nikki (00:00)
If you're anything like me, your worst dinner disaster might not be about burning dinner. It might be about just not making it. So you know how it goes, right? It gets to be that time of night and you haven't figured anything out and maybe you're like me and you'll pull out a frozen pizza again. Okay? And look, everybody eats, nobody's harmed, the kids are fine,
But there's always this tiny voice in my head acting like this frozen pizza is just evidence that I failed again.
And here's the thing I think I finally figured out. The pizza isn't the problem. so today we're gonna talk about why the phrase what's for dinner wears you out and why I don't think it's ever really about the food. And I want you to stick around because at the end I'm gonna tell you about something I built exactly for this. It's opening October twenty-seventh,
If you're new here, welcome back to 1% better in midlife. I am Nikki Cheak and today we are talking about why What's for Dinner is wearing you out. And why do I want to talk about this? Because I want you to look at the calendar. Halloween is right around the corner, and then Thanksgiving and the holiday parties start and the cookie exchanges and the school programs and the work stuff. And every weekend starts to have something in it. And every one of those things comes with more decisions. Who's bringing what?
What time do we eat? Do we need to grab something on the way? Is there something in the house that we can have for the kids while we're going? So if dinner is already feeling like a lot in October, it's about to get a whole lot worse. So I want to go back to the pizza for a second. Because if pizza's not the problem, then what is? And I think for me it's this. It's I wake up knowing that breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner are all waiting to just be invented again, right? Like
From scratch. I'll go to the grocery store, I'll buy a bunch of stuff, and then I have to think about what those what all of that stuff is going to actually look like. So, you know, breakfast, what do we have? Is anybody like out of something? Who's eating what? And is somebody already late for school? And lunch could be the same way, right? Lunches for the kids, lunch for me, which usually I just grab whatever's we have, and then lunch for my husband, right? And then there's dinner.
And this is always the big one because somebody walks in straight from school or sometimes before they leave for school and they're like, what's for dinner? And it's like that nails on a chapboard moment. Because sometimes I don't know. And sometimes I just don't want to make that decision. But here's the bigger part of it, right? It's not just a decision. It's a whole day of decisions that start in one place and then just don't go anywhere. Okay. They sit in your head.
They're running in the background and while you're trying to work or drive or answer texts or remember something else. So by the time dinner comes around, it's not that you can't cook, it's that you know you're out of decisions. And that's usually when the pizza comes out. Okay. Now this is where I think a lot of us go wrong. And I have been very guilty of this myself, okay? We treat it like food is a problem. Okay. We decide that the pizza is an issue.
And that we're gonna do better. So we find new recipes, we clean out the freezer, we make a big grocery list that looks like maybe we want to do things, we want to get healthy, we want to have better meals, but maybe it just doesn't work, right? And then what do we actually do? We added more decisions, right? We added new recipes to pick from, new ingredients to find, new things to figure out how to make, and on top of that, convincing everybody in the house to actually eat it. So by the end of the week.
You're having that frozen pizza again. Except now there's also a bag of something in the fridge that's probably going bad, and then you're like, yeah, so you let all of that food go to waste and you didn't have that and and then you had the pizza anyway, okay? Look, I'll be honest, I've tried the other wrap too. Okay, I've had a ton of great meal plans and I'll open them and it's it's wonderful and helpful, but
A meal plan that somebody else wrote doesn't really know what's going on in your house. Okay. It doesn't know that you've got boys that, like to eat a lot. It also doesn't know what nights practice are and that some nights nobody's home until seven. It also doesn't know the foods that you don't eat or can't eat or maybe you're allergic to. So when you print it out and you look at it and then you end up sitting there on Sunday and you're like, Okay, I just have to start all over again. Which is
What is that? More decisions. So here's what I've noticed, and this is the biggest thing that I think that has changed all of the things for me.
It's the exact same frozen pizza, okay? But when s it's six forty five and I'm pulling it out of the freezer because I've run out of ideas, that's when the little voice shows up. That's when it starts to feel like evidence, okay? And when pizza night is already on the plan and it's just like a Friday, Friday night's pizza night, right? Then that pizza night becomes a different story because the food didn't change. So what changed was that whether
a decision was already made. Okay. So I think that's where a lot of the guilt that we we carry around food isn't really about food. It's feels like we're just dropping the ball. Like breakfast, lunch, dinner. They're all getting graded every day, all day. And then that pizza or you know replace that with your favorite last minute meal, maybe it's spaghetti. That's the bad grade. Okay. But a decision that's already been made, it doesn't get graded.
It's just that's what that's what we're having tonight, right? So the obvious answer is okay, so let's just sit down and plan the week, right? You're gonna sit down on Sunday, you're gonna figure it all out, and my gosh, I've done that for years where I'll sit down and I'll want to figure out the whole plan, but then guess what? Then it's not even all just the plan. Then it's like, okay, well, what do I feel like eating this week? What do we have going on? And
Maybe we have multiple sports practices. My husband and I have to conquer, divide and conquer for multiple kids. Maybe we have an activity right after school and I'm like, okay, well when am I even gonna cook dinner? So the week gets busy and then I'm so I'm not only now c trying to compare what our week looks like with what the meals that we wanna eat are, but it's also trying to figure out
what does that look like from a like what are my kids gonna eat this week? Like do they want are these things that they want? Are these things that they will eat? Actually eat. And so by Sunday I'm just sitting down, you know, and I am already dreading meal planning because I have to start all over again. And I've done and and I I still do like sometimes pick certain nights that we're gonna have certain things, but
Let's be honest, my kids get sick of tacos and burrito bowls every week. And so they're like, I don't really want that this week. And so I and I get it, because sometimes I get sick of them too. Right. So that's exactly why I needed something that was gonna take this off of my plate. And so I built one less thing. And for a long time I would, you know, wing dinner, right?
Because I got sick of meal planning, because it was stressing me out, because I didn't want to sit down and try and figure out all of these decisions that I was just talking about. So I would wing dinner. And what that meant was going to the grocery store two times a day, sometimes getting frustrated and probably spending way more money than I needed to. And then I would grab the things that weren't healthy and everybody was eating something different. And it honestly just became a bigger problem. So
One less thing was born, and that's my personalized meal planning system. And I want you to hear me when I tell you this because personalized is the entire point of this. It's not another meal plan that somebody else wrote for you and it's somebody else's family. It gets down into the nitty-gritty. You tell it about your house, your people, right? Like everybody in your house, the busy nights that you have, the foods that you actually we eat, and things that you don't eat by child.
Right, or by family member. It talks about it goes into the details of if you eat chicken, right? Or it goes into the details of all of the different types of meat that you might eat. And when you get to those meats, it goes into even more detail about the type of cuts and meat, right? Because some meals are based on chicken thighs, but if your family doesn't eat chicken thighs, well, maybe you don't want to have that meal, right? So it also talks about
types of food that you like. Maybe your family loves
Thai food, right? Maybe your family loves Italian food. You can select all of these different types of food and it will pull all of that in. It also does allow you to pull in recipes from your favorite food bloggers. So all of those places that you have saved recipes out there for so long, but then you don't know whether or not it's gonna work, you can put all of those things in there. And so this way, when you sit down on Sundays, you're not starting from a blank page.
The deciding is already done for you, right? So I now literally, since I've built the system, only go in and say plan my week. And it plans my entire week. I might have to tell the system, hey, I think we want to change, you know, this and this. And guess what? It will change it out. Once I've approved the week, it then gives me an entire grocery list and also an entire meal planning.
Plus, if I decide that I have time to meal prep that week, it will give me what I should prep on the weekend and when and how long, right? Because sometimes I might only have 15 minutes on the weekend. So it will give me a 15-minute block of prep. It also will give me a rough estimate of what meals cost if I if I am worried about my budgeting piece. So all of these things are baked in. And the setup is super easy. It walks you through an intake form.
And then you take this information, you take the instructions, and you can paste it into Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini, and it will run the whole thing for you. The following week you go in, it remembers everything that you did, and all you have to do is say plan my week, and the week is planned. So doors for this are opening October 27th, and they're only going to be open right now for a short window at the founding member price. So if you want to hear about it the second it opens, I would encourage you to get on the wait list.
And the link is gonna be in the show notes for you. So all of this to say, what's the decision that you're most tired of making? Because I guarantee you it's not about the food. It's having to come up with it again, right? It's having to figure out all of the things that you're tired of figuring out. And hey, look, if there's a frozen pizza in your oven tonight, everybody eats, nobody is harmed, and I totally get it. But if you don't want that life anymore.
Hop on the wait list and jump in for one last thing.
