on the first page of Google. They also seemed to offer a pretty reasonable rate for their delivery service. For small and big businesses looking for a cold transport companies London, hire JUMP UP Logistics for their affordable rates and top-notch service.
So, I signed up. I was hoping this would be a great kickstart for me, allowing me to lose some of the weight I put on over the holidays and showing me a sustainable way to eat healthy on a daily basis. I wasn’t sure how long I wanted to try the service. I just knew I wanted to give it an honest attempt and see if this was the answer to all my healthy living woes.
Catered Fit has a wide range of programs you can try. They have programs for vegans and vegetarians, as well as athletes and those following a Paleo diet. You could also choose to add on extra items, like snacks, dessert, cold-pressed juices, and cold-brew coffee. I opted for the combo package, getting two fully cooked meals delivered right to my door every day (they were delivered between 3pm-9pm the day before). Typically, I chose something for lunch and something for dinner, my two biggest downfalls when it comes to healthy eating. All I had to do was pop the container of food into the microwave for a few minutes, and voila, lunch (or dinner) was served.
At first, I was really excited about this program. Every Wednesday afternoon, I got an email telling me that next week’s menu was up and I would hurriedly rush over to the Catered Fit member portal to look at my meals. In those first two weeks, I was salivating over the menu options and most days, I had trouble selecting just two meals. This impressed me because there were only six meals to choose from (three for lunch and three for dinner) and I am an incredibly picky eater, so I thought I would have a hard time choosing even one meal.
The other thing that impressed me? How friggin delicious every meal was! I was half-expecting each meal to taste like a Lean Cuisine (because that’s what they always reminded me of) but they were so tasty. I guess it helps that each meal was made fresh daily, not something flash-frozen and then just heated up. Out of the 34 meals I received, I think there were less than five that I didn’t enjoy. Mostly, I gobbled up every meal and felt so satisfied with it. I didn’t feel like I was depriving myself or on some crazy diet.
I also loved getting my nightly deliveries because I was always surprised by the meals. Since I had made my selections sometimes a week prior, I always forgot about what I requested until I opened up my freezer bag to see what was inside. It was like a little present to open!
So, what caused me to cancel my membership when it all seemed to be so perfect? There were a few things that prompted the decision. First, during the third week of the program, when I clicked over to the member portal to pick my meals, I was disappointed in the selection. Nothing appealed to me. The meals were a little too outside my comfort zone or something I knew I wouldn’t like. I ended up picking meals for each day but I didn’t get that feeling of satisfaction when I finally finished selecting my meals. I also ended up canceling one day of deliveries because there was absolutely nothing on the menu that I wanted. I was hoping it was a fluke. This week was also a weird week for me in general, since I had dinner plans one night and lunch plans two other days, so I had to pick out breakfast and lunch/dinner rather than just lunches and dinner. (And I wasn’t too impressed by their breakfast options; they definitely weren’t filling enough for me.) But the same thing happened the next week, and it was really disheartening.
But that wasn’t the only reason why I decided to cancel. I also felt like the portion sizes were a bit too small so I was always reaching for a snack just an hour or two after eating a meal. (In one meal, I received exactly four pieces of broccoli. FOUR. I don’t know about you but when I roast broccoli as a side, I give myself a large portion because it’s… broccoli. I don’t necessarily need to portion control that.) They have an “athlete” version of their plan but I’m not an athlete burning thousands of calories a week (or even hundreds, let’s be real here), so it didn’t make sense to choose that plan. I also wasn’t doing their “weight loss” version, which is just their Paleo plan. I chose Classic, which is supposedly for people who just want to maintain their weight, buuuut I’m skeptical about that. (Although, come to think of it, I didn’t lose any weight for the three weeks I was on the program so maybe it does work?!)
But the main reason why I canceled my Catered Fit membership was the price. I just could not justify spending nearly $150 a week for ten meals. I try to average $75 a week in groceries, so I was basically spending double the price. The convenience was nice. It was so nice to not have the think about meal prepping or cooking or doing the dishes. It’s so much easier to not talk myself into swinging by McDonald’s on my way home when I know all I have to do for dinner is heat up my meal. But, ultimately, I couldn’t justify the cost anymore.
I think I would like to have Catered Fit as an option for weeks when I’m too busy to think about grocery shopping or cooking but want to eat healthy, home-cooked meals. Or for weeks when I’m feeling uninspired by cooking. But it’s just not something I can do regularly.
The bottom line is, would I recommend Catered Fit? Absolutely. Unfortunately, the service is only available in California and Florida, but there are most likely similar options near you. I think it’s a great program and I had a really fun time using it. I would highly recommend checking out some sort of meal delivery service and just trying it out for a few weeks, especially if you’re like me and hate cooking. It was a good experiment but now I’m ready to figure out how to make eating healthy sustainable and budget-friendly.
Have you ever done a meal delivery service like this?
You know I have been eagerly waiting for this! It sound like it started out so great! I’m sorry the meal choices were so weird at the end. (I am terribly picky, too, so I GET IT.)
This is probably the same thing as “meal prepping,” but have you ever done a big day of cooking — on a Sunday, for instance — and then had a few weeks of frozen items you can eat all ready made? It’s exhausting. But on the few times I’ve done it, I’ve loved being able to go to the freezer and grab a ready-to-throw-in-the-crockpot bag of food or heat up a mini-pan of enchiladas or defrost a few bowls of soup.
Ha – I know you probably have already tried this or considered it. But you know I love to eat, so obviously I want it to be easy for you to eat too! 🙂
I have never tried something like this and didn’t even know it existed. It would be great for certain phases of your life – like right after you had a baby or had surgery or something like that. I’ve tried meal delivery services where you do the cooking, like Plated and Blue Apron. But we canceled for similar reasons – the menu options weren’t always appealing, they were expensive, and sometimes they were not very filling. I feel like the hardest part of meal planning is coming up with what to make so it was nice to have that solved. But it wasn’t worth the extra expense. So I’m back to doing meal prep for us. Phil has gotten better about making suggestions. I need to make a google or word document with all the recipes we like. But I don’t have access to google docs so this will be kind of a pain because I will either maintain it at home or work – won’t be able to access it (easily) at both places. but I think having a document like that would help with meal planning. I have a binder at home, which is nice, but it would be helpful to have a place where all the recipes are stored electronically so I have an expansive list to work with!
All this is to say that even for someone that loves cooking/meal prep, it’s still really hard!
I’ve never tried a meal delivery service, but I’ve been tempted to try something similar. (They send you recipes and all the ingredients and you cook it yourself.) The biggest thing that holds me back is the cost, for sure.
I totally agree with Lisa in that this would be amazing just after you have a baby or are recovering from an injury or surgery that hindered your ability to cook. Meal prepping can be a pain in the butt and you’re restricted by how much space you have to store everything.
I think healthy eating can absolutely be done without a ton of meal prep, but it takes motivation during the week to want to cook. I’m sure if I was single my eating habits would suffer, but thankfully I have a husband and two kids who probably wouldn’t fare well eating “junk” food.
This sounds so cool to have tried out! I agree with you about meal delivery services’ pricing and menu options. I got to try out Hello Fresh for an article last year and really enjoyed the experience of receiving unique recipes and getting to cook them myself. However, since I was partnering with the service, I received nearly two weeks of meal for free and continued to receive coupons and discount codes that I used for two meals per week every now and then. It’s a fun treat every now and then, but I usually have my account deactivated. Not always worth the price!
The catered service sounds great for when you’ve gone through a major life event and don’t have time to cook!
We always get free offers to try meal prep services, but we never do because the options either seem too fancy and rich for everyday fare. I would recommend checking out Talia Coren’s workweeklunch https://workweeklunch.com. She puts together a weekly grocery list and her recipes always require few ingredients, and I do not remember seeing a budget go over $50 per week for two people. Also her meal prep each week is set up such that it does not take very long to prep for the week and you do not end up eating the same meal more than twice (I think) a week . Her meals always seem filling and come with tons of suggestions for all kinds of variations.
I have never tried a meal delivering service and I could only justify the costs in very special circumstances. I do like cooking, so the thought of using the service didn’t even occur to me (although I’ve heard about different ones).
It’s a bummer that it’s so expensive that you can’t really justify it either.
If you *WANT* to try meal prep, there’s a service called Work Week Lunches that’s $8/month and she preps all kinds of meals and has a huge backlog of recipes. It’s really easy and yummy and she provides a shopping list and allows you to customize portion sizes. It doesn’t take as long as traditional meal prep and the food is good.
I don’t mind cooking so much, but the meal planning and grocery shopping is what drags me down. Erik and I have been meaning to try those meal kits where they provide the ingredients/recipe, but you still have to cook, because we don’t mind that part.
For us, what makes meal planning easier is having multiple go-to meals that are super simple. One of those is chicken and rice – the rice goes in the rice cooker (usually with beans) and takes care of itself within 15-20 minutes, and while that’s going Erik cooks chicken in a pan. We also do a lot of pasta, I go super basic and make spaghetti and meatballs (we buy them frozen). Erik will be a little fancier and add various protein/veggies, or make his own sauce. Also, we eat a TON of frozen veggies, because they only take 5 minutes to cook in the microwave.
I really struggle with cooking as well. I can get by, and with two kids I feel a lot of pressure to cook whole foods meals frequently. But I still have a LOT of stress and anxiety around cooking, especially when I’m trying something new or when the kids want to “help.” (It doesn’t help that the kids are constantly telling me that what I make is disgusting – even if I know it’s not!)
Anyway, this year I decided that I wanted to make cooking easier for myself because it’s not something that’s going away. I joined Rouxbe, which is an online cooking school. They have memberships for about $10/month and you have access to all of the lessons. I have been really impressed so far. The interface is wonderful and it is making learning the basics of cooking *sort of* fun for me. I figured if I start from the very beginning (which I never did – I’m self-taught, picking things up as I go) and really KNOW what I’m doing, then maybe I will gain confidence and, in turn, learn to enjoy it. At the very least, I am hoping it will take away some of the anxiety!
I’ve tried Blue Apron and a bunch of the meal delivery services were you make the meals and I’ve really enjoyed them. But they are a lot more expensive than just buying groceries (I aim to spend around $50-65/week), plus there’s just SO MUCH WASTE, that I’ve mostly stopped doing them. I will still use them during my super busy weeks at work, when it’s nice to come home and just follow a recipe, but I also really like cooking and I feel like I was introduced to new foods and cooking techniques by using the meal delivery services.
Have you ever done crock pot dinners? Or do you get bored eating the same thing night after night? I’ve got a handful of easy, mostly healthy go-to meals that I can eat over and over, including a pot of chili that I can use as lunch or dinner for a bunch of days.