I didn't want to give up our food to eat healthier.
I grew up eating Cantonese food, and my wife's side of the family is Japanese. We cook at home most nights in Boston: tomato eggs, chicken soup, miso salmon, curry, fried rice.
When my LDL cholesterol came back high, the advice I found was to switch to a Mediterranean diet. More salads, more olive oil, fewer of the dishes we grew up with. None of it looked like the food on our table, and I didn't want our kitchen to turn into someone else's.
So I started a spreadsheet
For nine months I planned every week by hand: which dishes, how many portions, which meals would be leftovers, and what to buy at which store. I checked each ingredient against what the American Heart Association, Mayo Clinic and Harvard's Nutrition Source say, and kept a weekly checklist of foods to eat more of and foods to go easy on.
A few things stood out once I had the data.
Most of our dishes were already fine. The ones that weren't usually needed one swap, not a new recipe: chicken thigh instead of pork belly, half the ground pork swapped for shiitake, oats at breakfast.
We eat the same favorites over and over. Tomato eggs showed up 22 times and chicken soup 20 times in 34 weeks. A plan that ignores your favorites doesn't last.
Leftovers do most of the work. About seven cooking sessions a week fed us roughly 22 meals, because each one was planned to cover a later lunch or dinner. Nothing was cooked just to be thrown out.
Shopping got cheaper once it followed the plan: one list, in the order we walk the stores, from Haymarket to Star Market to H Mart.
Why I turned it into a planner
A list of good foods never changed what I cooked. Planning the week did. Deciding the dishes once, cooking enough for leftovers and buying only what the plan needed meant we spent less, threw out less and ate better, without giving up Asian home cooking. That's the “AF”: Asian Food.
Eat Healthy AF does what the spreadsheet did, in a few minutes: pick a health goal, add the recipes you already like from any site or YouTube video, and it plans the week, the leftovers and the shopping list, with what each meal costs.
I plan our own week with it. If it helps yours, that's the point.
Food is one part of cholesterol. Genes and medication matter too, and one person's experience isn't a promise. Keep your doctor in the loop.
Eat Healthy AF (AF as in Asian Food) is general nutrition information, not medical advice. It doesn't diagnose or treat anything. Keep your doctor in the loop, and don't change any medication without them.