Today’s prompt, and the companion piece behind it.
The Food Delivery Apps
You have food delivery apps on your phone. Should you delete them?
The Short Answer
Probably. Food delivery apps reduce the friction between impulse and consumption to nearly zero. With two taps, any food arrives at your door. This is exactly the wrong environment for someone trying to change their eating. Deleting the apps doesn’t mean you can never order delivery: you can always reinstall or use a browser. It just adds friction that can interrupt impulse orders. That friction is the point.
Something to Sit With
How many of your delivery orders were truly necessary? How many were hunger, and how many were boredom, stress, or convenience?
The app makes ordering easy. Maybe ordering should be a little harder.
Learn More
The friction principle. Small increases in effort reduce how often people eat: the proximity work found a moderate effect on low-certainty evidence, with distance raising perceived effort rather than salience.[1],[2]
Food delivery apps remove almost all friction. Your payment is saved. Your address is stored. Your past orders are one tap away. In moments of weakness (tiredness, stress, boredom), ordering takes almost no effort.
Every impulse order is a sale for the app, not a gain for you.
What apps enable. Consider what becomes possible with a delivery app installed:
Impulse eating. A craving leads immediately to food. There’s no cooling-off period, no drive to the restaurant, no time to reconsider.
Deciding by default. When you’re too tired to think about food, the app decides for you, usually toward options that are high in calories and low in nutrition. Decision fatigue is the contested name for that; the app wins either way.[3]
Late-night availability. Many restaurants close; apps don’t. The danger zone of 10pm to midnight is fully serviced.
Visual temptation. Opening the app exposes you to photos of hyperpalatable food.[4] Even if you meant to order something healthy, you see the burgers, the pizza, the desserts.
Habitual ordering. The app tracks your habits and makes re-ordering trivially easy. What started as occasional becomes routine.[5]
The deletion argument. Removing the apps doesn’t remove the capability to order food. It just requires reinstallation or using a web browser, enough friction to interrupt many impulse orders.
The logic: if you really want delivery, you can still get it. But you’ll have to want it enough to take deliberate steps. The impulse that would have led to an order in 30 seconds will often fade in the 5 minutes it takes to reinstall an app.
This is environmental design, the approach Guyenet advises: arrange your surroundings, in a moment of clarity, so that tempting food takes effort to reach.[6]
When to keep them. Some people use delivery apps appropriately: planned orders from restaurants serving food that fits their eating approach. If that’s genuinely your pattern, deletion may not be necessary.
But be honest: Is the app serving your goals, or is it serving your impulses? The usage history tells the truth.
Alternative approaches. If deletion feels too extreme:
Move the app off the home screen. Adding a few taps of friction helps.
Set a cooling-off rule. Decide to wait 20 minutes before completing any order. Many cravings pass.
Remove saved payment. Having to enter payment information manually is enough friction to stop many impulse orders.
Keep only delivery apps for healthy restaurants. If a healthy meal prep service has an app, keep that. Delete the pizza apps.
The test. Try deleting the apps for two weeks. Notice what changes. If nothing significant changes, you weren’t using them problematically. If the change is hard, you’ve learned something important about your relationship with those apps.
Further reading:
- Clear J, Atomic Habits[7] (2018) — Chapters on friction and habit design
- Eyal N, Hooked[8] (2014) — How apps are designed to create habitual use
- Thaler RH & Sunstein CR, Nudge[9] (2008) — Behavioral design and choice architecture
Written by AI, directed and approved by me. How this is made →
You already know what to eat
You already know enough.
The information isn’t the problem. You have plenty of information.
The problem is that by the time you’re standing in front of the fridge — tired, negotiating with yourself about whether you’ve earned a snack — it’s already too late. Your habits have voted. Willpower shows up late, outnumbered.
So what if the right thought arrived before all of that?
One thought, every morning, before your day fills in
365 Changes sends you a single prompt about eating. It arrives early — before hunger, before decisions, before habits kick in.
Not a meal plan. Not a rule. Just a question or idea to sit with while you make coffee. Each is simple, but they accumulate.
You need the same core ideas to arrive from hundreds of different angles until they stop being things you know and start being who you are.
Get the daily prompt free:
Here’s what a prompt looks like
Each morning you’ll get a question or scenario like:
You’re in a bad mood and craving comfort food. What do you do first?
Click any of these and read the response. Each one is a complete thought worth reading on its own. The daily email makes sure one arrives before you need it.
- You have food delivery apps on your phone. Should you delete them?
- What combinations of nutrients trigger overconsumption by hijacking the brain’s reward system?
- How many times per day do you eat, including small bites? Is this frequency serving you?
Why daily? Why morning? Why small?
Daily, because change doesn’t happen in one big moment of clarity. It happens through accumulation — the same ideas arriving from slightly different angles until one day you notice you’re thinking differently about something you used to not think about at all.
Morning, because evenings are when you negotiate. Mornings are when you can still hear yourself think. There’s a small window before the momentum builds, before the habits wake up. That’s when a thought can land.
Small, because you’ve already heard it all. You don’t need another article, another tip, another list. You need the right ideas to keep showing up until they stick.
This is not a diet program
There’s no tracking. No streaks. No badges. No notifications begging for attention.
If you open the email, good. If you don’t, it doesn’t guilt you. There’s no streak to break. Tomorrow another one arrives.
One email. It asks almost nothing. It just shows up.
Free. No tracking. No streaks. Just one email, every morning.
Does it work?
Honestly? We don’t know if it will work for you.
I built this for myself. I was tired of feeling like I know exactly what I should eat and never quite eating that way. Tired of the mental math — what I ate, what I’ll eat, what I’m going to eat tonight.
I didn’t need more information. I needed the right thought to arrive at the right time. So I built something that does that, every morning, and I started using it.
It’s working. Slowly. I can’t point to a moment when things changed. I just notice that they have.
—Craig
How this gets made is written down too.
The writing here is done by AI. I direct it, and I approve everything before it publishes. Methods is a journal about the work behind the writing: what gets checked, what gets corrected, and what goes wrong. Methods is free, public, and nothing you have to read.
One way to find out:
Want more depth?
Some mornings the prompt will make you curious. The prompt is complete on its own, but each one also has a companion piece — 3 to 5 minutes of depth, grounded in research, for when you want to understand why.
All 500 companions are free to read. Here are four to start with:
- The Future Self — The person you’ll be in five years is being built by today’s choices
- The Food Mood — You’re in a bad mood and craving comfort food. What do you do first?
- The Tolerant One — You can sit with hunger and discomfort without reacting
- The Self-Deception — In what ways do you deceive yourself about what or how much you eat?
The daily email carries each prompt with its full companion. Subscribe below and it comes to you every morning.