Drink More Soylent
If you are a young career professional in a high cost of living city, you should seriously consider meal replacements for multiple meals per day.
People hear about my majority Soylent diet and say things like "How can you possibly stand that stuff, don't you like food?"
The truth is, I love food. I just love optimizing my life more. Here are some justifications, from a 2014 Soylent 1.0 OG.
Cheap Nutritional Floor
Meal replacement nutritional bioavailability is imperfect. They're ultra-processed, full of seed oils, and don't hold a candle to balanced home-cooked meals.
However, meal replacements are not competing with the platonic ideal of momma's cooking. They're competing with Shin ramen, grocery store hot bars, and slop bowls on a Tuesday at 9pm. A bottle of Soylent or Huel is not optimal, but robust, ensuring that bad diet days don't drop below some baseline.
Depending on your willingness to use a shaker bottle, a day of meal replacements comes at $8 to $20. What does that buy you? 2000 calories, 100g of protein, low added sugar, comprehensive micronutrients, and a low-carb macro mix. Not perfect, but better than waltzing down the street for Chipotle.
Cooking is Slow
People underestimate how long it takes to cook. Not just the shaking pan over flame section, but everything that comes before and after, including the cognitive strain of a ingredient logistics operation.
Let's say one cooked meal per day. Groceries once a week - 2h door to door, ~15min average per meal. Recipe selection/mise en place, preheat, etc: ~15min. Cook time: ~20min. Eat time: ~20min. Wash/clean/wipe time: ~10min. Nearly an hour and a half for a standalone meal, and we just think this is normal?
"Do meal prep on the weekend" - what? You really want to eat two reheated identical meals per day in the back half of the week? Even ignoring that, meal prepping 10 meals, including ingredient purchasing overhead, will still take on the order of an hour.
Prioritize Compounding Gains
You can always learn how to cook later in life. I speak from experience that focused effort for a few months is enough to reach a passable level for domestic purposes. You cannot, however, kickstart many careers later in life. Compounding career capital has a narrow accumulation window, mostly focused in the post-graduation early 20s years.
There is an incredible amount of upskilling that can be achieved in one to two hours a day of free time. Meal replacements are a logistical manifestation device. Know that you can always squeeze out the hour to hit the gym, do interview prep, finish the model, whatever - take that cognitive and temporal effort out of the cooking/eating budget.
No More Sleepy Afternoons
I am utterly incredulous that such a large proportion of people are perfectly okay with being sleepy for a solid chunk of mid-day productive hours. Caffeine is not a solution! Drink a coffee at the same time every day and your body starts modifying diurnal cortisol production to offset it the other way.
The postprandial crash (food coma) is substantially avoided with liquid meal replacements. With a clear indication of the volume of food being consumed per unit time, you can microdose calories continuously throughout the course of a day, modulating effective glycemic index and drowsiness peaks.
Hedonic Recalibration
Meal replacements will help you enjoy real food, not take away their joy. You eat delicious food all day and stop understanding what makes sustenance special.
Once you've spent a day feeding yourself from beige plastic bottles, cooking with your partner or stepping out for a burger will taste so good.
Restaurant slop and home cooking are a false binary. Soylent is the dietary dialectical synthesis.