How to Eat Healthy Without Cooking

Learn how to eat healthy without cooking. Quick, easy, and no-oven required!

Collage featuring different health no-cook foods, with a sticker on the collage reading, 'eat healthy without cooking'

Trying to take better care of yourself, but hate turning on the oven?

If you’re trying to learn how to eat healthy without cooking, listen up. It is possible. With a little bit of patience and creativity, eating healthy can be easy — yes, even if you hate cooking.

How? Read on for a few easy tips.

Choose Healthy Convenience Foods

The easiest way to eat healthy without cooking is by stocking up on healthy convenience foods. While ‘convenience’ might seem contradictory to health, you can find plenty of easy-to-make foods that are also good for you.

Whether you buy healthy salad mixes, or pre-made staples, having a few easy options to reach for can make it much easier to achieve your healthy eating goals.

Examples of healthy convenience foods include

Premade salads
Premade soups (check sodium content)
Falafels
Canned vegetables
Canned tuna (if you eat fish) or beans (if you don’t)
Pre-chopped fruit
Microwavable rice and quinoa
Pre-chopped veggies

While they might not sound like the most exciting options, pairing a few healthy convenience foods together can make for a tasty meal. Add some falafel to a premade salad. Or create an easy tuna salad from pre-chopped celery, canned tuna and a squirt of mayonnaise.

No-Cook Meals

Another easy way to eat healthy while avoiding cooking is by making no-cook meals. While salad is the obvious choice, many other easy meals require little to no cooking.

A few options:

Helpful Tools

While fancy tools and appliances aren't necessary, they can make healthy eating a bit easier. If you don’t like cooking, you might want to consider the following tools and small appliances that can save you time and effort when preparing healthy meals.

Microwave: If you hate using the oven and stovetop, then you might want to consider a microwave. Often overlooked, microwaves can do much more than just heat food. Whether you want to bake a potato, steam raw veggies, or boil water, microwaves can help out.
Food processor: Food processors are great for blending fruit and yoghurt to make smoothies, but did you know they’re also great for chopping? Most high-quality food processors can chop veggies, whiz up dressings, and even grind nuts into DIY nut butter.
Rice cooker: Rice is a fantastic staple. Healthy, easy, and cheap, adding rice to a meal is a great way to bulk it up. However, if you dislike cooking, the idea of preparing rice on the stovetop may be daunting. Fear not, a rice cooker can simplify the process, turning out perfect rice each time — so long as you use the correct ratio of water to rice.