I am currently digging myself out of a similar hole after losing a bunch of weight a couple of years ago. Let me try and remember some good habits I had for the both of us.

• I love fruit! If you have a hard time grabbing it vs something quicker, you can food prep it for about 30 min on Sundays and make a big ass bowl of fruit salad for the week. It’s sweet and full of fiber, which will help fill you up. Buying seasonal and clearance produce will help reduce cost. Do NOT put bananas into the fruit salad, they rot quick.

• Instant grits/oatmeal make for a quick lazy meal, are easy to customize with fresher ingredients, and usually come in small individual portions.

• Asian and Mexican grocers tend to have cheaper produce and more variety. Maybe I just lucked out with mine, it’ll vary by location.

• White rice, pasta and bread aren’t always the worst. Just portion it out and treat it like a side dish rather than the main course. I didn’t feel the need to force myself to eat brown rice or anything I didn’t like.

• Dry seasoning over premade sauces every time. If you absolutely must have sauce, make it from scratch. And I’m not talking simple stuff like soy sauce, mustard or vinegar: I’m talking fake mayos, BBQ sauce, ketchup. The dense ones. That shit can sneak up on you as much as sugary drinks. If it isn’t a key ingredient for a larger dish, ignore the sauce. If it is key, just be really careful with portions. Yes, this especially goes for vegan cheese sauces, do it from scratch. The worst offender for this is nut butters btw, so if you make protein drinks with any be really careful with it.

• Soy curls are pog, especially in fake chicken noodle soup. A very shelf stable protein.

• I used to focus on making soups when it was cold and salads when it was hot. I’d have it like 2-3 times a week, and they tend to use up leftover fresh ingredients that might otherwise go bad. There are so many different combos out there, but most end up being really filling and healthy.

Oh, well that’s simple then, and it’s not even vegan specific.

If I had to go back in time and tell myself food related advice (besides go vegan lol), it would be that just like your muscles can grow and shrink, your taste buds are also capable of incredible change over time.

Just because you hated broccoli as a kid doesn’t mean you hate it now. It’s important to try healthy foods you don’t usually eat once every few years to see if anything has changed. There’s such a wide variety of produce out there to try. You can gradually adjust your spice tolerance, yes even if you’re autistic, I used to hate mustard, and now I put that shit on everything. Any flavor can become as normal as vanilla if you eat it enough times, an example being coconut. At first, coconut can be a very overpowering flavor, but if you eat it long enough it’ll just seem mundane and ordinary. Coconut milk will just taste like… well, milk. You might get cravings for food that you don’t really want to eat, but it is possible to find alternatives and get used to them.

I will have to DM you, but yes I did diet and lose weight.

Going to be real with you, avoiding plastic in this day and age is like trying to avoid hitting any bugs while you’re driving, and I say that knowing that plastic is technically an animal product. Obviously, I don’t want people to eat a credit card worth of microplastics every day, but it’s impossible to avoid it altogether. It’s used for pretty much every food packaging, furniture, clothes, decor, appliances, cars, and toy on the market. I’m sure you know how hard it is to avoid from personal experience. I try to be as vegan as I can, given the circumstances of the plastic age, but ultimately oil made of ancient dead animals is still preferable to ongoing and unnecessary animal cruelty today.

While I do tend to avoid pleather clothes because most of it sheds in a couple of years or less and is generally too warm for the environment I live in, if my partner or I really need a raincoat for some reason it’ll probably be made of some sort of plastic. We’re indoor nerds that don’t really camp or have physically demanding jobs so that works for us. One of us commutes to the bus, and a simple raincoat gets the job done. I personally use umbrellas and those are made of metal and… yeah, plastic. I guess I could wear big hats more often if I wanted to stop using umbrellas. Most of the time we’ll either layer up or avoid the outdoors altogether… or just get wet lol. It happens sometimes.

If you’ve got the money, there are alternatives to both leather and pleather, although they tend to be on the more expensive and experimental side, such as apple leather, mushroom leather, and cactus leather. There are also vegan wools and cashmere out there, but they can be expensive at full price. If you need vegan work boots you probably will have to save up for them. TBH I don’t think good quality work boots have gotten any cheaper over the years, so you might have to save for new ones regardless. On the bright side, vegan friendly furniture, clothes, and purses have been on the market for a few years and can be purchased second hand if you spend enough time tracking them down. Purchasing second hand is also very helpful for seeing how well a particular vegan material has aged. I have gotten several pairs of goth boots via trading and thrifting this way. Development on these new materials is overall hopeful, but it could still be a few more years before it becomes mainstream. It would certainly be a lot more hopeful if capitalism were toppled, but, well… you could say that about pretty much everything nowadays.

I’m afraid I only have experience buying and cooking for 1-2 people.

I have seen a lot of great premade vegan chicken nugget and mac and cheese options for kids (even dino nuggies!), but generally we don’t do a ton of prep cooking on Sunday since one of us is hybrid wfh. There are lots of youtubers that have shared their bulk cooking recipes online and even show you step by step how they do it. I can go hunting for some good ones and DM you if you like. From what I’ve seen, the building components for bulk frozen meals include lots of plant based proteins (beans, tofu, seitan, soy curls, other fake meats), veggies, fruits and then some sort of carb like rice or pasta.

We do like to make a big one pot recipe each Sunday since we know that we don’t like to cook on Monday. Usually it’s something like daal, curry, black bean chili, fake chicken noodle soup, or misc stir-fry. Daal is one of our favorites now, and neither of us had even tried it before going vegan.

First, I know medical care is expensive in the USA, but I’d really recommend getting tested if it’s so serious that it’s putting you in the hospital. Vegan or not, you might eat something that kills you down the line. Debt is better than death.

Second, I think you’d be surprised by how many allergy friendly processed foods are also vegan. Both groups are such a tiny part of the overall population that often times they’ll just group us all together and assume every vegan is allergic to something. Some of the more common allergens that affect vegans are soy, wheat, sesame seeds, and nuts. I’ve seen various premade pizzas, proteins, crackers, and cheeses avoid some of these allergens. I’d say out of the most common ones, soy is probably the hardest to avoid. However, if you’re eating out, especially at a vegan place, I’ve never had issues finding out if something had an allergen or not. In fact, sometimes they’ll advertise it right in the dish description.

Of course, there are food allergens out there you’d also be avoiding by going vegan like dairy (I didn’t realize I was allergic to it until I stopped eating it), eggs, meat, and fish (shellfish is a major one). Out of the most common allergies, it’s about a 50/50 on whether it affects vegans or not. I will say, as a vegan in America, I’ve gotten way less food poisoning since I went vegan. I basically just need to be careful about washed greens and restaurant cleanliness nowadays, so that’s been nice.

Again, I’d really recommend getting tested if you can, so you know what exactly it is you need to avoid. Tell your doctor about your family history. If you’re American I can recommend a specific grocery chain that likes to focus on allergy specific vegan foods, but I can tell you now that it won’t be cheap. Once you know what affects you, you’re better off cooking at home.

I can answer the first question here, second question I’ll generalize here and DM you specifics.

So I’m assuming food prep includes weekly cooking. My partner and I don’t like to do all our cooking at once. Let’s see… we’ll typically eat something easy for breakfast like fruit or instant grits/oatmeal, lunch is either leftovers or frozen meals, but dinner usually involves cooking. We cook dinners for 5-6 days of the week. Sometimes it’s an easy 20 minute salad and other times it’s a 1.5 hour chili or daal that we let simmer for a while. On the average week, I’d say we cook a combined 5-6 hours. Less if we eat out more or there’s a great frozen food sale, more if we’re trying to eat more veggies and whole foods.

As for grab and go, there’s a ton of options. If you’re at the grocery store, there are usually lots of vegan frozen meals and vegan chicken nuggets/tenders to pick from. (Never get vegan wings, though, they’re expensive and taste like shit.) Other nice things include samosas, frozen pizza, instant ramen, ice cream pints, sorbet, veggie fried rice, a surprising amount of chips, pretzels, cookies, some chocolate bars and even fake meat/cheese deli options at one grocery store I frequent. They can make whole fresh vegan subs nowadays, and it’s not just filled with vegetables like at a certain sub chain.

If by grab and go you meant eating out, there are lots of options as well. I’m going to assume you live in an area that doesn’t have a ton of vegan restaurants, so this list will be a little generic: smoothies, vegetable subs, veggie/tofu sushi, pad thai, tons of Mexican food (ask if the beans are vegetarian-they can be fried in animal fat), fake protein burgers (fake meat/black bean/veggie/ect), most fries, most hashbrowns, avocado toast, most coffee places have vegan options, acai bowls, and so much more depending on your location. There are entire guides to eating out vegan, since plenty of us have to travel eventually.

Long story short, cooking is great and recommended, but you absolutely do not need to know how to cook to be vegan. Eat as little or as much slop as you want, I certainly do.

I’ll DM you some recommendations, but I will say here that you’d be surprised how many margarines are vegan friendly.

NewOldGuard’s answer was great, let me DM you some recommendations as well.