I built a custom Airtable database to track my food planning. If you knew me as a younger adult, you'd realize how ridiculous that idea is. For years, my "food planning" consisted of deciding which fast-food drive-thru to hit on my way home from work.

Until I got married, I ate almost every meal away from home. When I did eat at home, it was leftovers from previous restaurant visits or pizza delivery from New Jersey's excellent pizza shops. Often, breakfast either consisted of Dunkin' Donuts or the previous night's pizza. One Saturday, my buddy and I went to the mud races (a form of motorsport where vehicles like dune buggies on steroids race through muddy terrain for fun and profit), fueled by a pizza that had lived in the back seat of the car since the previous evening.

We've been hearing about the "quantified self" for nearly two decades as devices to track our steps have evolved to give us health data that used to require a trip to a clinic and cost thousands of dollars. We explore how that health data actually impacts your life, whether you're walking into your next doctor's appointment or forgetting about the sensor sitting on your wrist.

But eating out changed around pandemic time. We stopped going out to restaurants. My favorite Tuesday discount sushi visit was off the table, since the sushi place was closed. We started trying to cook at home.

Eating at home provided a bit of a health awakening. First, I didn't feel quite as ick as I almost always did from that constant diet of fast food and pizza. I then started to modify my eating more completely, avoiding refined sugar and flour. By the time I cut out the constant supply of my beloved baked goods, I started to lose weight.

This is where food planning came in. Most diets I'd participated in over the years promoted tracking what you eat. Whether it was calories, macros, or points, you recorded it after the fact. You still had to decide every meal, day after day.