A month without: prepared foods

For a city overrun with self-starters, New York certainly encourages you to avoid doing things yourself. If the dog needs to be walked, the laundry cleaned, the errands run, the child raised, the boyfriend entertained by a striptease in a sexy FedEx uniform—chances are you can pay someone to do it for you. Me, I know exactly which restaurants serve tacos in Mexican, South American and Vietnamese styles, but I can’t boil an egg worth a damn. As a teenager who protested “traditional values,” I balked when my mother tried to teach me how to cook. Big mistake. Now if I don’t want my dinner served between two slices of bread, I have to order takeout. Let’s just say giving up prepared foods wasn’t easy.

Keeping a food diary helped stave off famine. I immediately noticed a lack of fruits and vegetables in my diet and wondered if, although I’ve largely avoided working as an 18th-century sailor, I might be at risk for scurvy. Health magazines suggested adding the good stuff slowly: spinach on my turkey sandwich, blueberries in my yogurt. They also taught me that feeding yourself is the only way to really know what you’re eating, since restaurants smuggle butter and oil into just about everything healthy-sounding like “miso glaze” (with butter), “white-wine marinade” (plus butter), I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! (well, you get the idea). Thus educated—and knowing that a four-star chef couldn’t cook a decent meal in a Manhattan lunch hour—I ate healthier by default. If an apple took exactly one step to prepare (wipe on shirt), why should I waste time making pizza from scratch?

Also, opting for groceries over restaurants saved me money. Not just because I evaded the cloth-napkin tax (far bigger than I’d estimated), but because, surprisingly, my bar tab shrank. I’d go out to eat with friends, ordering only wine while they chomped their steaks. By dessert, these friends were funnier, more attractive and…oooh, blurry! And…zzzzzz… And that was after only two glasses. Waiting until after dinner to eat makes you a cheap date.

I’d like to say when the month was up my life was changed—that I’ve been eating soybeans and getting boozy ever since. But the truth is, I don’t have that kind of willpower. If I did, I would have cooked a healthy meal every night instead of relying on turkey sandwiches with spinach, yogurt with blueberries and a glass of wine with…another glass. But if there’s a force stronger than will power in New York, it’s laziness. I credit that force for my losing five pounds and gaining a few hundred dollars over the past 30 days—and for the fact that, right after I type this sentence, I’m calling Domino’s to order two cheese pizzas and two men to feed them to me.—Melissa Maerz