It’s very difficult in today’s fast-paced society to find a food that’s healthy and timely enough to fit into the busy schedule of the day. Hence the successful fast-food franchises have become a staple point of our daily lives with their offerings of convenience and speed, at the expense of our health and pocketbooks. The CDC now reports that during the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States and the rate remains high. (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) There are several factors contributing to this, such as lack of exercise, but a big factor is our eating habits, and a healthier form of eating is what I would like to discuss in this article.
So let’s say you’re at work, and allotted hour for lunch arrives. You jump in your car, drive down the street, and you’re more than likely bombarded with numerous choices, and none of them healthy. The franchises of our modern culture stare out at you in vivid signage and in a colorful attempt at temptation they offer you this value or that special. You pick one and proceed to eat your fill at 10 or 15 dollars a meal combo, and you usually get this small but high fat portion featuring some kind of fried meat and perhaps a side of overly salted potato slices, as is typically the case with the fast-food chains. We’re currently running the risk of allowing our eating habits to ruin our quality of life for about half an hour of transaturated fat that happens to be a quick fix at the time. Thankfully there is an even more time saving, healthier and cheaper alternative, the TV dinner.
Many TV dinners I’ve noticed pride themselves in their healthiness. A variety of companies offer low fat, low sodium, and low sugar meals, depending on what type of diet you might like to follow, if any. The Atkins diet is very critical of sugar, but other diets might require you to just cut out fats. Several TV dinner options offer you eater the potential to cut all unhealthy food inclusions out of the meal. Even if you’re not on a diet you’ll benefit from the abstention of fats and sugars that could clog arteries or allow for diabetes in the future. Look at the labels as you’re in the frozen section and see which type of food best appeals to you. There are quite a variety to choose from and I’m certain you’ll find one that’s right for you.
The TV dinner available at your local grocery store is also a much cheaper alternative. You can typically get four or five different meals for around 10 dollars total. That’s four or five meals you’ll get for the price of one fast-food meal, enough to last you through every lunch hour during the work week. If you’re like me and you like to get variety in what you eat every day, you can get 4 or 5 entirely different meals from the same brand and sometimes alternating brands for that same 10 dollars. Check with your local grocery store for pricing.
Back to the work scenario: it’s lunchtime and you have the standard hour for lunch. Instead of getting in your car and wasting expensive gas going to and from a local franchise, you pull a TV dinner out of the break room refrigerator or out of a small cooler you packed for work before you went in. You take it over to the microwave and in about the same amount of time it would have taken you to drive to lunch; you have a delicious ready to eat meal that you can eat at a greater leisure, considering that you’ll have a longer lunch hour without the drive. If your break room is lacking a microwave, ask if you can bring one in. Your co-workers might catch on and start eating lunch there as well, thereby forming an unofficial office health initiative and saving money all around. It doesn’t have to be at in an office setting either. The convenience of the TV dinner allows for them to be cooked anywhere you might have access to a microwave or conventional oven. Many construction sites I’ve seen have such a set up off to the side. If worse comes to worse you can always go home and heat the lunch there, and in some cases that might be required, but that would still be cheaper than eating out.
Today’s working realities don’t leave a lot of time to go home and cook up a healthy meal. You can do it the night beforehand, but people I’ve noticed typically want to relax after a long work day, and you have to make a dinner as it is. The TV dinner available at your local grocery store offers a VERY cheap alternative to driving to and from lunch and wasting expensive gas. It also offers the eater the time away from cooking a meal. In our work-oriented culture we don’t always keep the time we should to exercise, and it’s important that we maintain our health to some degree as best we can. We can do that by watching what we eat and frozen ready to eat meals such as the TV dinner will make an excellent companion for you in your journey through healthier eating and better finance/time management.
Works Cited:
“Adult Obesity Facts.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 27 Apr. 2012. Web. 28 May 2012. .
