Eating Like an Adult When You’re Too Busy to Think About Food
Not a doctor, not a nutritionist. What follows is the system of a man who, for twenty years, ate whatever was nearest at the moment hunger became an emergency, and then wondered why he was tired every afternoon.
The problem was never knowledge. I knew what good food was. The problem was that every meal was a decision made at the worst possible time: tired, hungry, in a hurry, and standing somewhere with bad options. Under those conditions, everyone chooses badly. The fix wasn’t willpower. It was moving the decision.
Decide once, eat many times
Breakfast is the same most days. So is lunch during the week. I didn’t do this to be virtuous; I did it to stop thinking about food at times when thinking is expensive. Pick two or three meals you can make or buy without effort, that leave you feeling decent at four o’clock, and let them be the default. Variety can happen at dinner and weekends. Weekday lunch doesn’t need to be interesting. It needs to be solved.
The three o’clock rule
If I’m deciding what to eat at three in the afternoon, I’ve already lost. Something has to be in the bag, the drawer, or the fridge at work before the day starts. Nuts, fruit, yesterday’s leftovers, anything that’s actual food. The afternoon hunger isn’t the problem. Meeting it unarmed is.
Shop with a list, eat what’s in the house
The kitchen decides more of your diet than you do. If the house has good defaults, you eat them, because they’re there. If it has bad ones, same thing. I stopped buying the things I didn’t want to eat at ten at night, and ten at night sorted itself out. Shopping is where the decision actually gets made; everything after is just execution.
Cook double
Whenever I cook, it’s twice the quantity. Tomorrow’s lunch is tonight’s dinner in a container. It costs ten more minutes and saves an entire decision, plus the money and the regret of the alternative.
Water first, always
Half of what I thought was afternoon hunger was thirst, and most of the rest was boredom. A glass of water and five minutes answers both before I open anything.
Protect dinner
If the day’s been chaos, dinner is where it gets repaired. Sitting down, actual plate, phone elsewhere, twenty minutes. Not because of the food. Because it’s the one meal that marks the end of the fight and the start of being a person again.
What it changed
The afternoon slump mostly went. The grocery bill went down, oddly, because restaurant food was quietly expensive. And food stopped being a daily source of small failure, which was worth more than any of the rest.
Tomorrow
Put something real in the bag tonight. Pick a default lunch for the week. Cook double once. The decisions move upstream, where you’re smarter.
Launch list
Be there on day one.
One email when the book opens on Kickstarter. Nothing else. Already reading the book? Your Cheat Sheet is at wisdomdeck.com/free.
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The book itself — 40 laws in ten parts, 320 pages, each ending with The Work — is funded first on Kickstarter.