I am not someone with infinite discipline or willpower. You'd be hard pressed to find someone with a bigger sweet tooth than me.

I am not a great cook. I cannot just whip a delicious meal out with 1.3 ingredients in 8 minutes and be done with it.

I am fine eating the same thing for lunch about 5 days of the week (scrambled eggs) but every 6 months, I lose all interest in eggs.

And like most of you, I always lose the plot later in the day - dinner!

Every summer our team has the tradition to pack and move office to the quiet and cool place of Mechi Chal. It’s a mountain hut located near Pamporovo in Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria. We work, have fun and stuff ourselves with delicious local food.
Photo by Stefan Vladimirov / Unsplash

Why? Well, end of the day, we are all fatigued after work. The brain has worked overtime and it has taken hundreds and hundreds of decisions, small and large. Not just food-related but work-related, home-related and well, pretty much everything. And so, when 7 pm rolls around, I used to inevitably open up my food delivery app and get some food.

Now, while I knew that I needed to order in less and eat at home more, getting around to doing it was not easy.

The lockdown snapped me out of this routine.

But it all comes down to one hour every Sunday - the most important hour on which the next week's eating hinges on - when we sit down and plan the menu for the week.

Every Sunday, my wife and I sit down and plan what we are going to eat for lunch and dinner over the next week. We debate over it, we write it down on our whiteboard, we look at the current groceries we have and make our grocery list, and when we are on a roll we also plan where we are gonna order in from (we cook 5 days of the week and order in twice).

This streamlines a whole lot of things - what we need to order and when? What's the prep work to be done?

And the decision is already made - what are we doing for dinner tonight? It is right there on the board. This means that's one less thing to negotiate or worry about. Instead, now you just do.

Photo by Kvalifik / Unsplash

The intent has already been clarified, which is most of the battle.

How healthy I eat this week and how stress-free and annoyance-free the process is every week hinges on that one hour. I believe that the one hour of planning has a much bigger impact on my health than the 5 hours I spend on physical activity.