Effortless Food Hack to Enjoy Healthy Meals, Free Up 10 Hours/Week, and Autopilot Your Diet Without Cooking (CookUnity Review)
When you think of healthy meals, you might think of…
🥕 Low calories
🥩 High protein
🥬 Nutritious ingredients
But you don’t have the time to calculate your macros and meal prep chicken and veggies you think you’re going to eat 14 times a week (assuming they even stay fresh all week).
Meanwhile, work is sapping your time and energy, and you wonder how you’re going to stay in shape.
You think to yourself: Be able to pay rent. Have a life. Stay in shape.
Pick two.
Or: Maybe I should just get myself a personal chef and a nutritionist.
But you’re not exactly looking to spend days vetting them and 1,000s of dollars a month either.
Well, what if I said I found a way to have your cake and eat it too?
- Meals that meet your macro and calorie targets (balanced with protein and veggies in a portion that you won’t overeat)
- Without interrupting your weekends with grocery shopping or cooking (no need to wait to pre-heat or boil anything)
- Without wasting food prepping repetitive meals that you can’t enjoy
- At a cost (~$10/meal) lower than the average restaurant meal whose main ingredient is butter and leaves you with food coma (lunchflation anyone?)
- All on autopilot — so you don’t have to think about what to eat more than once a week
It gets a little suspiciously boring (in a good way) not having to think about food at all.
How? Spoiler alert:
I found that CookUnity delivers a variety of high-protein (40+ grams), calorie-conscious, affordable, tasty, and balanced meals you choose from a menu. (Pics of food below!)
You can use their website or app to customize your weekly meals. And then set it and forget it. Use this link to get $50 off your first meal with CookUnity (or use the discount code BRIHA25939).
Not convinced to try this meal cooking service? What’s CookUnity?
“It’s just a fancy TV dinner! This is just fast food!”
Listen. It’s (good) food fast, not fast food.
I actually feel good after eating these chef-cooked meals. No food comas, sugar spikes, or hunger from fast-digesting starch. I also stopped having cravings for the usual junk I’d order off DoorDash. Like I’d open DoorDash but end up closing it every time.
New chefs. Local kitchens.
We’re a collective of over 60 independent chefs and counting, now cooking in New York, LA, Atlanta, Austin, and Chicago — with Seattle and Miami coming soon.
I love that it’s a collective of actual chefs with their own styles and menu. There are a variety of cuisines to fit your preferences —
- Mediterranean
- Indian
- Korean
- American
- etc.
You can even filter by which chefs you want to order from (more on that later).
When I eat Cajun Pork Chops that are actually an inch thick, couscous that is still bouncy, sauce/salad/naan you set aside and add later after the meat has heated up, all from a variety of options you have total control over… what I see is a guilt-free health-conscious meal system that automatically caters to my palate and all-day-busy schedule.
As we get older, our bodies need to be taken care of even more. And yet, life puts more demands on us.
I couldn’t do all the shopping, planning, and cooking (and cleaning up) on my own consistently, nor do I want to anymore as life gets busier.
But I’m happy to have found a way to eat well with nutritious meals for a much more reasonable price than eating out, or finding a nutritionist and a personal chef.
Look how thicc that meat is!
I prefer high-protein meals, so that’s what I get. But don’t worry! There are cooks who create plenty of other types of food, like pasta, tacos, wings, rice bowls, Asian-style noodles, etc.
Here’s a pasta for all you carb monsters:
They recommend heating the container in an oven and plating the food before serving. I choose to eat it right out of the container once it’s out of the oven. This can sound like it’s just a fancy TV dinner, but this is part of the convenience for me.
I’m breathing a sigh of relief thinking about meals being delivered directly to my doorstep, like having a neighborhood auntie drop them off so you can work or study harder.
Most of all, I love that I don’t have to step outside when I’m hungry or make impulse orders on DoorDash for meals whose main ingredient is butter.
By the way, the meals are delivered in a sturdy, white tote bag, chilled under a slab of ice. You can keep the insulated tote bags for your own use, or give them back to the delivery person next time. CookUnity has a zero-waste goal.
Get $50 off to try your first order with CookUnity.
Compare this to the TYPICAL cycle of struggling to eat healthily
You’re busy and tired at work. You drive out of the office/house to buy a Panera combo. Seeing the $17 receipt, you remember Patty from accounting eating her pressure-cooked chicken soup. Sounds a lot healthier and cheaper than your sandwich and chowder (+ tax and tip you hit on autopilot).
After work, you grab a Whopper combo for dinner, vowing to research a decent way to feed yourself. You fall asleep in front of Netflix with lettuce stuck to your arm.
Sunday afternoon: You decide to hit the grocery store. How many pounds of chicken breast do you need? Who knows, let’s grab some broccoli, which now costs $3 a head. What else looks healthy? A salad mix, avocados, raspberries, ground beef, eggs — why is everything so expensive these days? The USDA food pyramid from the 1970s said to eat bread and milk, so into the cart they go.
You stock your fridge, bake your chicken and steam your broccoli, divvy them up into containers, and give it a taste… Tastes edible enough. You celebrate your hard work with a pizza to distract yourself from the Sunday scaries and dirty dishes piled up in your sink.
But you’re still feeling hungry throughout the week. A donut from the break room wouldn’t hurt. You’re also getting tired of the dry chicken and don’t know what to do with the avocados turning brown.
You try a couple of recipes to mix it up, but it takes too long each time. (You have to do this every day?!) You keep running out of fresh ingredients. The salad has already wilted into soggy moss, the milk is suspicious, and the meals you put into reusable Tupperware are starting to smell funkier by the day. You have no more appetite for this, so you DoorDash some soggy tacos trapped in a moist box.
You feel like you wasted time, energy, and food and didn’t even enjoy it. Not worth the money you saved. Most of all, you don’t want to step into a store as pretentious as Whole Foods ever again. Whatever. “Fitness is overrated! Let’s get that bread instead 🍞🤑”
Until you stop fitting into your pants and the cycle begins again. Do you even remember what your New Year resolution was?
No more wasting time and food with haphazard cooking
Maybe you’ve heard these phrases:
- “Abs are made in the kitchen, not in the gym.”
- “80% of fitness comes from your diet.”
- “What gets measured gets managed.”
In other words, watching your calories and macros makes the biggest impact on weight management. How do you figure out if what you’re eating meets your calories or macro requirements?
CookUnity makes all this absolutely frictionless. On the CookUnity website or app, you can filter based on your needs. Less carb? Vegetarian? Meat-based?
Every week, they will send you a reminder and pre-fill your order based on past preferences, which you can edit before confirming. Otherwise, they will just send it to you on autopilot.
So far, my favorites are the Adobo Chicken and Chorizo Paella (chicken and sausage over Calasparra rice), Adobo Flank Steak (beef with roasted potatoes and broccoli), and Herbs de Provence Roasted Chicken (with croutons and salad). You’ll want to experiment and try out meals for a week or two to find your own favorite meals.
And the chefs always come out with new meals every week, so check back in to see what else is new on their menu. CookUnity highlights new meals for you to consider (watch out for email announcements). Get $50 off your first order here.
Combine this with your favorite fitness activities (whether they’re brief exercises, intermittent fasting, or tracking your macros)…
And you’ll be well on your way to an effortless lifestyle where you can:
- Outsource your nutrition
- With a variety of meals
- Batched at a price lower than manually ordering greasy or unfulfilling (high carb and expensive) meals from a restaurant every time you get a craving or muffins from the grocery store to fill a craving when your brain is too exhausted to care.
You can save a ton of time grocery shopping (2 hours+ to drive and shop) and actually making the food (average of 30 minutes for each meal * 2–3 meals a day, not counting recipe research).
That’s around 10 extra hours a week you could use to catch up on your projects, pursue a hobby, or simply enjoy your time.
How much are 10 hours of your time worth? What about 500 hours a year?
Imagine how much more productive and focused you’ll be not having to interrupt your work scrounging for food.
You can also save money on top of that. With each additional meal you add to your order, you save a certain amount. I go for the 8-meal plan, but you can save more by going for the 12- or 16-meal plan. Some meals do cost extra, though, so watch out for that.
Shipping costs included, you end up with an effective cost of around $12 plus change per meal that’s calorie-conscious, full of meat, and cheaper than the typical meal from a restaurant — all automatically delivered to you every week and putting your food and nutrition worries to rest.
Compare that to your typical unhealthy (and cold and soggy) DoorDash meal that costs $20, $30, $40, $50 or more!
Sure, you’ll save some time over the upcoming week if you spend a weekend afternoon meal prepping. More power to you if you can do it consistently and you can create variety and flavor in your meals. (I couldn’t make it work 😬)
Enjoying the process is what makes it sustainable. How many times have you given up on weight loss because you were tired of cooking and eating the same old bland food?
$110 a week is a good return on investment in yourself (dare I say, a lifehack) for buying back your time, sanity, and fitness. It’s worth at least trying it out once at a $50 discount. If you don’t like it, there’s no obligation to continue.
“OK, this makes sense… But there are a bunch of other services like this, no?”
I would rave about those other ones if I liked them, too.
Not to name them — but I’ve tried many and have seen ads for a bunch of similar and adjacent services out there. But when I look into or try them, I end up leaving disappointed.
On the other hand, I haven’t looked back from CookUnity.
In my opinion, CookUnity is the best of all worlds — the perfect fusion of reasonable cost, taste, nutrition, packaging, AND convenience.
Of course, do your due diligence and choose the service that’s right for you. You may prefer other services like Freshly.
Here’s how I personally compare CookUnity to other meal delivery services:
- The others don’t have thoughtful packaging. CookUnity is a zero-waste company, so you can give your bag back to the driver next time.
- The others are often higher in calories (vs. CookUnity meals that are thoughtfully designed to be around 500–900 kcals).
- The others either don’t taste as good, are small portions, or go bad/sour quickly. CookUnity meals do start to go bad after about a week, so check the expiration dates printed on the packaging.
- The others sometimes require cooking (I’m here to save time 😒)
Questions you probably have about CookUnity / frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- “Are the meals actually good?” Yes, I was impressed with most of the meals I got. This is my favorite meal delivery service. Don’t expect steakhouse quality, but the meals definitely have the mark of a chef. Meals usually have 3–4 of these components: protein, carb, veggies.
- “Can you skip a week of delivery?” Yes, via the app or website.
- “Can you change your meals every week?” Yes, they’ll send you a reminder to confirm your meals.
- “Why not Blue Apron?” I’ve tried at least five of these meal kits. They take longer than the recipe says. A 30-minute recipe turns into 90 minutes, possibly because I suck at cooking. Try doing that every day, and soon you get tired of it. Also, their ingredients are so exotic and specific that you’ll rely on them if you want to make the same meal again (where do you get strands of saffron?). If you want to cook without the hassle of shopping, I would try HelloFresh, which was one of my favorite meal kits. Ingredient quality is slightly lower than Blue Apron, but you get easier meals with ingredients you can easily find at the store. It’s been years since I’ve tried these, so explore your options.
- “Why not Soylent, Huel, etc.?” This is actual cooked food, rather than freeze-dried globules you reconstitute with water. You’ll feel fuller and more satisfied.
- “How do you heat up the food?” They offer two sets of directions: oven and microwave. Here’s an example:
- “Do the meals come with nutritional information?” Yes, there’s a label with stats and ingredients (see above).
- “Do these meals last a while?” I try to finish my meals within 7 days, and they all taste fresh during that time. They don’t come frozen (though kept cool with ice packs), but you can freeze them.
- “Do they deliver to me?” Probably! They deliver to all states within the continental U.S.
- “Are you locked into a contract?” No, cancel or skip your next week by the deadline. Set a reminder in your calendar or let the app notify you. They’ll also email you a reminder.
If you’re ready, try it here for $50 off (or use the discount code BRIHA25939), or explore CookUnity’s front page first!
