...actually, I'm not. Or "not really". A big salad, for example, is a lot healthier if you're not adding shredded cheese and using full-bore dressing.
Thousand Island dressing is probably my favorite, but it's always been just a bit too tangy for me. The tangy flavor saturates my need for salad and I can then go several days where even the thought of having a salad is unappetizing.
If, on the other hand, I put cheese on the salad, that cuts the tanginess, and I'm a lot more likely to eat another one soon. Learning this allowed me to take salads to work with me when I was working at Target, so at lunch time I'd have a huge honkin' salad. I'd be starving by 6 AM, but damn was it good for me.
(Yes I have tried other salad dressings. In general, I don't like them very much.)
But a couple of years ago I found that I can make a single-serving salad with lettuce, a shredded carrot, a slice of onion, and cheese--and can eat one every damn day with dinner thanks to the way adding cheese damps down the flavor of the dressing.
That's the way this week has been. I've also discovered just recently that if I eat a salad with dinner it cuts the liklihood of a post-prandial hypoglycemic episode:
Marei Callendar's Turkey pot pie: hygoclycemic attack laterI don't understand it, but if it works, I don't care about the particulars.
Same pot pie with big salad: no hypoglycemic attack.
So when I went shopping on Tuesday I picked up a box of Zatarain's gumbo mix, thinking I'd make it with some of the shrimp out of the huge bag I bought around the end of December. Then I thought, "No, not just shrimp; I'll use a chicken breast, too." So I ended up with this big pot of chicken and shrimp gumbo last night. I had some around 4-ish; and then when I started getting hungry again, around 8, I had a big salad and another bowl of the gumbo, and some garlic breadsticks.
Tonight's dinner: big salad, grilled ham and cheese sandwich, and tomato soup.
(Incidentally, I froze the leftover gumbo. We'll see how that tastes, but it's spicy enough that it shouldn't taste bad. If it does as well as my spaghetti sauce did, it'll be fine.)
But if you think about it, this is a far cry from my much more typical diet of fast food. Fast food has the advantage of being very easy, and it's not particularly expensive, but with it being winter I don't want to go out. So it comes down to a choice between making something out of what I have on hand, or starving to death; and since I'm the only person here, now, I only have to worry about what I want.
And, to be honest, this is probably better for me than the hyper-processed stuff you get at McDonald's anyway.
Yesterday, except for going to the dentist and doing one errand, I was home all day; and everything I ate, I made myself. Today, I got up so late I just decided to go to McDonald's for a bacon mofo; but dinner is as described above. And I don't think I spent 20 minutes making it, either.
Of course, it also means using more dishes. I just took my dirty dishes into the kitchen and realized I had a whole load in the dishwasher, so I started that before coming back.
Age 43 is a hell of a time to escape the stupidity of adolescence.