Healthy frozen food dinner options?

There's nothing magically bad about frozen meals. If they add up to the right number of calories and meet your nutritional goals, they're fine for weight loss. Well, actually - only the calorie total matters directly for weight loss. If they don't fill you up, or they don't add up to good overall nutrition (in context of other things you eat), there's an outside chance they could have an indirect effect by making it hard to stick to your calorie goal (if not filling) or by triggering fatigue (by under-nutrition tanking your energy level) . . . but you'd notice that, right?

I don't use many frozen meals, because they're generally too low in protein for my goals, and too low in vegetable volume for my desires. But if they add up to what you target and need, they're fine. (NB: The protein issue is probably mainly that I'm vegetarian, and many of the meals that are vegetarian are too low in protein for someone who's athletically active or aging . . . and I'm both.)

Try the ones you like, log them, see if you feel full and happy, see whether your nutrition and calories add up well (on average over a few days to a week). If you can hit the goals that matter to you, they're fine.

If you like them, and they fit your goals, they're fine. We usually keep 1 or 2 on hand but I've found it's so much easier to just keep frozen veggies, frozen chicken and different sauces around. In the same 5 minutes it takes to warm one up, I can microwave our own food and it tastes so much better.

I have a bag of frozen veggies with some chicken breast thrown in for dinner a couple times a week. There are several different ones you can get. California Blend, etc. Low cal, filling, no salt and lots of fiber and decent protein.

Before I started eating a lot of salt, my blood pressure was low enough that I used to get dizzy when standing and even passed out a few times. To reiterate, I eat a lot of salt. Most of this comes from salt I add, making Thai recipes that include triple sodium bombs of soy sauce, fish sauce, and oyster sauce, or eating other high-sodium Asian foods.

However, after reading Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us I would be concerned about packaged food that contained a lot of added sodium as one of the reasons for this is best quoted directly from the book:

"Among all the miracles that salt performs for the processed food industry, perhaps the most essential involves a plague that the industry calls “warmed-over-flavor, ” whose acronym, WOF, is pronounced something like the dog’s bark. WOF is caused by the oxidation of the fats in meat, which gives meat the taste of cardboard or, as some in the industry describe it, damp dog hair, when the meat is reheated after being precooked and added to soups or boxed meals. “Once warmed-over-flavor gets going, you are pretty well dead in the water, ” said Susan Brewer, a professor of food science in the University of Illinois’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Science. “People can smell or taste it at very low levels...”

This is where salt comes in. Once WOF sets in, salt becomes a convenient antidote for the processed food industry, which is heavily
reliant on reheated meats. One of the most effective cures for WOF is an infusion of fresh spices, especially rosemary, which has antioxidants to counteract the meat’s deterioration. But fresh herbs are costly. So manufacturers more typically make sure they have lots of salt in their formulas. The cardboard or dog-hair taste is still there, but it is overpowered by the salt."

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I do have sodium-bomb Campbell's chicken noodle soup on hand. But I consider it a low quality food. It's for rare occasions like one of us is sick or he's hungry after being out snow-blowing. Interestingly, I accidently bought the low sodium version one time and found it inedible, even after adding salt.

springlering62 wrote: »

@kshama2001 now that’s really interesting.

I thought it was only me who didn’t care for reheated meats. Never even thought about it being a universal issue.

Don’t mind at all eating leftover chopped meats chilled, much prefer over reheating.

I can eat leftover cooked chicken breast for days longer than leftover chicken thigh. Now I add rosemary to leftover chicken thigh; problem solved!

I personally find that most are too small to be very satisfying, and could use a bit more protein. As others have mentioned above, I too prefer more vegetable bulk and more protein in my supper... so I find it works better to have half a bag of microwaved frozen vegetables and a serving of some batch-cooked frozen meat or a serving of previously frozen batch-cooked stew/soup/chili.. which is closer to my preferred meal volume, calorie total, macros. I'll pick some up frozen-meals every once in a while if in the mood for something very different though.