Confessions of a fat girl: I have Dinner Anxiety

In posting some comments in different Facebook groups this morning, my pal Brittany who blogs over at Razorback Britt pointed out something that should have been so obvious to me….I suffer from “Dinner Anxiety”.

 

My worst time of day, without a doubt, is at night, between the hours of 6 and 9pm. I get home from work, I'm always stressed about what to make for dinner (and the time it will take to make it) and then, after I eat...I'm still hungry (or I think I am because I let myself get so ravenous) that I mindlessly snack for the remainder of the day (insert "clean" snack here, like popcorn...it's ok because it's healthy right??)

I’m trying to get better about this, but the reality is that even after being on this journey for over a year, I’m just not comfortable in the kitchen.  I don’t enjoy cooking.  I actually might go as far as to say that I HATE cooking.  I feel completely at a loss sometimes because it’s always on me to decide what to cook, to plan, to prep, etc.  I’ve had this discussion many times with my husband, and if it’s possible, he hates all that stuff even more than I do, so if I left it up to him, we’d go out to eat or have take-out every single night.

I recently decided to look into a service called “Dream Dinners”, where you can go and prep several meals at once (they do all the shopping, cutting, and cleaning for you!). 

 

 

It’s obviously more expensive than if I did this by myself in my own home, but the prices really aren’t too bad per serving, and the reality is I would never make “gourmet meals” like I would get by going here, both due to lack of experience and the fact that buying costly ingredients for one dish usually doesn’t make much sense (hence the constant grilled chicken with broccoli dinner staple that I default to).

I’m hosting a group on October 28^th to try it out, where we’ll each make 3 different meals (each meal is 3 servings).  I’m hoping I can stretch the meal and get lunch the next day for me out of it too, but we’ll see what the serving sizes really look like.  Either way, I’m hoping this will be a step in the right direction for me, I’m so bad about cooking and I know we could benefit from eating at home more.  In the past, I did weight loss programs like Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem, which took a lot of stress out of the situation for me, but it’s not realistic to eat microwave dinners for the rest of your life, and there’s so many preservatives (and sodium) packed into that stuff that it’s really counterproductive…when I went back to eating “real food” after doing those programs, I gained back all the weight I lost plus some, because it didn’t really teach me anything about preparing food for myself.

 

I don't know what to expect, but given that this place is more like an "assembly line" type system where they do all the planning/thinking for you, I think this might be a great starting point for me.  I might even realize that I can do some similar meals at home on my own after some time, but we'll see what I think after the 28th!

 In the meantime, I’d love to know: what are your go-to, healthy, easy weeknight dinners?