What Are Some Foods To Avoid If I'm A Bachelor Cooking For Myself?

July 1, 2009— -- Question: What are some foods to avoid if I'm a bachelor cooking for myself?

Answer: If you're a bachelor cooking for yourself, first of all, I gotta give you props. That's huge. You're not going through the drive-through, you're not picking up Chinese takeout, you're not ordering in pizza. So the fact that you're even cooking at home, you're already many steps ahead.So when you want to look at: What are you gonna avoid when cooking? Frying anything. So just put that fryer away, put that bottle of oil away. Don't deep-fry anything.

The other things you want to avoid are white processed carbohydrates. The thing that stinks is those are the really easy things to cook at night. You can whip up a bowl of pasta, whip up the rice -- that's easy. But those are things that are very high in just white carbs [and] are giving you nothing nutritionally.

So you want to try to switch to whole grain carbs if possible -- again, that brown rice, the whole wheat pastas, experiment with different sauces that you'd be adding. If you don't like whole wheat pasta, you can go ahead and add red sauce to it.

What you also want to limit is canned foods as much as possible. They don't have nearly as many nutrients, a lot of the nutrients seep out into the solution. Plus they're higher in sodium. So canned foods, fried foods, white foods, those are just off-limits in your house.