Healthy/Delicious meals made easy

As the book by Benjamin Hardy says, Willpower Doesn’t Work!

Instead, two things I encourage people to do is to take control of your environment and to build systems that more or less automate healthy decisions.

In an upcoming post I will write about designing your home to promote improve health by default, but today we will be discussing my favourite example of building a system:

Every Wednesday seven healthy and delicious meals get delivered to my door in a cooler bag with an ice pack. Meels knows my preferences and they choose the meals for me and they charge my card on a weekly basis. I spent 5-10 minutes clicking some buttons when I signed up and now they know things such as:

• I like Beef, fish, chicken, and Turkey
• I don’t like Pork or shellfish
• I like rice, potatoes, and rice noodles, but not pasta or anything with flour
• I like a mix of meals with meat/fish and veggies and meals with meat/fish and veggies and rice/potatoes/carbs

I have literally never had a bad meal from them, and at this point I’ve had 200+ meals from them. There have been periods where I got as many as 24 meals in a week delivered from them (12 on Wednesday and 12 on Sunday).

I heat the meal up in a pyrex dish in my toaster oven (it takes just ten minutes), and by eating my meals out of the pyrex dish there is only one dish to clean when I’m done.

I’ve also enjoyed Protein Chefs (great meals but awful software and a confusing website) and Essential Meal Delivery (they are more focused on the weight loss market and I found their chicken breast to be a bit bland, but I really enjoyed everything else from them and I know their owner – he is a good person who genuinely cares).

The only services I’ve used that I can’t recommend are Live Fit Foods and Good Food. Here is why:

• LiveFit foods (at least at the time) had a large industrial kitchen in London that services all of Ontario. So for Toronto customers the meals come by post. The ice packs had completely melted by the time they arrived and were room temperature. It came a day later than it was supposed to and when I wrote their customer service to express my concern they downplayed it. Given there are so many good services that are local with their own delivery drivers/partners I’d rather not have my meals mailed to me.
• For people who love to cook meal kits are great, but to me the entire point of ordering something prepared is to save time. I don’t want to spend 20-30 minutes cooking a meal that has no leftovers, but that’s what happens with meal kits like Good Food. I ended up wasting a lot of the meals because I didn’t feel like cooking them and/or I was short on time. If I’m going to cook I’d rather do one big meal prep on the weekend and have food for the entire week.

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