Make Home Run, No Fail, Hearty Plant-Based Meals in 12 Minutes or Less!

How are we supposed to eat healthy when we're so insanely busy?

Ah modern life...40 hour work weeks, household chores, running errands, taking care of your kids AND your parents AND your grandkids.

Then there are the family and social obligations, the house to clean, the kids to chauffeur, the dog that should probably be walked at least once this week, your nephew’s birthday card that needs sending and your significant other who has been feeling a bit neglected.

And of course, we’ll always make time to exercise or go to the gym on that mythical tomorrow -- the day that we are less busy that never seems to arrive.

We get so set on getting things done that even when we aren’t busy we feel like we should be.

You get a quick minute and think, “well shouldn’t I be vacuuming? The car could use an oil change. I should really call second-cousin Ed and catch up.”

Sometimes I spend weeks in survival mode. I’ll go to bed already thinking about the things I have to do the next morning. I feel like I can’t give any one thing the attention it needs, because I’m being pulled in so many directions.

And I’m not the only one. Here are some recent comments from readers about their struggles with time.

What’s truly unfortunate about this is that our busyness becomes a major barrier between us, our health goals, and our goal weight.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve had the major revelation that you can take charge of your health by taking charge of what you put in your body.

Letting go of the junk and eating healthy, nourishing, wholesome foods is absolutely the path towards lasting health and optimal weight.

But for most of us, if we want these nourishing foods we have to prepare them ourselves. And that takes time.

And when life gets exhausting what tends to go out the window first? You. Taking care of yourself. And along with that, taking the time to prepare those healthy foods that you know you should be eating.

I know the last thing I want to do when I come home exhausted and starving is make a healthy dinner.

We hear from people who get home starving from a busy day and they feel too tired to EAT let alone cook a meal!

But this stuff is important, right? We are talking about our own personal health, the health of our families, and of course fitting into those old jeans wouldn’t be so bad either!

So you rally your reserves, pull out the recipe books and track down that one recipe that you bookmarked. Mmmm, grilled portobello burger with sun-dried tomato kale-hemp pesto. It looks amazing! How awesome, a healthy meal you are actually excited to eat.

Time to get started. You flip the page and take a look. Prep time: 20 minutes. Cooking time: 10 minutes. Not bad!

Ok, how about the ingredients? Yes you planned ahead and bought the portobello mushrooms. Looks like you are out of kale, but you can substitute spinach. Turns out sun-dried tomatoes aren't the same as regular tomatoes. No problem, you'll use regular ones this time. But hemp seeds? What the heck are those!

Ok, so you'll have to modify things a bit, but you can still make a go of it. You start chopping, throw some things in the pan and then glance back at the recipe.

Your heart sinks as you notice a little detail that you somehow missed before: Ah yes, you were supposed to let the mushrooms marinate for an hour... Suddenly your estimated time to putting a meal on the table has ballooned to 1.5 hours.

Probability that the family will actually eat it? Quickly approaching zero.

Frozen pizza starts to sound pretty darn good right around now.

Even if you’ve planned ahead and have everything you need, cooking a plant-based meal from scratch can be super difficult.

Maybe (unlike me) you are an all-star chef. When I made the decision to take charge of my health and put plants first six years ago, I had zero cooking skills and no idea how to prepare a healthy meal! I was transitioning from a standard diet, and every meal had to be hearty, filling, and delicious in order for me to feel satisfied. Otherwise, I would get a little cranky. So I spent an embarrassing amount of time, energy, and money preparing meals.

I used to spend hours washing and chopping veggies and carefully measuring spices.

I would pour over recipe books, put together a shopping list, and head off to store to search out the ingredients, many of which I’d never heard of before. I literally spent hours strolling through never before seen aisles at the grocery store staring blankly at never before seen ingredients. Kale? Broccoli raab? What is this stuff! I ended up spending a ton of money on specialty ingredients that it turns out I didn’t even really need! The first time I saw my grocery bill I nearly cried.

Back home, it was at least another hour of washing and prepping veggies, carefully measuring spices, and working my way through the recipe to ensure that I hadn’t made a mistake.

Usually it took me at least two hours to prep, cook, and eat. And then after I was exhausted from just trying to feed myself a proper dinner, it was another 15-30 minutes cleaning up!

I literally couldn’t work more than a part-time job. There weren’t enough hours in the day for me to work full time and feed myself.

Thank god, I didn’t have any kids!

But the worst part was, even after all that effort, the result was usually pretty mediocre.

You know what's not so fun? Spending $40 and 3 hours making inedible “mushroom gravy.”

I’ve been known to eat some pretty terrible food just because it’s there, but this gravy my friend, not even I could eat.

It went into the compost! Guess how I would have rather spent those forty big ones and three precious hours of my life. DOING ANYTHING ELSE!

AND WHAT IF THEY WON’T EVEN EAT IT???!!!

And if making a healthy delicious meal that YOU love isn’t hard enough, you also have to consider...the fam.

What if the kids don’t like what you make? What if your dear significant other doesn’t like what you make?

What if you just spent your two precious hours of free time slaving away over a hot stove (not to mention the shopping, chopping, measuring, cleaning) in order to put a nourishing, delicious home-cooked-with-love meal in front of your family and they WON’T EVEN TRY IT!!!

Instead they complain about how it looks, and decide instead to grab a factory-farmed, pesticide ridden, GMO, food-like HOT POCKET out of the freezer AND MICROWAVE IT and then go back for THIRDS!

You do so much to support the health and well-being of your family and they just throw it all away, just like that.

It’s no wonder we find ourselves on our way to the drive through, promising to do better tomorrow.

When faced with the decision to go through the rigmarole of cooking or opt for an easier alternative, it takes a special kind of willpower to stay the course.

Especially after a few days, weeks or months, or when you’ve just come home after a particularly brutal day.

So most of us find ourselves on our way to the drive through, telling ourselves that we'll do better tomorrow.

Tomorrow you'll stick to the diet. Tomorrow you'll plan in advance. This weekend you'll finally sit down and meal plan for the week.

Reality check: It's never gonna happen.

The truth is that if it’s not easier to put together a healthy meal that to get in the car, drive a couple blocks, and order out from a fast-food restaurant, the chances that you will succeed go down dramatically.

It’s not because you don’t have enough willpower. It’s not because you aren’t disciplined enough. It’s because you are a human being. And from the perspective of the science of habits and behavior change, changing your diet is one of most difficult things that you will ever do.

Instead of trying harder, we can try smarter. We can give up relying on willpower and instead create systems that will keep us on track.

I believe in stacking the deck, putting the odds in your favor, and making it as easy as possible for you to succeed.

There is an alternative for the ingredient intensive, time consuming approach to putting together meals. And you can have your health, delicious home-cooked meals, without spending your life in the kitchen.

And I’m not talking about a personal chef.

Six years after changing my diet, I put together most of meals in 5-12 minutes.

In fact, I put together many meals in 5 minutes or less. Yes I spend a little bit of time on prep a couple days a week, but I'm not exaggerating. Most of my meals are done in 5 minutes.

How do I do it?

After a ton of trial and error I've discovered a combination of kitchen shortcuts, delicious pre-made products and organizational techniques that allow me to put together surprisingly delicious, filling and hearty meals with the minimum time investment possible.

I finally learned to make simple and hearty meals like this in just 5-12 minutes.

Now, I’ve always been a bit more into efficiency, and I have to admit that making spectacular meals hasn’t always been my focus.

But in 2013, I met and fell in love with Regan -- my fabulous and fantastic partner in business and life.

Trained as a chef in the french culinary tradition, she then branched out to bring her traditional background into the world of raw and plant-based foods. And she happens to make some of the most incredibly mouth watering plant-based dishes that I’ve ever come across.

We decided to team up and give you the best of both worlds: delicious, hearty and satisfying yet simple meals that the whole family will love. And when you tell them how long it took to put that meals together, they won’t believe you.

This is an unbelievably simple method to get you in and out of the kitchen in a zip without sacrificing taste or health. We call it the 12 Minute Kitchen.