Here's my advice for quick cheap healthy meals: get a microwave steamer. Throw frozen veggies and meat bits (I use Morningstar brand fake-meat strips but I assume real meat equivalents exist). Takes about ten minutes to make a meal, you can mix up the vegetables and any sauces you want to use on the whole thing.
Before this I drank Soylent for around 2 years, I'm not the kind of person to get bored by lack of variety in food. I just wanted something easier and healthier than Soylent.
The only part of the diet I actually find "boring" is the vegetables. I like everything else, I specifically picked foods from each category I enjoyed enough to eat daily. E.g. I tried several kinds of raspberries and decided I didn't like them enough to have daily.
I can still add variety. Maybe once a week I'll go out and grab a tuna salad, and somewhat less often I'll have a steak salad. And the other week I bought a pack of ice cream sandwiches and had 2-3/day till it was finished, and had less elsewhere to compensate. I may gradually add more things in as I experiment, but this is my base diet, one I can be comfortable knowing it's nutritious.
You are already at ~3500-4200 cal deficit a week. Recommended typical safe is ~7000 (2 lbs).
If you are doing any kind of exercise you will get close to that, but at 150 lbs, im not sure you need that much loss.
Stay safe my friend
It’s 8 eggs a day (soft boiled in a $20 egg steamer)... lots of bok choy or broccoli in avocado oil (oil for calories)... rice... and protein shakes. I microwave the veggies.
Protein shake recipe is Greek yogurt from Costco, frozen berries, oatmeal, a scoop of pea protein, avocado oil.
I combine the two to get 3000 calories a day.
I enjoy food sometimes, like the first few bites, but to me hunger is a disease and eating is a chore. I’ve always had a poor appetite and low-ish (21) BMI.
Really the biggest factor for me was a food I like enough to have daily, and minimal preparation. The cheap is a bonus.
Here's my cheap, fast, and healthy diet that doesn't require any cooking. I started a few months ago and it's very effective in losing weight and saving time.
Half of a pound container of cottage cheese, plus a large melon (cantaloupe or honeydew are easy to cut once you learn how) for breakfast. One can of sardines for lunch. Another can of sardines, plus a can of vegetables for dinner.
One bottle of water at each meal plus 1-2 more throughout the day. Whenever hungry in between meals, snack on almonds.
You can buy a week or so worth of everything at a time, and some like the fish, vegetables, and nuts can be bought in bulk for months. Effectively no work to prepare anything, the trickiest is really the melons, you can substitute to bananas or grapes for easier fruit but higher carbs. And you can always eat out a meal every few days, estimate how much it makes up and eat that much less.
This costs roughly $10/day, and I'm targeting 1200 calories, which is the minimum recommendation for men. I track everything with an app and allow myself to go slightly higher if I'm hungry at the end of the day. There's about 3-400 calories buffer for those almonds, which I sometimes use for coffee with milk, or for various alternative snacks (e.g. granola bars in bulk turn out to be extremely cheap on a per calorie basis). And then there's a buffer between 1200 and the roughly 17-1800 I'd be at for breakeven, so if I splurge once a week I just don't lose weight that day but I'm not gaining anything.