My Weekend Ritual Part 1

(Photo courtesy Peter Mooney https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)

In my humble opinion, building a better future is a long term game, a marathon rather than a dash. Therefore, it helps to automate habits that reinforce and maintain your most important resources.

Three important resources are your money, health and time, especially your health and time because in most cases they are difficult, expensive or impossible to replace.

It therefore is important to marshal these resources and a great way to do it is with weekend rituals (however you define your weekends).

The weekend ritual is a set of key activities habits that reinforces a healthy lifestyle and provides the foundation for an ecology of healthy habits.

My weekend ritual consists of three habits: making weekly lunches (health), weekly financial check-in (money), and goals review (time).

There are many benefits to all of these including peace of mind. In this post, I will discuss my weekly lunch routine.

Making Weekly Lunches

This is a pretty simple habit – during the week I buy the lunch ingredients and on Sunday I spend about 30 minutes mass producing my lunch.

I think this habit is important because it makes it much easier to maintain an intentional and healthy diet. It removes sources of “friction” that get in the way. In my case it removes the following sources of friction:P

• cleaning and cutting vegetables – usually I can’t be bothered to pull out the cutting board, cut the vegetables and clean up to eat one sitting of vegetables – however, it’s easier to talk my self into it when I am doing a week’s worth of vegetables – once I have done all the cutting in one big batch, no more cutting needed for the week
• lack of time in morning to make lunch – I am not an early riser nor super punctual – often I would wake up late with no time to make my lunch – however, if my lunch is already made, I feel like the long difficult part is done and will quickly pack my lunch
• wasting my whole lunch hour buying lunch – if I go out for lunch it takes up at least 2/3 of my lunch time going out, purchase the food and eating it – with a packed lunch a lot more of my hour becomes available to work out or do something productive

There are other benefits including substantial savings in money (conservatively
$200 CAD/month, $2400 CAD/year) and a peace of mind that comes with knowing your lunches are set for the week.

This applies to other meals and food based habits too. Want to eat more of a plant-based diet? Want to eat out less in the evening? Make a couple of batches of meals ahead of time – you will be a lot less likely to cheat on your new food goal if the meal is already made when you get home from a bad day craving your good old comfort food.

Making Wraps for the Week

For my lunch I usually prepare wraps with coldcuts, sweet peppers and lettuce. It provides me vegetables and I find wraps leave me less dozy after lunch than bread. So here is my ultra-complicated recipe (sarcasm alert!) for making my week’s worth of wraps.

First, I take my ingredients – cold cuts of choice, sweet peepers, tortillas and lettuce.

I start by laying down a tortilla…

…lay down the coldcuts….

….cut and put on sweet peppers…

…put on the lettuce….

…roll up the tortilla and cut the saran wrap….

And voila! A week’s worth of wraps is created!

Do you have a recipe or lunch ritual you would like to share? Feel free to share them in the comments.