Can I Get A Six Pack If I Don’t Cook For Myself?

I talk quite a lot about preparing meals for yourself, about customizing your nutrition so that you’re doing everything you can (or at least everything within reason) to get yourself a ripped body and six pack abs sooner, rather than later.

But at the same time, there are a lot of us who simply aren’t very good at cooking for ourselves. Or maybe we’re someone who just really doesn’t have the time to cook good, nutritious meals.

While I think this idea that we have no time is a bit exaggerated, it’s a real issue for some people.

So let’s say you’re forced to eat out, on-the-go, and generally not in the most “ideal” conditions for taking care of your specific nutrition.

Can you still get a six pack?

Yes You Can. But…

It’s a lot harder.

Like – several measures of magnitude harder than it is to just learn how to cook for yourself.

It’s all about trade-offs, and the trade-offs you have to make when you’re trying to, as they say, “make smart food choices” while continuously ordering off a menu are not trade-offs that your body is always going to like very much.

Eating Out Means Surrendering Control

Look, one of the best things about eating out is that it’s delicious. We get to enjoy a lot of food we might not normally cook ourselves, especially when it involves deep-frying or other complicated food preparation techniques that do take a lot of time.

But the grim reality is that a lot of the delicious taste we associate with food on-the-go is really just a combination of fat, sugar, and salt, combined in such a way as to hit our brain’s pleasure centers.

When you eat out, you surrender control to the chef (or the food processing plant, if you really don’t pick and choose).

You really have no idea how much salt is going into your food, and whether or not the balance of nutrients is what you need.

The Labeling Paradox

But wait, you say – food that I buy on the go comes with labels! I can just use those to figure out the salt content and make sure what I’m eating is OK!

That doesn’t really work.

And the reason it doesn’t really work is because if you’re eating foods that are being served to you with a label, it probably means they’re coming in plastic. And that means – in fact, that pretty much mandates – less fresh food.

You can’t get the nutrients you need from fresh, leafy greens when they’re packed away on a store shelf somewhere.

Ignoring Labels Frees You From Labels

This is the whole point – when you make the basic decision to just cook with fresh ingreidents and do this work yourself, you no longer have to worry about labels. You don’t have to try and waste all this mental energy on figuring out exactly what’s gone into your body, because you’ve cooked a range of healthy stuff at home and even if you aren’t 100% perfect, you’ve probably got 80% of the way there – plenty to get you started on getting a six pack.

But For Those of You That Really Can’t Cook

Keep these tips in mind:

• Buy as fresh as possible. If it’s a choice between a tuna salad sandwich or a bunch of mixed, roasted vegetables, go with the vegetables.
• Stick with low ingredient counts. It’s better to just eat a bunch of raw veggies, nuts, and dried fruit for a mid-afternoon meal than to stick with the “my meal has to look exactly like a meal” concept, which often leads to buying packaged items with way too many ingredients
• Careful with takeout/delivery. You really have no idea what’s going into that stuff. Start getting prepared to spend more money to get the food you know you should be having, from good sources who cook things well.

BTW: Have you had to learn to adapt to your busy life style?  Leave a comment below and tell us your tips and tricks that use on a daily basis to stick to your diet !