How to eat at home without spending much time (relatively healthily)

This is a short guide for people who don't like to cook. One solution to this is to order take-out, or to go out to restaurants a lot, but that tends to be unhealthy (even healthy-seeming restaurant food is often less healthy than you might think, because their incentive is to make the food taste good, not to make it healthy; also, since restaurants often don't publish detailed nutritional information, calorie counts, and ingredient lists, it can be hard to find out how healthy it really is). And in any case, ordering take-out or eating out is expensive.

Please note that i know nothing about nutrition so this 'advice' may be totally wrong! This is just what i'd tell my younger self.

A succinct summary of much healthy-eating advice by Michael Pollan is 'Eat food, not too much, mostly plants'; (by 'eat food' he means eat real food, not fake food ("There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these."). My advice here tends towards that but not completely; this is why i say this is RELATIVELY healthy; you could do better.

One issue with this diet is that i end up having to eat a bunch of small meals rather than a few large ones. I can generally read while i eat (or while flossing after i eat) so this isn't terribly inefficient but when you have a job with set lunchtimes it may be hard, so let's take another look at those components which are relatively healthy and which don't require refridgeration or a microwave at the time of eating (eg things which you might be able to eat at your desk). Tangerines are pretty portable. In some places you may be able to eat oatmeal at your desk (oatmeal made with water instead of milk can sit out all day without spoiling), and also canned baked beans. Maybe Bananas, although bananas might be too smelly in some environments, and they can be messy, and maybe canned tuna, although again this could be too smelly for some places. Peanut butter and jelly, although not requiring refridgeration is definitely messy; if you get it on your hands you'll want to wash them, not just use a paper towel to wipe them off; similarly salad sounds good but in fact because it gets stuck in my teeth i find i really want to floss after eating it, which makes it unfit for eating at your desk. If you really must only eat a few large meals, i find that starch, grease, and meat lasts longer; the tradeoff is that this is less healthy.

'Staples' (i eat a lot of these):

• Oatmeal. Eat a ton of oatmeal. It's fiber, it's apparently good for your digestion (apparently it helps if you have constipation, but also for the opposite problem; apparently it's like a sponge that buffers the amount of water down there), and it's apparently good for your heart. There are various varieties, from least healthy to most: (a) instant oatmeal in those little packets, with flavorings, (b) instant/quick/1-minute oatmeal in a large container, without flavoring, (c) rolled oats (non-'instant'), (d) steel-cut. I generally go for (c) rolled oats; there's not much difference in taste or convenience compared to (b) and it's slightly healthier. I don't add sugar or honey or anything. Just add some water and microwave it for a few minutes (watch out, if you microwave it too long it volcanoes over the side). Adding milk tastes better but (a) it's kind of a pain to keep milk 'in stock' in your fridge all the time, because it goes bad so fast; so often i don't have any milk around, and (b) since milk goes bad you can't keep it for very long; you can keep water-based oatmeal for a week (longer, actually, but i usually eat it within a week). I like to not add very much water so that one bowl holds a lot of very thick oatmeal, and then eat it slowly over the next few days. If you're going on a trip to somewhere which may not have a microwave you can just buy those instant packets (a) and eat them dry, although this is of course not as healthy and not as satisfying.
• Bananas. Unlike most things on this list, bananas go bad within a week or so, and you can't put them in the fridge (well you can, but they turn brown quickly and that makes it harder to tell if they've actually gone bad, so i don't recommend it). Note that you have to be good at taking out the trash almost every day if banana peels are in it, or you get fruit flies.
• Yogurt. Get a huge tub of it, it's more cost-effective than those single-serving packages. I like the French Village brand found at Trader Joe's. I like the Vanilla non-fat type but that's probably not so healthy due to the sugar; it's more of a dessert. The Plain Non-fat is probaby better or even the Plain Cream-line (which has fat but i bet the fat is less unhealthy than the sugar in the vanilla one).
• Peanut butter and jelly. Trader Joe's has a bunch of great jellies. Note that jelly is full of sugar and hence unhealthy, so don't use too much of it. To reduce the amount of bread, you can just spread this on a single slice of bread and then just eat that.

Fruits and vegetables:

• Tangerines
• Fresh berries; blueberries, strawberries, sometimes raspberries and blackberries
• Peaches, pears
• Apples are okay but i sometimes end up biting myself unless i cut them up first
• Bags of lettuce-like stuff for salad. I just eat this by itself, i don't make it into salad. One problem is that this gets way stuck in your teeth, necessitating extra flossing.
• Corn (microwavable)
• Brussel sprouts (microwavable)
• Broccoli (microwavable)

Other starchy/high calorie:

• Hash-brown patties (microwavable). Warning: probably not healthy.
• Tamales (microwavable) from Trader Joe's. Warning: probably not healthy.
• canned baked beans (bush's original is pretty good)
• canned chili (warning: probably not healthy)

Meat (note: eating too much meat is bad for you):

• Canned tuna from Trader Joe's. Warning: may not be healthy in large doses (might have mercury)
• Sliced, smoked salmon from Trader Joe's (just eat it raw). Warning: may not be healthy in large doses.
• Frozen Chicken balti pie (microwavable) from Trader Joe's. Warning: probably very unhealthy.
• Frozen Meatballs (microwavable) from Trader Joe's. Warning: probably very unhealthy.
• Frozen Lamb Vindaloo (microwavable) from Trader Joe's. Warning: probably not healthy.
• Sliced chicken with herbs, pre-packaged, resealable

To drink:

• Mostly water. Sometimes orange juice (warning, may not be healthy). Sometimes milk (warning, may not be healthy). Sometimes (rooibos) tea. Sometimes cranberry juice (warning, may not be healthy).

Dessert:

• whatever you want, just don't eat too much of it too often (for me, often the vanilla French Village yogurt from Trader Joe's is it's own dessert, but sometimes i have other stuff too)

If you MUST cook something:

• scrambled eggs with shredded cheddar cheese. This is relatively quick and easy to cook but you still have to clean the pan afterwards so it's not as quick as the other stuff above; also eggs don't last too long so there's the additional logistics of keeping them 'in stock' in your fridge. Also this is probably unhealthy.

Notes on some things that may be less healthy than you might think:

• sugar. One of my friends likes to say, "sugar is poison". Especially watch out if you notice yourself often getting sleepy almost every time after you eating some particular thing with a lot of sugar; this probably means you just consumed way too much sugar
• soda. Just imagine it's sugar water. Sugar is poison. Also, sodas tend to have lots more calories than you might expect; if you drink soda regularly it might account for a significant fraction of your total calories
• fruit juice. This has lots of sugar and generally the stuff you can buy in stores has processed out most of the healthy fruit stuff anyways. So it's actually not much better than soda.
• white bread. White bread is now thought by many to be not very healthy (a bunch of calories, a high glycemic index, not much nutritional value)
• In general, go for brown/'whole wheat'-ish variants of things eg whole wheat bread is better than white bread, brown rice is better than white rice.
• salad dressing can be very unhealthy, so much so so as to make the salad+dressing an unhealthy choice rather than a healthy one
• most vitamins: i eat multivitamins frequently but i haven't noticed any difference. I've seen some studies that are skeptical of them. I'll probably still eat them just in case i'm missing something, but you should know that they're expensive and possibly useless.

Notes on some things that may be more healthy than you might think:

• Fat. Fat's is somewhat bad in itself, but some of it's reputed badness is due to the calories within it. You feel more satiated when there is some fat, which means you'll likely eat less calories in total. So the total badness of fat may be less than you think.