What Running This on My Own Has Taught Me About Looking After Myself

There's no team here. No one to cover a Sunday cook if I'm under the weather, no one to bounce a decision off at 11pm when I'm still labelling containers. It's just me, and most of the time that's exactly how I like it — but it's taken a while to learn how to do it without running myself into the ground.

The honest version of running a food business alone looks less like the tidy version people imagine. It's early starts, a lot of driving, and a to-do list that never quite empties. For a long time I thought the answer was just to work harder and smarter, fit more in, be more efficient. Some of that's true. But the bigger lesson has been learning where to stop.

I teach yoga alongside this, which sounds like a nice balance on paper, and mostly is — except it also means I know exactly what it looks like when someone is running on empty, because I see it in a room full of people every week, and I've had to get honest about seeing it in myself too.

A few things that have actually helped:

Deciding what doesn't get my attention. Heavy social media posting was costing me more than it was giving back, so I stopped trying to be everywhere, all the time, and moved to something slower and more batched. The business hasn't suffered for it.

Letting the numbers tell the truth. It's easy to feel like you're falling behind on a gut sense of busyness. Actually sitting down with what's coming in, what's going out, and where the hours go has been more reassuring than not looking — even when the numbers aren't all good news.

Protecting the boring bits of rest. Not retreats, not treats — just an evening with nothing booked in. Those have become non-negotiable in a way they weren't in year one.

None of this is a solved problem. I don't think it is for anyone doing this alone. But it feels worth writing down, mostly because I suspect a lot of people running something on their own — a business, a household, a caring role — are having a quieter version of the same conversation with themselves.

If you're the sort of person juggling all of it yourself, one less thing to think about might be dinner. Take a look at the week's menu 👈