Looking for what recommendations people have for cheap healthy foods to eat here in Japan. Not necessarily eating out, but food to make at home. Trying to improve my diet and lose weight.
Stir fry is my go-to cheap food that’s versatile, healthy, and easy. Just buy a large wok or skillet, and a cheap rice cooker (although a pot will be fine too).
Chop up whatever vegetables and protein you find on sale at the grocery store (or at roadside stalls in the late summer and autumn). Tofu is probably cheapest for protein, but I know some people like their meat. Get some bulk seasonings that will last a while; there’s tons of recipes online.
The combinations are almost endless, and you quickly get a feeling for what works and what doesn’t. Use minimal oil or even just fry things in their own juices / water. Serve it with rice generally, although pasta or noodles also works. As a bonus, you can make a large batch and freeze some for later.
(also want to point out the fact you’ve been downvoted for this useful and reasonable post says a lot about this sub and foreigners in Japan in general…)
Eat more vegetables and weigh out your other foods so you are eating proper portion sizes. The standard grilled salmon, vegetables and rice is simple and inexpensive.
Eggs, lean meat and vegetables, olive oil is a good option to fry meat and eggs. Chicken is probably the cheapest.
Edit : if you want to loss weight probably best to avoid large portion of rice.
Just bento and onecookbook have good Japanese recipes
Also cook pad
Fish roaster: sanma, aji, saba, iwashi
All “cheap” fish
Chicken breast – cheapest “meat”
shredded cabbage salad, miso shiru, leafy greens – buy from a produce shop vs grocery store which can be more expensive
Cut carbs
Don’t drink your calories
[deleted]
I usually just buy a random assortment of vegetables and meat at the supermarket and then Google
ピマンレシピ
しめじレシピ
ひき肉レシピ
Etc. Just googling recipes for whatever I have in the fridge. It helps me find new recipes so I don’t get bored. Of course I also have recipe books or my own recipe journal of recipes I especially liked that I go back to. You kind of need a large variety of the cooking basic/commonly used ingredients for this to work though. If you’ve never really cooked before it can cost a bit of money to get set up, but once you have all the things then you can use them over the course of weeks-months. These basics are things like: cooking oil, olive oil, mirin, cooking sake, vinegar, sugar, salt, various herbs and spices, dashi, chicken soup stock granules, tsuyu, sesame oil, soy sauce, tubes of ginger and garlic paste, mayonnaise, flour, potato starch, panko, etc. then once you have these things you can make a wide variety of recipes with an assortment of vegetables and meat.
I usually just pick out whatever things are in season or on sale in the supermarket. You’ll notice as the months pass certain things will get more expensive and certain things will get cheaper. Try going to discount supermarkets or greengrocers for even cheaper produce.
I also buy the discounted meat in large quantities as much as possible and just always freeze what I won’t eat in the next day or two. Don’t defrost it by microwave as much as possible. Take it out of the freezer a day or two before you want to use it and put it in the fridge. Doesn’t really affect the quality thawing it that way.
If you really want to lose weight I would suggest buying a kitchen scale to weigh your food. Find an app to calculate calories of the food by weight. Do this first and see how much calories you are actually consuming. All these healthy ingredients isn’t going to help much if you over eat them. Then work towards eating a little bit under your maintenance calories. The trick is finding your maintenance calories.
Oh and don’t forget to measure everything including any oil used for cooking or extra sauces and of course what you drink too.
Almost the same thing but cheap and healthy Soboro don, taco rice, gabao rice. Both the taco rice and gapao rice you can add onions and bell peppers/piman. All three you can dice maitake and cook it with the ground chicken. Curry is also a good choice you can put almost any veggies doesn’t just have to be carrot, potatoes, onion. In the winter nabe, they have packets at the store for any easy way then just put a ton of veggies. I personally do shimeji, inoki,shiitake, carrots, and hakusai
I’m vegan, so it’s pretty simple for me to just buy some locally produced vegetables and a fish and throw them in a slow cooker with some vegan miso and water. Costs under $5 a meal that will last you a day and serves 3-6 people.
I didn’t see this suggestion, so commenting to add: try out cauliflower rice. I get a frozen one from MaxValu that’s cauliflower and broccoli and do a half/half mix with regular white rice. Cuts down the carbs, adds vege, and tricks my brain into thinking I’m eating a full portion of rice. Especially when I have it with something like curry.
Chili (make a huge portion and freeze some), curry and lentil soup (you can eat this with bread) are my go to easy and cheap meals.
Getting a sous vide machine transformed my cooking repertoire. Cooking everything to perfect tenderness, never dry and not using any oil etc. is a game changer. So much you can do with it and also low power usage.
Second was getting an airfryer, which is actually just a small convection oven. You can roast tons of things in there and its also very healthy.
Both these are very versatile, don’t take much space and should broaden your possibilities a lot.
My husband loves mung bean sprouts. He has a whole bag with some chicken/pork or fish and salad.
It’s only 30 yen or less for a bag!
Personally, I love to buy the big bags of frozen veg from Gyomu Super and cook them together in a pot with stock to make an easy soup. You can eat beans or whatever you like for protein
I’ve lost about 26kg this year. Switch all your rice for bagged (or handmade) sengiri cabbage and make donburi. Sundubuchige, tonjiru, misoshiru, yasai itame, boiled eggs for breakfast, no japanese bread cause it has so much fucking sugar, shirataki. Buy dried lentils and legumes to make at home. Shake salmon.
And most importantly: count your calories, buy a cheap food scale and log your food in the app of your choosing (usually mfp or loseit). A 30 minute walk will burn probably 10% of an oomori ramen. Just because you were a good boy and jogged for 45 minutes this morning does not mean you can drink 5 Strong zero 9% and eat a shit ton of Karaage. You got this.
You probably are not going to like this idea at first, but hear me out. Type 2 diabetic here diagnosed back in summer of 2019. I went through the same thoughts you are going through and I found a few things that just simply work and have a few friends and colleagues who do the same and have really good results.
#1 is drop any sugary drinks, so any soda or those garbage monster like drinks are a no-go. I haven’t had a soda since I was diagnosed and never will. I had a sip of coke last year and it tasted repulsive. Drop the sugar. This includes those sugary kaki-gori and milkshake drinks from McD’s.
#2 Try skipping dinner. Load up your calories (carbs) during breakfast and lunch so you can burn them off during the day. Force yourself to fast during the nighttime. Drinking 10 beers + greasy ramen at 10pm? No more. If you must, drink a protein drink or eat some fruit with plenty of water. This is key and dropped my a1c and allowed me to control my weight significantly. If I hit the gas and miss dinner every night 7 days a week and eat healthy I can drop anywhere between 4-6 lbs a week. But there are cheat days with spaghetti and pizza so it is never perfect.
Healthy + cheap means adding natto/edamame, yaki-zakana/sashimi and shirataki/konyaku meals – stir fry is greasy right so best to skip that. When I was first diagnosed with this awful illness, I only ate shirataki noodles and thinly sliced pork and beef with ponzu for lunch and protein drinks at night and dropped my a1c and was able to control my weight easily. Skipping dinner took maybe within 1-2 weeks to get use to. At first it sucks as you go to bed hungry but when you get used to it your stomach will shrink and make it easier to cope. And, when you can get control your hunger urges, you can starts to intermittently fast and detox but hold off on that for now.
Don’t forget to exercise, just walk 8K-10K (4K-6K?) steps per day. Get up a bit earlier and go for a walk. Have useless email time after lunch, go for a walk. Pissed at your stupid colleagues and boss? Go for a 10 minute walk. You will see results.
There are lots of resources online and if you want to hear it from the real life diet heros, go into the diabetes sub reddits and ask them for advice on what they eat, you will get much better ideas than in here….
Basically most traditional Japanese foods are healthy. Miso soup, broiled fish, natto and anything soy-based, soba, yakiimo, etc…just avoid fried foods, fatty meat, refined carbs, alcohol and you’ll lose weight for sure
I normally just go to the supermarket and first check the cheap vegetables, those that expire soon. Then you have normally a good amount of vegetables already and after stir fry the same or next day it will taste the same as if you take fresh ones.
Thinks I like doing are also stir-fry, I like to use the fried tofu or fried tofu skin but normal tofu also is good. You can get a tofu press to have more firm tofu pieces.
You can have it with Udon, soba or any other noodle like type. I live those with eggplant and then the sprouts are also really cheap here, so add them in.
Another food option is babe, basically habe a pot and cook everything.
For more protein I personally like to add beans, the ones you can get at Gyomu deep frozen are fairly cheap.
You can do Curry as well, if you don’t drown it in coconut cream or keep the portions low it will be an okayish food calorie wise and goes well with rice.
Since it is summer I personally love cold Udon or cold soba and just take the Tsuyuu from the shop (you can make it bit it takes a while to cook and then cool down), then some fresh negi on top and add whatever you like, cut tomato, cucumber or miyoga, some fried mushrooms or eggplant or if you like it some Natto.
I also had many recipes at home but switched it with this website where you can make your own and download from whatever page you found something on, it automatically cuts out all the long explanations and just leaves ingredients and instructions. This is my Userpage, I have put some recipes on it: https://cooked.wiki/user/fripi
If you manage to get 5-10 recipes you really like you can rotate them easily and still.enjoyntastynfood every day without too much hassle. All the best 🙂
I love soups (non asian for home made choices because asian soups oftenhave huge amount of salt, I enjoy them when going out and completely stopped eating miso). It’s cheap and healthy.
I bake most of my foods in the oven. I know people complain about Japanese ovens and it’s true, but my microwave has amazing oven.
I bake veggies, meat, fish, you name it. I choose yogurt or sour cream instead of mayonnaise, I don’t bake stuff in mayonnaise. Yes, could be delicious, but if you want eat healthy, you can choose other seasonings. Sometimes salt and black pepper work perfectly. Also not too expensive.
I don’t eat rice because I don’t like it and find Japanese rice unhealthy (it’s carbs without vitamins in my opinion). If you can’t eat without rice, eat less rice (-50%), try to eat brown rice or, even better, other grains. Before each meal eat vegetables (seriously, eat veggies before each meal when possible). And always have huge bowl of salad. Greens, cucumbers, tomatoes, pepper, pumpkin seeds, red onion, just a bit of olive oil, olives. It’s not that expensive to be honest but you can change some ingredients to cabbage which is cheap. Register for your supermarket sales info emails etc. collect coupons.
Don’t eat desserts for breakfast. Buy 12 eggs, boil or fry some for breakfast, maybe half of cucumber, etc. healthy and cheap.
And never ever buy combining good, it’s overpriced. Also, always check labels, Japanese food has lots of carbs when you don’t expect it.
Don’t buy low fat yogurt, we still need fats for better diet. Sometimes add avocado to your food.
19 comments
Stir fry is my go-to cheap food that’s versatile, healthy, and easy. Just buy a large wok or skillet, and a cheap rice cooker (although a pot will be fine too).
Chop up whatever vegetables and protein you find on sale at the grocery store (or at roadside stalls in the late summer and autumn). Tofu is probably cheapest for protein, but I know some people like their meat. Get some bulk seasonings that will last a while; there’s tons of recipes online.
The combinations are almost endless, and you quickly get a feeling for what works and what doesn’t. Use minimal oil or even just fry things in their own juices / water. Serve it with rice generally, although pasta or noodles also works. As a bonus, you can make a large batch and freeze some for later.
(also want to point out the fact you’ve been downvoted for this useful and reasonable post says a lot about this sub and foreigners in Japan in general…)
Eat more vegetables and weigh out your other foods so you are eating proper portion sizes. The standard grilled salmon, vegetables and rice is simple and inexpensive.
Eggs, lean meat and vegetables, olive oil is a good option to fry meat and eggs. Chicken is probably the cheapest.
Edit : if you want to loss weight probably best to avoid large portion of rice.
Just bento and onecookbook have good Japanese recipes
Also cook pad
Fish roaster: sanma, aji, saba, iwashi
All “cheap” fish
Chicken breast – cheapest “meat”
shredded cabbage salad, miso shiru, leafy greens – buy from a produce shop vs grocery store which can be more expensive
Cut carbs
Don’t drink your calories
[deleted]
I usually just buy a random assortment of vegetables and meat at the supermarket and then Google
ピマンレシピ
しめじレシピ
ひき肉レシピ
Etc. Just googling recipes for whatever I have in the fridge. It helps me find new recipes so I don’t get bored. Of course I also have recipe books or my own recipe journal of recipes I especially liked that I go back to. You kind of need a large variety of the cooking basic/commonly used ingredients for this to work though. If you’ve never really cooked before it can cost a bit of money to get set up, but once you have all the things then you can use them over the course of weeks-months. These basics are things like: cooking oil, olive oil, mirin, cooking sake, vinegar, sugar, salt, various herbs and spices, dashi, chicken soup stock granules, tsuyu, sesame oil, soy sauce, tubes of ginger and garlic paste, mayonnaise, flour, potato starch, panko, etc. then once you have these things you can make a wide variety of recipes with an assortment of vegetables and meat.
I usually just pick out whatever things are in season or on sale in the supermarket. You’ll notice as the months pass certain things will get more expensive and certain things will get cheaper. Try going to discount supermarkets or greengrocers for even cheaper produce.
I also buy the discounted meat in large quantities as much as possible and just always freeze what I won’t eat in the next day or two. Don’t defrost it by microwave as much as possible. Take it out of the freezer a day or two before you want to use it and put it in the fridge. Doesn’t really affect the quality thawing it that way.
If you really want to lose weight I would suggest buying a kitchen scale to weigh your food. Find an app to calculate calories of the food by weight. Do this first and see how much calories you are actually consuming. All these healthy ingredients isn’t going to help much if you over eat them. Then work towards eating a little bit under your maintenance calories. The trick is finding your maintenance calories.
Oh and don’t forget to measure everything including any oil used for cooking or extra sauces and of course what you drink too.
Almost the same thing but cheap and healthy
Soboro don, taco rice, gabao rice. Both the taco rice and gapao rice you can add onions and bell peppers/piman. All three you can dice maitake and cook it with the ground chicken.
Curry is also a good choice you can put almost any veggies doesn’t just have to be carrot, potatoes, onion.
In the winter nabe, they have packets at the store for any easy way then just put a ton of veggies. I personally do shimeji, inoki,shiitake, carrots, and hakusai
I’m vegan, so it’s pretty simple for me to just buy some locally produced vegetables and a fish and throw them in a slow cooker with some vegan miso and water. Costs under $5 a meal that will last you a day and serves 3-6 people.
I didn’t see this suggestion, so commenting to add: try out cauliflower rice. I get a frozen one from MaxValu that’s cauliflower and broccoli and do a half/half mix with regular white rice. Cuts down the carbs, adds vege, and tricks my brain into thinking I’m eating a full portion of rice. Especially when I have it with something like curry.
Chili (make a huge portion and freeze some), curry and lentil soup (you can eat this with bread) are my go to easy and cheap meals.
Getting a sous vide machine transformed my cooking repertoire. Cooking everything to perfect tenderness, never dry and not using any oil etc. is a game changer. So much you can do with it and also low power usage.
Second was getting an airfryer, which is actually just a small convection oven. You can roast tons of things in there and its also very healthy.
Both these are very versatile, don’t take much space and should broaden your possibilities a lot.
My husband loves mung bean sprouts. He has a whole bag with some chicken/pork or fish and salad.
It’s only 30 yen or less for a bag!
Personally, I love to buy the big bags of frozen veg from Gyomu Super and cook them together in a pot with stock to make an easy soup. You can eat beans or whatever you like for protein
I’ve lost about 26kg this year. Switch all your rice for bagged (or handmade) sengiri cabbage and make donburi. Sundubuchige, tonjiru, misoshiru, yasai itame, boiled eggs for breakfast, no japanese bread cause it has so much fucking sugar, shirataki. Buy dried lentils and legumes to make at home. Shake salmon.
And most importantly: count your calories, buy a cheap food scale and log your food in the app of your choosing (usually mfp or loseit). A 30 minute walk will burn probably 10% of an oomori ramen. Just because you were a good boy and jogged for 45 minutes this morning does not mean you can drink 5 Strong zero 9% and eat a shit ton of Karaage. You got this.
You probably are not going to like this idea at first, but hear me out. Type 2 diabetic here diagnosed back in summer of 2019. I went through the same thoughts you are going through and I found a few things that just simply work and have a few friends and colleagues who do the same and have really good results.
#1 is drop any sugary drinks, so any soda or those garbage monster like drinks are a no-go. I haven’t had a soda since I was diagnosed and never will. I had a sip of coke last year and it tasted repulsive. Drop the sugar. This includes those sugary kaki-gori and milkshake drinks from McD’s.
#2 Try skipping dinner. Load up your calories (carbs) during breakfast and lunch so you can burn them off during the day. Force yourself to fast during the nighttime. Drinking 10 beers + greasy ramen at 10pm? No more. If you must, drink a protein drink or eat some fruit with plenty of water. This is key and dropped my a1c and allowed me to control my weight significantly. If I hit the gas and miss dinner every night 7 days a week and eat healthy I can drop anywhere between 4-6 lbs a week. But there are cheat days with spaghetti and pizza so it is never perfect.
Healthy + cheap means adding natto/edamame, yaki-zakana/sashimi and shirataki/konyaku meals – stir fry is greasy right so best to skip that. When I was first diagnosed with this awful illness, I only ate shirataki noodles and thinly sliced pork and beef with ponzu for lunch and protein drinks at night and dropped my a1c and was able to control my weight easily. Skipping dinner took maybe within 1-2 weeks to get use to. At first it sucks as you go to bed hungry but when you get used to it your stomach will shrink and make it easier to cope. And, when you can get control your hunger urges, you can starts to intermittently fast and detox but hold off on that for now.
Don’t forget to exercise, just walk 8K-10K (4K-6K?) steps per day. Get up a bit earlier and go for a walk. Have useless email time after lunch, go for a walk. Pissed at your stupid colleagues and boss? Go for a 10 minute walk. You will see results.
There are lots of resources online and if you want to hear it from the real life diet heros, go into the diabetes sub reddits and ask them for advice on what they eat, you will get much better ideas than in here….
Basically most traditional Japanese foods are healthy. Miso soup, broiled fish, natto and anything soy-based, soba, yakiimo, etc…just avoid fried foods, fatty meat, refined carbs, alcohol and you’ll lose weight for sure
I normally just go to the supermarket and first check the cheap vegetables, those that expire soon. Then you have normally a good amount of vegetables already and after stir fry the same or next day it will taste the same as if you take fresh ones.
Thinks I like doing are also stir-fry, I like to use the fried tofu or fried tofu skin but normal tofu also is good. You can get a tofu press to have more firm tofu pieces.
You can have it with Udon, soba or any other noodle like type.
I live those with eggplant and then the sprouts are also really cheap here, so add them in.
Another food option is babe, basically habe a pot and cook everything.
For more protein I personally like to add beans, the ones you can get at Gyomu deep frozen are fairly cheap.
You can do Curry as well, if you don’t drown it in coconut cream or keep the portions low it will be an okayish food calorie wise and goes well with rice.
Since it is summer I personally love cold Udon or cold soba and just take the Tsuyuu from the shop (you can make it bit it takes a while to cook and then cool down), then some fresh negi on top and add whatever you like, cut tomato, cucumber or miyoga, some fried mushrooms or eggplant or if you like it some Natto.
I also had many recipes at home but switched it with this website where you can make your own and download from whatever page you found something on, it automatically cuts out all the long explanations and just leaves ingredients and instructions. This is my Userpage, I have put some recipes on it: https://cooked.wiki/user/fripi
If you manage to get 5-10 recipes you really like you can rotate them easily and still.enjoyntastynfood every day without too much hassle. All the best 🙂
I love soups (non asian for home made choices because asian soups oftenhave huge amount of salt, I enjoy them when going out and completely stopped eating miso). It’s cheap and healthy.
I bake most of my foods in the oven. I know people complain about Japanese ovens and it’s true, but my microwave has amazing oven.
I bake veggies, meat, fish, you name it. I choose yogurt or sour cream instead of mayonnaise, I don’t bake stuff in mayonnaise. Yes, could be delicious, but if you want eat healthy, you can choose other seasonings. Sometimes salt and black pepper work perfectly. Also not too expensive.
I don’t eat rice because I don’t like it and find Japanese rice unhealthy (it’s carbs without vitamins in my opinion). If you can’t eat without rice, eat less rice (-50%), try to eat brown rice or, even better, other grains. Before each meal eat vegetables (seriously, eat veggies before each meal when possible). And always have huge bowl of salad. Greens, cucumbers, tomatoes, pepper, pumpkin seeds, red onion, just a bit of olive oil, olives. It’s not that expensive to be honest but you can change some ingredients to cabbage which is cheap. Register for your supermarket sales info emails etc. collect coupons.
Don’t eat desserts for breakfast. Buy 12 eggs, boil or fry some for breakfast, maybe half of cucumber, etc. healthy and cheap.
And never ever buy combining good, it’s overpriced.
Also, always check labels, Japanese food has lots of carbs when you don’t expect it.
Don’t buy low fat yogurt, we still need fats for better diet. Sometimes add avocado to your food.
Hope it helps!