Lance Feeds Everyone but Himself
On my way to work every morning I pass a food truck. The guy running it is named Lance.
Lance makes incredible food. Fresh wraps. Grilled chicken bowls. Stuff that smells so good you want to pull over even when you're already running late. He's been at it for a couple years now. Regulars love him. He knows their orders. He knows their names.
Here's the thing about Lance.
He feeds fifty people a day. Good food. Balanced meals. Real ingredients. And then he eats garbage himself.
I found this out because I stop and grab something from him a couple mornings a month on my 29-minute drive to the airport. We started talking. One day I asked him what he ate for dinner the night before.
"Didn't really eat dinner," he said. "Had some chips around nine."
I thought he was joking. He was not joking.
The Red Flags I Could Not Ignore
The more Lance talked, the worse it got. He skips breakfast every single day. Lance is up at 4:30 AM prepping food for the truck. He drinks coffee until the lunch rush hits. That's six hours of hard physical work on nothing but caffeine. By noon he's running on fumes.
He eats whatever is left over at the end of the day.
No plan. No structure. Whatever didn't sell becomes his meal. Some days that's a solid chicken bowl. Some days it's three leftover muffins and a bag of trail mix.
He crashes hard every afternoon.
Lance told me he hits a wall around 2 PM. Can barely keep his eyes open. Most days he just pushes through it. Some days he closes the truck early because he can't function.
He thinks eating "healthy" means eating less.
When I asked if he'd ever tried to fix it, he said he'd cut back on portions. Ate less. Felt worse. Gave up after a week. He thought the problem was volume. It was never volume.
He has no repeatable system.
Every single day Lance makes a new decision about what to eat. That's seven decisions a week, minimum, all made when he's already tired and hungry. The worst possible time to decide anything.
This Is Not a Food Problem
I talk to my mom almost every day. She's 91 years old. Still sharp. Still plays Scrabble with me online and wins a third of the time.
You know what she's done for decades? She eats the same few meals on rotation. Not because she's boring. Because she figured out what works and she stopped reinventing it every single day.
That's the difference.
Lance's problem is not that he doesn't know what healthy food looks like. The man literally makes it for a living. His problem is that he has no plan for himself. No structure. No routine. No system that runs without him having to think about it every morning at 4:30 when his brain isn't even online yet.
This is not a nutrition problem. This is a planning problem.
And it's the same mistake I see people our age making all the time. We know what we should eat. We just never build a system that makes it automatic.
Tomorrow I'm Going to Fix This
I told Lance I had something for him. Not a diet. Not a meal plan from some website. Not a list of superfoods.
A prompt.
One prompt that builds a meal plan around his actual life. His schedule. His energy needs. His budget. The foods he already likes. Tomorrow I'm going to show you the exact prompt I gave Lance.
And I'm going to show you what happened when he actually used it.
If you've ever felt like you know what you should be eating but can't seem to make it stick — tomorrow's issue is for you.
What's one meal you eat on repeat because it just works? Hit reply and tell me. I'll share mine tomorrow.
Until tomorrow,
Stay in Win Mode!
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