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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   1473 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for April 16, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Since I asked my question about protein Sunday, I went and bought a proper food scale and found that a pound of meat really isn't that much after all. In fact, my default "gonna eat some air fried pork or chicken with some seasoned salt on it now" meal is around a pound. And two chicken leg quarters seem to weigh something over 2 pounds before cooking, with the bones weighing something negligible like 3 or 4 ounces between them, which makes it make sense that I don't want to eat any more chicken after eating two chicken leg quarters.

Now my question is: what's the cheapest protein nowadays, and what protein isn't even worth your time? A few years ago, I tried tracking "protein per dollar". I think chicken breast and chicken thighs ranked pretty high in protein per dollar, but dried beans made a pretty good showing, too. The problem with beans in my opinion is that they're pretty high calorie for the protein they have on offer, and they also need a good amount of fat on top of that to make them palatable. Bad deal, I think.

Kettlebell get-ups and swings are fun. Get-ups are surprisingly tiring and work out a surprising amount of your body, and kettlebell swings are pretty exhausting. I'm wondering when I should start trying some of the exercises later in the book; I started doing one-armed swings the other day, and my left hand somehow didn't know how to grip like the right hand did and I ended up going too far away from a hook grip and every swing pinched the base of my fingers. This incident really progressed the state of my calluses.

This video has fairly recent US numbers, pause at the time stamp for the table.

Absolute cheapest are lentils and skim milk. Cheapest "pure" protein sources are chicken, canned fish, and whey. He doesn't have soy protein on there, but it's probably about the same as whey if you are doing isolate. It's probably slightly better to space your intake out rather than having all your protein in one giant bolus, especially for whey. Two feedings is already a lot better than one. You probably face diminishing returns beyond four.

Beans, tofu, etc are not good sources of protein. They contain more protein than, say, lettuce, but nothing comes close to meat. Costco sells eye of round for very cheap. It doesn’t taste good, but it’s low fat and leaves you a lot of calories to fill with tasty stuff. Costco also sells protein powder cheaper than pretty much anywhere else. Finally, pasta is cheap and 10-12% protein, which can add up to a lot after a few bowls.

Tofu is absolutely a good source of protein. Super-firm tofu is 14g tofu and 2g carbs per 90g. Sure, it's not meat, but if you're better off eating tofu rather than a few bowls of pasta if you're trying to hit a protein target without blowing out your calories.

Tofu's decent but my problem with it is that it's pretty expensive. It's something between $3-5 for a block of it at my grocery store. I'm going to Sam's Club today, though, maybe I'll see if the calculation goes like @deluxev2 said.

You can get blocks of it at Asian stores for about $2.

Any good advice for making it taste and feel less boring? That's my issue with tofu. It's got incredibly boring taste and texture.

By the way, if you have an Asian store nearby, try the different tofu brands. Some are curdy and some are silky (independent of the "firmness" on the box) and some prefer the silky type.

You gotta sauce it. Try something like this.

Tofu is, indeed, a relatively blank canvas, but that means that it can take on wildly different flavors. Check out something like this to get a bit of a sense of the range available.

Combining it with meat is cheating. The whole point of tofu (for me) is to get protein without the long term health risks of constant meat consumption.

I've tried marinating tofu with spices but then I'm getting large amounts of sodium

Ah, Kenji's still got your back. I imagine you could make some adjustments to make it a bit easier or to vary the flavor profile.

FWIW, I'm not super convinced that there are all that many health risks of eating meat, and it wasn't part of the initial assignment. I'd still suggest giving something like this a shot to at least get a sense for the range of flavors that are possible. I also get the sense that choices on sodium are a bit orthogonal here, too. One can choose low/high sodium versions of both meat and tofu.

Have you tried kitsune udon? They cook the tofu so it’s a little crispy and caramelised on the outside. Might not be healthy though.

Well the sake would be unhealthy. :) Looks interesting though. Thanks.

To add some numbers to this, sourcing prices from Costco:

Non Cake Flour Products (bread, noodles, etc): 0.028g/calorie -> 56g/2000 calories, 25g/$

Black Beans: 0.067g/calorie -> 134g/2000 calories, 53g/$

Tofu: 0.12g/calorie -> 240g/2000 calories, 43g/$

Chicken Breast: 0.2g/calorie -> 400g/2000 calories, 53.5g/$

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