Well, I'm thinking of ordering from some type of home meal delivery service (Schwann's, Home Bistro, etc.) to supplement our regularly home cooked meals. The Mr. and I have crazy schedules but like to eat healthy, balanced meals. I do a fair job with cooking, but it seems we're always throwing out leftovers or produce that has gone bad because our schedules prevented us from getting to it in time. A big reason I'm leaning toward something like this is that I'm attempting some career/health changes and can't be in the kitchen all evening after work. Does anyone have any experience with these services or any suggestions? I am just wasting money or is this truly a time saver? I've viewed it from the perspective that the expense is worth the time saved, but am I fooling myself? Any thoughts would be appreciated!

I wife and I have had similar problems, and we've made some adjustments to cut waste and save cost. Firstly, we started prepackaging our meals. We take a few hours on the weekend and make large batches of basics then build "TV dinner" style packages with them. We switched our produce from items like mixed greens which wilt quickly and spoiled frequently to apples, carrots, dried fruits, and avocados which held up better over time. We started reducing portion sizes when cooking to minimize leftovers since we weren't eating them anyway. We also had to let go of some of our ideals about how we eat, since in reality we weren't eating the way we were shopping so we looked for alternatives that were still healthy but didn't spoil as quickly. So our approach was twofold, rather then getting a service we did the work ourselves, and we took an honest look at our eating habits and changed our shopping to better match what was actually happening instead of what we thought we should be doing.

Sounds like you'd still be throwing out leftovers (and more expensive ones at that) unless you the home meal deliveries are really just enough for one meal.

For really busy people (which it sounds like you are), delivered meals may be the best way to maintain a healthy diet. But cooking doesn't have to involve "all evening in the kitchen." I've got a few cookbooks-full of recipes that take no longer than 30 minutes to cook, and most of them are 20 minutes or less. That's about an hour total when you factor in cooking, cleanup, and actually sitting down and eating. Add some time for shopping, and it works out to about 1.5 hours per supper. We usually eat the leftovers for lunch the next day (or the next couple of days). I often make a big meal on Sunday nights that provides leftovers for lunches and suppers for at least couple of days.

I use Dominos, Papa John's, and Pizza Hut as frequent meal delivery services.

I once used a meal-prep service called Let's Dish. They offered a kitchen, recipes and all ingredients. I packaged my meals, froze them and cooked when I was ready. Overall I liked it.

They were fairly expensive (around $200 for 8 meals serving 4 persons each.) They took on average 20-40 minutes to cook. Some just required cooking in the oven, others required several prep steps at home.

The meals were of a far higher quality than the prepared frozen meals I've had. The results were far superior to anything I could produce on my own in the same 20-40 minutes. The price was lower than what I would have paid for a comparable meal at a restaurant. I had some flexibility in preparing the meals, and in some cases I split the meal into two (2 pre-prepped meals of 2 servings each, instead of 1 meal serving 4.) This was great when I knew my kids would not eat the meal.

Overall I'd recommend it, just make sure you have plenty of space in the freezer!

What my wife and I often do is only cook the healthy home cooked meals on weekends and freeze the extras for lunches and dinners throughout the week. Then my wife will occasionally cook during the week if she gets off a little early one day (her days range from 6-10 hours... mine are almost always 12 hours).

One of the keys to eating healthy is snacking on healthy food. I usually try to eat a banana and/or an apple for breakfast, though sometimes I opt for a Fiber One breakfast bar. This takes virtually no time to prepare.

For lunch, I always have some sort of vegetables and/or fruit along with maybe a sandwich or soup. This takes minimal time to prepare.

For dinner, the key is to remember you don't HAVE to have meat in every meal. Ideally, meat should be limited to only a few days per week for health reasons. Some days we will have salads which takes minimal time to prepare. Other days it will be soup and vegetables. And then some days it's pork or steak or whatever... again, along with some vegetables.

If you focus your meals around fruits and vegetables rather than around meat or pasta, you can make a lot more meals in a shorter amount of time and you will get healthier in the process.

From what I've seen, these services are pretty expensive, and you still need to heat the food up, etc.

I think you would be better off finding a way to make feeding yourself a priority, and finding ways to make it as convenient as possible.

I always have frozen fish (BJs wholesale sells boxes of tilapia with tortilla crust and one with a parmesan crust) and a bag of spinach on hand... easy quick dinner. Pop the fish in the oven, make a quick vinagrette (1tbs olive oil, 1tbs red wine vinagar, some dijon mustard, wisk it up) and have a big spinach salad with feta, then eat your fish.

We also always have browned ground beef in the freezer, as well as chicken breasts.

What's the barrier, really?

Keep the left overs for your lunch the next day!

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Home delivery meals can be pricey, but I understand that you don't want to spend forever cooking or eat the same thing day after day. What I have just started is a meal swap with 10 friends. Everyone chooses a different meal from a healthy cookbook and cooks 10 portions of it. The following day, we all get together and trade. There you go- lunches and dinners for a whole week. It's a lot faster (and cheaper) to cook a large portion of a single meal rather than 10 different meals.

it is acceptable that very busy all day at work and stuff, you been no time to cook healthy food
and just lean on the food delivery..
as my advice you can cooked food at weekend...or just preset it and then you can cook it in the following week...!
i think it will be a time saver and money saver too...!

I don't see anything wrong with relying on delivery - perhaps you can do a combo - buy enough of the delivered meals for say, 3 or 4 dinners per week. For the rest of the week you could keep it simple - we often will just do scrambled eggs at night, or cold sandwiches.

We have a family of 7 and tonight I bought one of those Stouffer's lasagnas. $10 to feed all of us, not too bad. Is it the healist? Probably not, but I don't have the energy to throw a good lasagna together, and when I do it cost a lot more than $10.

I don't have experience with meal delivery, but as for making your own cooking a bit easier to do, I recommend a slow cooker. Serves the same purpose as meal delivery (dinner is ready when you get home from work) but is cheaper and there are zillions of easy recipes to choose from.