>When I thought about getting my food, I really had three goals: cheap, fast, and healthy.<p>Here's my cheap, fast, and healthy diet that doesn't require any cooking. I started a few months ago and it's very effective in losing weight and saving time.<p>Half of a pound container of cottage cheese, plus a large melon (cantaloupe or honeydew are easy to cut once you learn how) for breakfast.
One can of sardines for lunch.
Another can of sardines, plus a can of vegetables for dinner.<p>One bottle of water at each meal plus 1-2 more throughout the day. Whenever hungry in between meals, snack on almonds.<p>You can buy a week or so worth of everything at a time, and some like the fish, vegetables, and nuts can be bought in bulk for months. Effectively no work to prepare anything, the trickiest is really the melons, you can substitute to bananas or grapes for easier fruit but higher carbs. And you can always eat out a meal every few days, estimate how much it makes up and eat that much less.<p>This costs roughly $10/day, and I'm targeting 1200 calories, which is the minimum recommendation for men. I track everything with an app and allow myself to go slightly higher if I'm hungry at the end of the day. There's about 3-400 calories buffer for those almonds, which I sometimes use for coffee with milk, or for various alternative snacks (e.g. granola bars in bulk turn out to be extremely cheap on a per calorie basis). And then there's a buffer between 1200 and the roughly 17-1800 I'd be at for breakeven, so if I splurge once a week I just don't lose weight that day but I'm not gaining anything.