“I don’t have time to eat well.” Examine this excuse. Is it actually true, or a matter of priorities?
The Short Answer
“I don’t have time” is rarely about time. It’s about priority, planning, and willingness to confront tradeoffs. You have time for things that matter to you: scrolling social media, watching shows, hitting snooze. Eating poorly takes time too: the drive-through line, the takeout ordering, the post-meal slump.
But there is a catch in the word “priority.” Deciding something matters is a goal intention, and goal intentions are weak predictors of what people do: they account for only 20 to 30% of the variance in behavior, and people convert good intentions into action about 53% of the time.[1] So “make it a priority” is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. If you have tried caring more and it didn’t work, you were not failing at caring. You were running into the gap between intending and doing, which is a real and measured thing rather than a character flaw.
Something to Sit With
How much time do you actually spend on meals currently, including takeout and drive-throughs?
What would you have to give up to add meal prep time?
Is the excuse “I don’t have time” genuinely true, or is it protecting you from change?
Learn More
Testing the Excuse.
Track your actual time for one day:
- How much time on your phone (check Screen Time)?
- How much time watching TV or streaming?
- How much time in unproductive transitions or waiting?
- How much time recovering from poor food choices (energy crashes, sluggishness)?
Many people discover hours of discretionary time they don’t notice because those activities feel essential.
Compare meal prep to your alternatives. The figures below are ordinary estimates rather than measurements, and your own numbers are the ones that matter. Run them for a week and you will have better data than any general claim could give you:
- Cooking a simple meal: 20-30 minutes
- Waiting at a drive-through: 10-15 minutes
- Ordering delivery and waiting: 30-45 minutes
- Eating out at a restaurant: 45-90 minutes
The “quick” options often aren’t faster than simple cooking.
What “Eating Well” Actually Requires.
Minimum viable healthy eating. Estimates again, the same caveat as the table above, restated here because it applies here too:
- 10 minutes to scramble eggs and slice vegetables for breakfast
- 5 minutes to assemble a salad with pre-cooked protein for lunch
- 20 minutes to cook chicken and vegetables for dinner
- 2 hours on Sunday for basic meal prep that covers the week
Now add it up, because the total is the part people get wrong. Thirty-five minutes a day is a little over four hours a week, and the Sunday session takes it to roughly six. If that prep genuinely replaces some weekday cooking then it lands nearer four, but it cannot both replace the cooking and be added to it.
Six hours is the honest number to weigh, and it is probably still less than you feared. How it compares against your own screen time is yours to judge; you checked that figure three sections ago. Put the two numbers beside each other and let them argue.
What it doesn’t require:
- Gourmet cooking
- Complex recipes
- Instagram-worthy presentations
- Hours in the kitchen
Healthy eating can be simple: protein + vegetables + fat. Repeat.
The Hidden Time Costs of Eating Poorly.
Poor eating has its own time demands:
Energy crashes: Sugar highs and crashes steal productive hours. The 3pm slump isn’t free: it costs focus and effectiveness.
Health appointments: Managing weight-related health issues takes time: doctor visits, prescriptions, complications.
Decision fatigue: Deciding what to eat without a plan takes mental energy throughout the day. The familiar version of this (self-control as a tank that decisions drain) is the ego-depletion model, whose large preregistered replications found effects indistinguishable from zero while a review weighing both sides calls the evidence inconclusive, so hold the mechanism loosely.[2] The practical implication survives it: repeated undecided choices are a cost, whatever the machinery turns out to be.
Recovery time: Feeling sluggish after poor meals reduces what you accomplish.
Future time: Long-term health consequences can steal years of quality life.
The “time-saving” of fast food isn’t actually saved: it’s borrowed from elsewhere.
The Priority Question.
If a doctor said “Cook more or you’ll die in six months,” you’d find time. The time exists; the urgency doesn’t (yet).
Ask yourself honestly:
“What am I prioritizing over eating well?” Phone scrolling? Netflix? Hitting snooze? These aren’t wrong, but they’re choices.
“What would I drop if health became urgent?” That thing you’d drop? You could drop it now.
“Do I have time for things I care about?” If yes, eating well can be added. If no, examine your life more broadly.
Practical Time Solutions.
Batch cooking: Cook once, eat multiple times. Sunday prep covers Tuesday dinner.
Simplify meals: Not every meal needs a recipe. Chicken + broccoli + olive oil is about twenty minutes (another estimate, not a measurement) and requires no planning.
Strategic shortcuts: Pre-cut vegetables, rotisserie chicken, frozen vegetables. These aren’t cheating: they’re realistic.
Reduce decisions: Eat the same breakfast every day. Rotate through five dinners. Fewer open questions, fewer chances to default.
Make an if-then plan, and make it specific. An implementation intention (“if situation X arises, then I will do Y”, naming when, where, and how) shows a medium-to-large effect on follow-through across 94 studies, and it works hardest exactly where this companion lives: it helps most when getting started is the difficult part, and its effect on keeping you from derailing part-way is larger still.[1] “If it’s Sunday at 4, then I chop vegetables for the week” is doing something structurally different from deciding that meal prep matters.
And frame it as a replacement rather than a negation. “If I’m too tired to cook, then I eat the prepped chicken” is the replacement form, which in the same study did not backfire; “If I’m tired, I will NOT order takeout” can backfire: in that study, negation-framed plans produced ironic rebound, most likely when the existing habit was strong.[1]
Prep while doing other things: Chop vegetables while on a phone call. Cook while kids do homework. Stack activities.
Lower the bar: “Good enough” meals prepared quickly beat “perfect” meals never made. Functional beats fancy.
The Real Barrier.
Usually it’s not time. It’s:
Skill/confidence: Not knowing how to cook simply. (Learnable.)
Planning: Not having ingredients ready when needed. (Solvable.)
Habit: Defaulting to what’s easy rather than what’s good. (Changeable.)
Priority: Not having made this important enough yet. (That’s on you, and it is the weakest of the four, which is not what you’d expect.)
That last point deserves its own line, because this companion has spent a page pressing on priority. Priority is a goal intention, and goal intentions are the part that doesn’t convert: 20 to 30% of behavioral variance, roughly half of good intentions reaching action, and interventions that successfully change people’s intentions producing only a small change in what they actually do.[1] Caring more is the least effective of the four levers. Skill, planning, and habit are the ones that move, and the if-then plan above is how intention becomes any of them.
Time scarcity is often a story we tell ourselves to avoid confronting what we’d have to change. But “just decide it matters” is a story too, and the evidence above says so.
Further reading:
- Newport C, Deep Work[3] (2016) — On time, priorities, and focus
- Vanderkam L, 168 Hours[4] (2010) — On how we actually spend our time
- Clear J, Atomic Habits[5] (2018) — On building new behaviors into existing time
- Duhigg C, Smarter Faster Better[6] (2016) — On productivity and priorities
Written by AI, directed and approved by me. How this is made →