The underrated benefits of always having oatmeal at lunch ========================================================== ![the "they don't know" party meme: a guy standing alone at a house party holding a bowl of oatmeal with the caption "they don't know this oatmeal slaps" while everyone else socializes with pizza and fancy food](/img/oatmeal.webp) For me, eating oatmeal at lunch every day is almost a spiritual experience. Let me give you my rundown: - it's healthy and cheap - it's a great and efficient routine, one decision less each day - counterintuitively, it enables a wide variety of tastes **Healthy and cheap** Healthy, cheap and vegan. You can enrich it with bananas or goji berries for extra nutrients. You can use oat milk or other fluids that are enriched with stuff you might be lacking, like vitamin D and calcium. **Great and efficient routine** You have more time in the lunch break to do whatever. You can legitimately get down the ratio you like better each time you make it. If you skip breakfast, you are craving food by lunchtime^[Admittedly, this is because of fasting, but if you break your fast later in the day you love the food even more. Ancient wisdom.]. Tribal creatures we are, there is always an undercurrent of "what will my work colleagues think about this?" Doing it anyway builds genuine self-confidence. I also think it's secretly [high status](https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/the-moat-of-low-status-68a): you open the door for your work mates to do similar weird shit at lunch. It doesn't even mean you eat worse overall. My work colleagues might doubt this, but I cook really nice dinners. Oatmeal at noon is what enables that, in a kabbalistic way I can't describe. **Variety** I'll try to describe the exoteric side anyway: if you constrain your life in one area, it opens up a lot of options in another area. If you constrain your sleeping and wake-up time, that's the only real way to have a routine where you write each morning, or exercise each morning, or do whatever each morning. Variety comes from constraint. You can min-max your oatmeal with whatever nutrition (and taste) you need, and can even do [morphological analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_analysis_(problem-solving)) on your combinations:

Fluid	Base oats	Topping 1 (fruit)	Topping 2 (seeds/nuts)	Topping 3 (extra)
Oat milk	Rolled oats	Blueberries	Chia seeds	Goji berries
Water	Instant oats	Banana	Flaxseed	Honey
Soy milk	Steel cut oats	Apple	Walnuts	Cinnamon
Coconut milk	Overnight oats	Mango	Almonds	Cocoa powder
Almond milk		Raspberries	Pumpkin seeds	Peanut butter
		Strawberries	Hemp seeds	Protein powder

I swear, I genuinely feel people are missing out on the greatness of oatmeal at lunch. > The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have ~ William Irvine