Hey — it’s Steven.
Another Saturday morning, another meal planning breakdown.
This week:
Don’t rely on willpower or discipline
Shift your mindset to systems
Reduce the amount of decisions daily
*Quick editor’s note: Based on feedback, I’ll start sending out this newsletter every Saturday morning so you have time to implement these frameworks prior to meal planning or grocery shopping for the week ahead.
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Breakdown
I constantly ask friends, family, and WFH professionals about what their meals look like during the week.
Everyone has a slightly different answer.
But one detail is almost always the same.
Everyone shits a brick when it comes to weeknight dinners.
For different reasons:
Kid’s soccer practice
A late-night work session
An extra draining day
Your spouse is getting over a cold
A commute that took way longer than expected
No time to grocery shop earlier in the week
But it’s almost never because your willpower fails at 6pm.
It starts much earlier.
Each morning you wake up with a finite daily budget of willpower
Every new decision you make withdraws from it
By dinner time, the account is empty
Reducing decisions can’t be solved with motivation or discipline alone.
That “hustle-culture” mindset is dead.
It just doesn’t work for me.
Maybe it’s the Italiano in me, but I can’t skip a meal and focus on anything except food.
Instead, I’ve noticed something very consistent in my own life.
Any week I follow a behavior-based system, I see real differences in what I can accomplish.
In the gym.
In my business.
In my family life.
I feel borderline superhuman when I follow structure, especially around meal planning.
I used to joke when I was a cook in the Coast Guard that our missions wouldn’t succeed if the operations team wasn’t fueled by my meals.
It was half a joke, half the truth.
The weeks I don’t know what’s for dinner are the weeks I see no traction anywhere else.
My workouts stall.
My sleep suffers.
My focus disappears.
But on the weeks when dinner is already decided:
There’s no last-minute scramble
Evenings become time to decompress with my wife
I read at night and sleep better
Mornings start on autopilot
I like to say:
A good morning routine begins the night before.
And a good evening routine begins in the morning.
Maybe it sounds a little silly, but it’s 100% true.
If evenings feel harder than they should, you don’t need more willpower.
You need fewer decisions.
Try this one small shift this week.
Plan a few weeknight dinners ahead of time.
See you next Saturday am
Steven | Meal Planning OS
Say hi to me on LinkedIn, anytime. I post daily about reducing decision fatigue through meal planning.
P.S. I breakdown how to turn dinner into a system (instead of a decision) here.
P.P.S. I’d love your feedback. Use the poll below or reply to this email.
