Every plan to eat better assumes a version of you who is not tired.
That version does the shopping on Saturday, cooks properly on Wednesday and does not mind washing up at ten in the evening.
He turns up for about nine days!
After that the real one arrives, and the real one is tired, running late, and would quite like to eat within the next four minutes.
We think almost every system for healthy eating is designed for the first person and then abandoned by the second.
Motivation is a poor building material
We are not against motivation. It is genuinely useful for starting things.
It is what gets the cupboard cleared out and the first shop done, and there is nothing wrong with enjoying that.
The trouble is that it behaves like weather. It arrives, it is pleasant, and then one Wednesday it is simply not there.
If your dinner depends on it being there, your dinner does not happen.
So the question we find worth asking is not how to stay motivated. It is how to need less of it!
The whole of our system
We cook more than we need.
That is it. There is no second part to it.
A pot of lentil soup takes the same forty minutes whether it feeds two people or six.
A tray of potatoes takes the same time in the oven either way.
Cooked rice sits in the fridge for three days and asks nothing of you while it waits.
When the oven is already on for one thing, something else goes in beside it, because the oven is hot anyway and the second tray costs almost nothing.
What this does to a Wednesday
On the tired Wednesday, the decision you were dreading does not get taken at all.
There is nothing to decide, because there is already food.
This is a much smaller thing than motivation and a much more reliable one.
You are not making yourself want the right dinner. You are arranging matters so that the right dinner is the one requiring the least effort.
We think that is worth saying plainly, because it is the opposite of how most advice is written.
The food environment you live in decides most of what you eat, far more than your intentions do.
Change the environment and your intentions stop having to work so hard.
Three things worth having ready
We are not going to give you a system with containers and colour coding, because we have never used one.
In practice we keep three things that make the week work.
A cooked grain in the fridge, which is rice or quinoa or buckwheat, whichever you have.
A cooked legume, which is usually lentils because they need no soaking.
Something roasted, most often potatoes or sweet potatoes.
With those three in the fridge, dinner is an assembly job rather than a cooking job, and lunch tomorrow is already solved.
Where the effort actually goes
None of this asks for more time in the kitchen.
It asks for the time you already spend to be spent slightly differently, in larger quantities and less often.
We did not arrive at this because we are organised people. We arrived at it because cooking a separate meal every single evening is not something most people can keep up.
The next thing worth understanding is what happens when you are not tired at all, and you still want the thing you said you would not eat.
And, always, seek health consciously.
