hi I'm a truck driver and I'm looking for ideas on what food to buy

Buy whatever food you like to eat, that fits in your microwave!

:drinker:

bigtanklucas2001 wrote: »

I was trying to find out what the best food to get cuz I need to lose weight

Help us out. What kind of things do you normally like to eat? If you tell us that, we can probably give you some ideas of how to eat things you enjoy in a more healthy way.

Have you figured out your caloric allowance for the day? Then you can start plugging the pieces of your meals in. Find out how much you can have each day and portion out your meals and snacks. A microwave in your truck will certainly help. I use my microwave all the time for those Green Giant Steamers. Tons of veggies (most with sauce!) and very low calorie impact.

Umm eggs are a good breakfast option, and you can easily mix in some veggies. Oatmeal is another one. You could "toast" bread for sandwiches using parchment paper, or toast different types of nuts, but beware as their calorie content is high so small portions are key. Veggies are also super easy in the microwave. I often use it to cook sweet potatoes, corn on the cob, etc.

There are microwave grills that work pretty well. I have one. You can actually brown meat and make grilled sandwiches in the microwave with them. I cook fish and veggies in it too. Look on Amazon or QVC. You can find some videos on You Tube or QVC.com that can give you some ideas. If you want to spend $30-40, it would expand your food options. I also like to use silicon cookers in the microwave. They are very easy to clean and work great.

Well since you have the cooler you could even look into meal prep on a smaller degree. Cook a bunch of chicken breast/ground turkey/hard boiled eggs at the beginning of the week and then all you have to do is warm it up. It makes it super easy and is very little work to prepare. Then you always have a good main course/protein source ready so its easier to make better decisions while on the road. Then you could do the frozen veggies in the microwave or bring some canned veggies to go with your meats and you could use them in all different ways. You could make tacos, wraps, put the meat over salads, etc. And you could meal prep a bunch of rice as well and have that with your meals too. It would take minimal work to prepare and would make it easy while you are on the road.

Do you have a place to plug in a crock pot? I had a friend that would throw stuff in there and it would be ready when he stopped.

The steamfresh bags of pasta and veggies in sauce are really good. I eat those at work a lot. My cousin who's a truck driver swears by peanut butter and bananas or apples when he's in a trouble spot and doesn't know what to eat.

If you can store them - the bags of steam-in-bag veggies are good because they're usually on sale at any big-box store/supermarket and you can add things like some hard cheese, hard boiled eggs and/or beans to them to add protein. Most hard cheeses (in my experience) doesn't have to be keep ice-box cold if you eat it in a few days and its not in the sun.

If you buy snack size ziplocks - you can use these to portion out nuts, granola, pretzels etc and eat them in combo with other things or if you need to go another 40 miles before dinner.

Best of Luck!

Though not a truck driver, I do take lots of road trips and recently my eating habits on these trips have undergone some self scrutiny. I used to have bags of various items in reach so I could graze along the route. No more! Figure out what you want to eat between stops, take out the appropriate amount, and pack everything else out of reach. If you can get to it, you can't eat it!

Healthier options I now eat on the road:

apples
bananas
clementines
baby carrots (with hummus if I need a dip)
caramel rice cakes - pretty much just filler, but only 50 cals. They're messy, so I break them into bite-size pieces while they're in the bag
Greek yogurt
Kashi bars
sliced meat

One thing my wife started making for us on road trips is Thai chicken wraps. They're filling and low calorie (and damn good!):
FlatOut flatbread wrap
1.5 oz of Tyson pre-grilled chicken strips
1/2 cup coleslaw mix (cabbage & shredded carrots) (or Asian salad mix without the dressing)
dry chow mein noodles (or the won ton strips from the Asian salad mix)
2 tsp of Thai Peanut Sauce

That is only 260 calories. You can use tortillas instead of the wraps, but that adds another 50 calories or more. With a bit of creativity you could come up with other wraps.

Another thought...at home we use a Hamilton Beach Breakfast Sandwich Maker. I thought they were rather gimmicky, but I ended up using them quite a bit. They only use 600 watts so if you can use a microwave, you can use this. With a multi-grain english muffin, 3 or 4 slices of lunch meat (or canadian bacon), a slice of cheese, and 1 egg, a breakfast sandwich totals 290 calories. The eggs and cheese don't need refrigerating if they're used within a week and not left in the hot sun. Get one of those plastic carriers for the eggs...they're in the camping section of sporting good stores and are usually yellow. Check out the Hamilton Beach website for several sandwich ideas. You can use muffins, bagels, bread, croissants, any sliced pre-cooked meat or sausage patties, tuna, different cheeses, etc.

7lenny7 wrote: »

Regarding the weighing of food on the road...let's say you buy a bag of something to snack on, like pretzels. The bag tells you that there are 10 servings and each serving is 140 calories (pulling numbers out of the air). You split up the big bag into portions you're likely to eat and come up with 8 ziplock bags. Now just take the overall calories of the package...1400 calories...and divide by the number of portions you come up with, which is 8. End result is 175 calories. Alternately, if you're scanning bar codes, use the portion size it comes up with, but edit it to indicate you're eating 1.25 servings (10 divided by 8). Each bag may not be exactly that size, but on average they are. This way you avoid having to weigh the servings out.

I use this method for things like frozen yogurt. I just eat maybe a spoonful at a time. I don't log each spoonful, but when when I eat 25% of the pint, I'll log that much. Then another 25% of it when I reach the halfway point, and so on. No tedious weighing, but when I'm done, I'll have accounted for every calorie.

That makes sense with packaged food, but when I do road trips, I'll buy fruits at gas stations and convenience stores. Also, you have some variations of how much is in some of the self-serve foods. For example, the Pilot / Flying J scrambled eggs... how much you put in a cup makes a difference (of course, then you need to make sure you tare out the scale too) as would the weight of bananas, oranges, or apples you pick up. If you eat such foods very often, it can make a difference over time.

Honestly, my 10 day / 5K mile road trip is not going to make a huge difference for specific measurements on food compared to the other 355 days of the year and if I gain during a trip, I have time to make it up (I usually do a lot of hiking on my travels, so I'll have deficits anyway). But if you are on the road 240 days (just estimating based on 20 days/month) per year, a 10%-20% variance on every piece of fruit can certainly add up.

Still, if it is too much burden to use a scale, it is better to estimate than to leave it out of your log completely.

Hi as a suggestion - when you at your home base i would make either: stir-frys, chili, beef stew, shepherd' pie, bake chicken breasts which you would then freeze in individual portions. Take as many servings out of the freezer that you would need for road trips and supplement with either baby carrots, celery sticks, bagged salads [bring your own dressing]. For snacks, suggest almonds, rice cakes [you can get them in many flavours, no fat cold cuts [eat sparingly as the sodium content can be high depending on the brand]and boiled eggs. Buying canned anything isn't great for weight loss as the contents generally have a lot of sodium. Good luck and let us know how you do. Regards, barbyk