Can hard boil eggs with minimal attention (set the alarm on your cellphone), can make 6 or 12 at a time and those will last you a couple days.
Get some vegetables that require minimal preparation - I used pickled vegetables and like them, but canned would be fine too. Maybe tuna or sardines, try them all and see what you like.
Then you've got rice+beans, and you add on some vegetables to it, and then either hard boiled eggs, tuna, or sardines - fast, cheap, healthy.
But yeah if you want to eat carbs and be healthy you have to basically count calories for the rest of your life.
Counting calories is not that hard. I can do it in my head by now. Tracking my weight (which, I think, is equally important, especially for motivation) is more or less a reward and not a chore by now.
As someone who does not get food cravings and does not have blood sugar regulation issues, it's hard for me to understand, but the only way some folks can manage to eat less is by banning certain foods from their life.
I used to eat rice, pasta, potatoes, and bread all the time. I only miss the bread, but I make exceptions when I go to a restaurant and they have a really good bread.
Perhaps it's a diet of coffee/cigarettes (appetite suppressants) that made me go from 200 lbs to 172 in a year but oh well.
I do know that I will have to track my weight and count calories for the rest of my life. That’s ok. (As a teenager I already lost a substantial amount of weight with the same method but I gained it all and more back because I stupidly stopped tracking my weight and counting calories. I’m confident that I won’t make the same mistake again.)