Bonus points for healthy/low carb. Omivore, vegetarian, vegan, I eat all the things but my autistic ass is very low on spoons. I’m a good cook but even the thought of cooking instant ramen sounds daunting sometimes.
Easy things I’ve incorporated are protein shakes with coffee, flax milk and chia seeds during the morning. Keeps me good til 1pm or so since breakfast grosses me out during the weekdays and it takes like 2 minutes to prepare
Also wraps. Throw a protein on, condiments or a sauce like pesto or something, rip up some lettuce with your BARE HANDS, and that’s it. Or if you’re feeling fancy, slice up some cheese/veggies. Less than 5 minutes with minimal clean up, just a cutting board knife, plate and maybe a spoon or butter knife. Sometimes if I’m not cutting much ill just do it carefully in my hands or on my plate to avoid washing the cutting board
I think if you get a decent one they’re pretty good for smaller 1-2 serve salads as a main, depending on what you put into it or maybe 3-4 serves as a side.
They aren’t a workhorse though.
If you wanted a step up it would be a mandolin and one of those orange korean julienne slicers, but then you’ve moved out of the low energy, low cleaning burden and into a completely different realm of cooking because suddenly the amount of dishes piles up significantly. (Although if you love carrot and you want the right texture, a julienne slicer is second to none.)
The other alternative is one of those electric salad shooter-type rotary slicer/grater appliances, the ones that rest on your bench top are a better design imo, but what you save in prep time you probably pay for in cleanup time. If you were planning on making and eating lots of salad in the coming days as your main meals though, that’s where you’d hit a sweet spot of them being an efficient use of time and your energy.
In that use-case it would be something where I personally would prep my veggies and throw them into individual containers so I’d be able to make a salad at a whim for lunch and then I’d use that same container of sliced peppers and grated carrot to put as the side vegetables for a burrito bowl while combining the diced/grated tomato with the diced onion and a bit of lime and cilantro into a pico de gallo. Or basically the same, except for nachos or tacos.
If you bulk prep each veg and keep them separate then you’ll probably find that they’ll keep longer, if one thing is more delicate and it goes bad it’s not going to ruin all the other veg, and it would help give me the guise of variety while riffing on the exact same base ingredients of fresh vegetables, except served in different configurations in different dishes.