From an ecological viewpoint, the deep freezer is not an ideal way to store food. For one thing, while older ways of preserving food didn't rely on continuous use of electricity, the deep freezer does. For another thing, nobody who is plugged into a central grid really has a continuous supply of electricity, so if more food is stored in a freezer than can be consumed during the day or so it takes to thaw, the extra food is wasted.
This web site does not recommend buying or using a big deep freezer as a way to store a year's supply of food. Real preppers know that the most probable disasters for which they're prepping all begin with disconnection from the power grid.
However, most houses and flats come with refrigerators. Most of those refrigerators come with a small built-in freezer compartment, with just enough room to store what you could nibble on over a week or two, or use up in a day or two if necessary. This is the freezer that is your friend when you start trying to work a diet program for better health.
You look at those menu lists and immediately think "Obviously those dietitians don't have normal jobs. All they do all day is cook. That's how they can suggest fresh omelets for breakfast, fresh-broiled fish with a big vegetable salad for lunch, and turkey chili with freshly cooked beans for supper. No working parent with an eight-year-old, a three-year-old, and a job that demands 'face time' at the office three days a week, could possibly eat that way. That is why everyone grabs 'fast food' and 'convenience food' and why 'health food' plans can't really work. The capitalist system has got us. I'm doomed never to find out whether this diet would cure my viral arthritis or Long COVID or irregularity or whatever else, because I can't afford to make a full-time job of cooking the way a lot of doctors and rich retired patients eat at expensive camping retreats at Santa Rosa."
First of all, as camping retreats go, especially those attended by flocks of doctors who are on call to make sure nobody goes into insulin shock as the adult-onset-diabetes patients make the transition off insulin, the McDougall food-as-medicine retreats are fantastic bargains. You're in an earthly paradise, you're feasting on California's freshest produce, and one of the charming couple rowing or playing tennis with you and your partner is an M.D. who's there just to give you free advice if you need it. If you enjoy travelling, camping, meeting new people, and/or being in California, a McDougall retreat is a treat that's hard to beat.
But say you're in my situation when I had to do a drastic health food diet. You're still growing, you're a single "parent" or even a literal single parent with a baby, you're working 35 hours a week in the city and another 25 hours a week at home, your symptoms are acute pain and intense fatigue accompanied by depressive moods, and when you rush home from the office to the stack of work on your desk at home, even in winter you're not inclined to spend time baking bread.
Here's what you can do. There has to be one day when you're at home and you decide what you do. Failing to carve out one day when you're accountable only to God is a sin. In the United States the goal has been for everybody to have at least two days for themselves every week, one when they go to religious meetings and one when they do their own chores and errands. If your schedule does not have room for that, you need to correct your schedule.
During this time for personal work, consult your menu plan for the week, and cook what you need to cook. Divide it into serving portions, and freeze what you're going to eat for the rest of the week.
Cooking time can be made into quality time with the family, also. If you've been socialized to pay attention to others in a very conspicuous way, facing them at a 180-degree angle and staring into their faces, you might be surprised to find out how much easier it is for some people to talk when you're doing something side by side instead of staring at their faces. This may be when you find out whether the teenager really doesn't like school because she's all that far ahead of her classes, or because she's a witness to a crime.
Cooking time can also be a way to help others deal with their emotions about the fact that you're not eating something they eat. Continuing to cook what they eat is a way to show that you're not judging them or planning to make them follow your diet plan. Being able to cook meat dishes for other people while you go vegan, or bake wheat bread for other people while your diet is gluten-free, can also be very empowering. Food sensitivities can actually set up a mild form of physical addiction that has withdrawal symptoms.
If there are teenagers in the family they may want to eat everything all at once. Most people reach their full height some time in the teen years, but their bones and internal organs continue growing into their mid-twenties. All this growing they are doing is what makes teenagers so moody. Some days they don't have much appetite, and some days they're bottomless pits. Their appetites reflect some sort of nutrient need, which can be enormous, so if possible it's good to buy extra supplies and cook extra food for them to devour. Things that are on a health diet plan are usually good things for teenagers to fill up on; they can benefit from the trace minerals in all those vegetables. Freeze portions for them too, and mark the freezer containers so that the teenagers know when they've eaten all the "whoever" portions and must not eat the portion marked "Pris's Lunch for Tuesday."
Some foods freeze better than others. There may be dishes on your diet plan that, in order to taste right to you, need to be cooked when they're eaten. The only real nutritional difference between breakfast, lunch, and supper is that most people digest the "heavy" foods, fats, proteins, and complex carbs, most efficiently earlier in the day. If the only meal where you have time to assemble a fresh salad, omelet, etc., is breakfast or supper, you can probably get the benefit of eating that dish at that time of day.
Some foods actually taste better, to a majority of testers, when they've spent some time in the freezer allowing flavors to mingle. Beans and bananas may be easier to digest when they've been thoroughly cooked, then chilled or frozen, then reheated.
Some families find that the "Fix It and Forget It" plan of spending one day a week, or even one day a month, cooking and then reheating frozen home-cooked food on other days is an efficient plan for everyone, especially if different family members are on different diet plans. There are cookbooks and web sites dedicated specifically to identifying dishes that freeze well. The McDougall and Sinatra diet plans rely on recipes in this category.
Jethro Kloss's early "elimination diet," which eliminated many foods from the diet and reintroduced them by ones, advised eating just one thing at each meal. One fruit or vegetable, steamed or boiled if necessary in a minimal amount of water, with minimal salt. This is still the preferred approach for building immunity because it makes it easy to identify food items that your body is not currently digesting. It's also the way vegetables tend to be prepared for freezing--very lightly cooked to slow down spoilage if things thaw before they're eaten, then frozen in such a way that they'll need further cooking to reach the level of softness or "doneness" to which many peopleare accustomed. Those little packets of frozen corn, peas, potatoes, etc., are generally more expensive than whole raw foods, but may be cheaper at some times of year. Onions and garlic, which are generally considered immune system boosters, are easier for some people to tolerate when they've been finely chopped, parboiled, and frozen.
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