Eating healthy has been a constant struggle for me.
While I’ve always had a blessed metabolism, I know it will slow as I age. Therefore, I have to prepare for that day. Also, I learned the hard way that relying on your metabolism will only get you so far.
You can still have horrendously unhealthy cardiovascular system and slice your lifespan. I found that out when I ran a 10+ minute mile at high school soccer tryouts, minutes longer than everyone else.
You also won’t build muscle or look shredded. Instead, you’ll be skinny fat: skinny with a shirt on, but with a surprise gut when you take your shirt off.
After learning more about nutrition that I ever did and tracking my macro nutrients for half a year, I discovered that more people know little to nothing about proper eating than I thought. Most people I saw had horrendous fast food eating habits and didn’t care about getting enough protein in at all.
Here’s a couple examples:
The travel hacking blogs I follow, vloggers, and biographies I read constantly reference eating whatever tastes good or whatever keeps them from dying. Jimmy O. Yang’s biography details how he ate ramen to survive as an actor and then gorged on steak and salmon at acting parties. Yes Theory, a group of popular Millennial vloggers, have 24-hour survival challenges in cities they can’t speak the language in. My family members told me it was unlikely I’d have access to a consistent gym and the concept of tracking food intake is alien to them: they cook and buy what they want at restaurants.
Although it’s common in the fitness community, eating enough protein and limiting fat, carbs, and calorie intake is foreign and seemingly difficult in the real world. Average people just don’t understand. It’s a wonder how they complain and get jealous of people more jacked than them when they don’t work out regularly and eat right. (Steven Lim of BuzzFeed set me on a mini-anger tantrum when he kept doing this during a “Worth It” Suit video with his more jacked friend.)
Combined this on top of my dislike for cooking and washing dishes and you have an obstacle. Quick, easy cookie videos just don’t do the trick for me. When I imagine the hours it will take to cook the dish and the hassle of storing and keeping track of all the ingredients, my eyes roll to the back of my head in agony.
That’s why I experimented with one week of an expensive meal prep service, DietToGo.
My initial thoughts before tasting the food was, “Is this going to taste good? The macros are incredible and this is expensive. I feel like it’s going to taste mediocre or horrible.”
But almost all the meals were delicious! This was incredible because I am a picky eater.
I believe it was the seasoning and creativity. When I bit into the chicken and salmon, they seasoned it beautifully so it melted into your mouth and tasted wonderful, without fattening you.
Some of their recipes were quite creative too. They had a chicken bagel pizza, which was delightful. I was shocked that you can have a meal with fat so low and still have it taste so delightful. I suppose they used a fat-free parmesian or something.
You can deduce how they made it from their labels. Their labels list all ingredients. Usually, their ingredients are all recognizable. No weird chemical names. Just simple stuff like “parmesian, grilled chicken, pizza bread, asparagus, rosemary, and garlic.”
I’m a big eater so portion size is important for me. The more, the better. Some of their meals fell short. The chicken salad, tuna salad, and chicken sandwich meals were lackluster. The chicken sandwich was literally a patty of processed chicken with a whole wheat hamburger bun.
The beauty of DietToGo is that it allows you to choose which meals to eat every day. That’s why you can have the same meal you like. You can replace the scheduled chicken sandwich meal with the salmon meal.
Their Blackened Salmon meals are the largest portion and biggest bang for your buck. I’ve done enough of my own grocery shopping to know how expensive raw or cooked salmon is by the pound. You get a giant slab of perfectly seasoned salmon with brussel sprouts. Honestly, I don’t know how they were able to give such large portions. I assume its their door-buster meal that they don’t make much profit margin from and they hope to make it up when you order other meals.
All the meals are the same flat price, so I wonder what would happen if I ordered Salmon for every single meal. That being said, there seems to be some type of “meal limiter” when you select the meals you want delivered. Each day has a list of five or six options and these options vary daily. From what I’ve seen, the system cycles between around twenty total meals you can choose from and it limits it to five choices so you can’t exploit the system by ordering the most expensive meals to prepare every day of the week.
If it wasn’t for the price, I’d do this meal prep service for at least another year.
I had some money left in my balance from Restaurant.com (don’t use this site, most of the restaurants have stopped working with this site) and wanted to find some way to use up my balance. I found DietToGo to be one of the remaining companies that still offered coupons on the site so I purchased one. That cut down the cost to about $8 per meal on average. Original price is closer to $13 a meal.
If you can afford it, it’s a good alternative to buy back your time and eat delicious, healthy meals.
DietToGo, like many meal prep services, don’t deliver to your home address. Instead, they have drop-off fridges in local gyms. I found one in my area that was a 5 to 10 minute drive, which wasn’t bad at all. I found it interesting that I had the only meals in the fridge. The rest of the fridge was filled with other employee’s lunches.
