Five Healthy Cooking Lifestyle Concepts

I absolutely detest the taste of protein shakes. I hate meal prepping and get really bored making the same exact high-protein meals over and over while I’m on a diet. However, even though I don’t like doing those things, in the past 10 years, I’ve lost over 70 lbs from my heaviest weight at 240 lbs, all while cooking a variety of delicious, tasty meals.

In this blog post, I want to show you Five Healthy Cooking Lifestyle Concepts that I’ve been using over the past decade. We’ll have an entire collection of recipes linked below so you can actually put these concepts to practice. But first, I feel like we have to cover what eating or cooking healthy food even means, or else this post is kind of pointless.

What Does Eating or Cooking Healthy Food Mean?

In the age of short-form videos and tweets, I feel like a huge disservice has been done when it comes to a lot of health and fitness content. You can pick any food and almost guarantee that someone has made a video telling you not to eat it. The reality is, people with completely different diets and lifestyles can all be in very good health. So, before we jump in, let’s explain the fundamentals of healthy eating.

While we are all bound by the mechanics of losing weight and getting in shape, it’s a one-to-many relationship with a range of outcomes. By understanding the fundamentals, it’s completely changed my life and explains why these five concepts have worked so well for me—and maybe you too.

I think the best no-nonsense resource book I’ve read is “Understanding Healthy Eating,” a science-based guide to how your diet affects your health. I would highly recommend reading the whole thing, but here are a couple of the key concepts:

Calorie Balance

First, there are six principles of your diet that affect health in order of total effect. By far, the biggest factor here is Calorie Balance, or calories in and calories out. They use these principles to create a healthy eating pyramid that’s a great mental model. Let’s touch on the first three because these are mostly what’s at play in the concepts that we’ll go through.

Why is Calorie Balance so important? Well, there’s that famous example where a professor used the Twinkie diet, which is high in fat and high in sugar, but he controlled the total calories of Twinkies he was eating and was still able to lose over 27 lbs in 10 weeks because he burned more calories than he was consuming. This is true in all diets—vegan, carnivore, keto, vegetarian. Controlling weight is primarily a product of calories in and calories out.

Why is weight so important? We tend to equate weight to good health because there’s a lot of evidence that shows being overweight or obese can lead to all sorts of negative outcomes. The CDC page has a bulleted list of all sorts of diseases, complications, and overall just a low quality of life. In the cooking concepts and recipes we’ll be going through, this is by far the most important principle that you can play with when it comes to eating and cooking healthy foods you enjoy.

Food Composition

Just because you can lose weight eating only Twinkies, principle number two—food composition—matters a lot too. Here’s a quote from the book: “In simple terms, while the number of calories you eat per day is by far the biggest determinant of your diet-mediated health, there is such a concept as healthy food.” In most cases, for the best health outcomes, it pays to consume more of these kinds of foods as a fraction of your total calories.

Food composition is really where all that common advice we’ve heard comes in. You want to eat a varied diet with vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, whole grains, and healthy fats. But why exactly? There are plenty of reasons, but from a fundamental standpoint, I think there are two main ones. First, these foods help us meet our minimal nutrient needs as it relates to vitamins, minerals, fibers, phytochemicals, protein, and essential fats. Secondly, these foods are typically more satiating.

All foods can be ranked on a satiety index. This means that for equal calorie portions of different foods, some of those foods will keep you fuller for longer. For example, 1,000 calories of lean proteins and potatoes will satiate you much longer than 1,000 calories of candy bars and donuts. This rolls back into principle number one because it’s easier to consume more calories of lower satiety foods compared to foods with a higher satiety index.

Macronutrient Amounts

Food composition also closely ties in with number three—macronutrient amounts. Macronutrients are what make up food and calories. One gram of carbs equals four calories, one gram of protein is also four calories, and one gram of fat is nine calories. Macronutrients seem to be where a lot of that seemingly contradictory advice comes out. A keto diet will focus on getting calories from high fat, adequate protein, and very low carbohydrates. A vegetarian or vegan diet is likely to get more calories from carbohydrates and thus lower in proteins and fat. A bodybuilder diet is likely going to prioritize a high amount of protein.

However, assuming the same total calories and you’re meeting the minimum needed amounts, while all three diets may look completely different in the types of food you are eating on a day-to-day basis, these can all be perfectly healthy. This is where I wish more people would reflect on their goals and experiment with different Macronutrient Amounts.

For example, in my case, a few years ago I wanted to try to get as lean and muscular as possible. An often-cited number for that type of goal is to eat 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. I was shooting for 160 lbs, so for me, that meant 160 grams or 640 calories worth of protein. But guess what? I found this too restrictive and it wasn’t enjoyable because I couldn’t make the types of food that I wanted without going over my total Calorie Balance. Remember, how the food you are eating affects your physical health is just a single aspect here. Mental and social health are another important part of healthy eating that I feel like is never talked about, and we need to figure out how they fit in.

For my mental health on the cut, I dropped the protein to 120 grams per day and bumped up the amount of carbs, which made my life so much easier to eat a variety of foods I really loved like sandwiches, pastas, and rice-based dishes. A less restrictive diet that focuses on the fundamental of Calorie Balance could also help social health when you cook for or go out to eat with family and friends.

For example, when I was in consulting, we would go out to amazing restaurants all the time. So, on those days, I would intermittent fast and then eat a high-protein, low-calorie lunch so that I could pick whatever I wanted off the menu that looked really good to me rather than trying to find some healthy option.

There’s a ton more information we could go into, but I think it becomes diminishing returns fairly quickly. Most studies or citations are typically looking at specific tests or highly optimal results, which may matter if you are after a specific outcome. However, I would argue that most people can massively change their life through non-optimal diets and non-optimal fitness regimens that could be stuck to over several decades.

That’s exactly why these five Healthy Cooking Concepts have truly changed my life, and you’ll need to figure out how they fit into yours. If you are in the rut of constantly going out to restaurants, grabbing takeout, or ordering Uber Eats, the first place where I like to start is just to pick one of my favorite foods and make it at home.

Healthy Cooking Concepts

There are kind of three different levels to this that you’ll need to figure out which works best:

Level One: Restaurant Recreation

Imagine fried rice is your favorite takeout dish. We’ll use this as an example and take it through the three levels. When a restaurant is making your food, all they really care about is making it taste as good as possible and make sure you have a big enough portion. So, in level one, all you are doing is literally recreating the dish to match the restaurant.

This may make you wonder, how is this any healthier or helping me consume lower calories? Well, I’ve got two reasons. First, you likely are using much less fat and thus fewer calories overall. Now, for something deep-fried like chicken or French fries, it’s going to be basically the exact same, but for common takeout dishes from Chinese, Thai, Indian, pizza, or deli places, in most cases, you’re probably using less oil than they would because you’re thinking about it.

Second, and probably more importantly, is portion control. When you order from a restaurant, they control the portion size and thus the total calories. If you dump that fried rice onto your plate, you may realize this is 1.5 or 2 times the amount you would actually serve yourself at home, thus it’s 1.5 to 2 times the amount of calories. So, level one is really dealing with portion control.

Level Two: Macro Conscious Recreation

Level two is where we make some changes, and this is where I live most of the time. I’ve made so many videos over the past several years showcasing how to do this with dishes like fried rice, butter chicken, pizza, chop cheeses, Chipotle bowls, or In-N-Out. Really, all I’m doing is playing with the total calories and Macronutrient Amounts, and it’s all dependent on the recipe. Sometimes I’ll use less fat, sometimes less carbs, sometimes more protein.

In this fried rice video from a couple of years ago, I made three main substitutions. Number one, I overcooked my rice on purpose so it absorbed more water. Water has no calories, but it does have weight and volume, so this led to two plates of rice—one with 853 calories and one with 533 calories because it had more water in it. Now, this is not something a Chinese chef would recommend, but we have different goals here.

My second substitution: I used about 5 grams of cooking spray instead of 20 grams of liquid oil. My third substitution: I used shrimp instead of chicken thighs, which is higher in protein and lower in total calories. In the side-by-side bowls, I was able to make the same amount of food at a drastically lower total calorie count and different Macronutrient Amounts.

Level Three: Very Low-Calorie Alternative

Level three is where you take that same food but significantly change a key ingredient in the recipe to make a much lower-calorie alternative. An example of this would be using cauliflower rice instead of white rice. This is much, much lower in calories, but it kind of also fundamentally changes the dish—it’s no longer fried rice. Other examples of this would be using pizza with a cauliflower crust or making an egg sandwich with egg whites only.

If you want a bunch of options to choose from using this concept, we’re going to make an updated collection on my new website called Cook Well that you can choose from, and they will all be linked below.

Creating Your Own Healthy Recipes

Instead of recreating your favorite foods, these next three concepts will show you how to start Creating Your Own Healthy Recipes at home.

Seasoning Lean Proteins

Like we touched on earlier in Food Composition, lean proteins are high in protein, low in calories, and will keep you full for a long time. But they can be pretty bland and boring if you don’t know how to prepare them. This is why learning how to season lean proteins is so important because you can completely transform boring lean proteins into countless different dishes.

I made a whole video on this concept in “How to Cook Healthy Meals Without Ever Running Out of Ideas,” but here’s the cliff notes version. I broke down a seasoning framework where:

1. You learn a seasoning technique

2. You apply it to a lean protein

3. Choose a form factor to serve it on

4. Add condiments and toppings

If you follow this framework, you end up with an unlimited supply of ideas. For example, blackened chicken can be done with any spice combination. First, thin out the chicken breast, which will help it cook evenly. Secondly, sprinkle salt over both sides to internally season it. Third, add the spice rub. Here are three of my favorite spice rubs for chicken breast:

1. Garlic powder, red pepper, and oregano—I’ll use this for hoagies or pasta salads.

2. Cumin, chili powder, and garlic powder—I’ll use this for fajitas, tacos, or maybe some Mexican-inspired dishes.

3. Sumac, cumin seed, and garam masala—This is a new one I’ve been trying out that I use in these Middle Eastern-inspired yellow rice bowls with pomegranate seeds, nuts, and pickled onions. They are the perfect accompaniment, and I’ll leave a recipe for this one specifically because this is just one you have to try.

Controlling Carbs

Once you have your seasoned proteins down, next you’ve got to figure out your carbs. Now, we learned from earlier—carbs, fats, and proteins—none of them are the enemy. Here, I’m looking at Controlling Carbs as a product of Calorie Balance, and I’ll do this in my cooking in two different ways.

First, I’ll replace them. I do this all the time with mac and cheese or pasta salads. Instead of just eating a bunch of pasta, I’ll substitute some of the pasta with lean proteins and different vegetables. One of my other favorite recipes of mine is this green chili chicken white cheddar mac and cheese, where I did this by adding poblanos and chicken in place of just all pasta and cheese.

The second way I control my carbs is by using a lower-calorie carbohydrate alternative. For example, this could be using lower-calorie corn tortillas for your tacos or quesadillas in place of flour ones. Another example of this that I always have in my pantry are high-protein ramen noodles from today’s sponsor, Vite Ramen.

I’ve been using these for the past three years, and you guys have seen them on the channel before with my spicy garlicky noodle recipe. They have a whole assortment of individual instant ramen flavors where one package is around 500 calories and 28 grams of protein. Or, I really like having a couple of packages of the naked nudes—one brick is 400 calories and 23 grams of protein. This is a great starting point for adding a sauce and lean protein, and again, you’re shifting around the Macronutrient Amounts, leading to more satiating and enjoyable food.

Vite Ramen is all made in the USA by a small family-owned business that’s committed to people over profits. I would rather get extra protein and micronutrients from whole food items that I can be creative with and make fun dishes. So, head to the link below and use code Ethan for 10% off your order with $25 in value of free chopsticks, spoons, and stickers.

Low-Calorie Condiments and Garnishes

Fourth, having a variety of Low-Calorie Condiments and Garnishes in the fridge is one of the easiest ways to start making healthy food taste so much better. I have two subcategories here:

First are naturally Low-Calorie Condiments and Garnishes. These include fresh herbs, pickled stuff, hot sauces, vinegar, salsas, mustard, citrus juice, and Greek yogurt. So, why are condiments and garnishes so good? Simply put, they make our food more interesting. Fresh herbs have strong aromas, pickled items taste sour, and in the case of pickled onions, they have a nice color contrast. Hot sauces and salsas can be spicy, mustard and Greek yogurt are tangy and creamy, and citrus juice and vinegars are sour. All of these are naturally low-calorie ingredients that I always have on hand.

The second category is low-calorie condiment creation. These can be store-bought or homemade. I know there are a lot of options now out there like low-calorie salad dressings, syrups, or sauces that you can buy at the store. If any of you have favorite store-bought sauces, let us know down in the comments and help all of us out. For me, on the channel, I’ve made a number of low-calorie condiments, such as the jalapeno ranch I made with less mayo and more sour cream in this video, or the yogurt lime dressing I’ve used in my pasta salad video. If you simply learn to upgrade your condiment and garnish game, you can make healthy food taste incredible.

Evaluate, Integrate, and Enjoy Yourself

This last concept might be the most important and the hardest to figure out. There are so many ways you can cook healthy foods and have fun doing it. Ultimately, figuring out routines and protocols you can actually stick to long-term is probably what’s going to make the biggest difference. Meal prepping a bunch of food never worked for me, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be exactly what someone else needs. This is why you need to evaluate and integrate these concepts to fit your needs.

For example, here’s a list of tiny cooking tasks that I’ll do throughout the week on busy days. If I have 3 minutes in the morning, I’ll salt my lean protein and pop it in the fridge. Then, I’ve already completed step one of Seasoning Lean Proteins. If I need some inspiration, I’ll just try out a new spice rub that seems interesting, like in that chicken recipe from earlier. On Sunday mornings, I like to start a braise and go about my day. Six hours later, I just need to figure out a carb source to serve it over, like a banh mi. I’ll keep frozen vegetables

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