When I tell people I have barely cooked in the last year, it is as if I’ve let them in on a dirty secret like not washing my bedsheets. They look taken aback, almost disgusted, and ask how I survive. When I say I buy “ready meals”, they try to hide their horror as they picture me microwaving one of those compartmentalised plastic trays of sweet and sour chicken, and plonking myself in front of the TV.

Sure, this revelation contrasts with other aspects of my lifestyle – I eat lots of fruits, go to the gym, and take a fistful of vitamins every night. But I just don’t see the point of cooking. I’m not sure it’s much healthier or cheaper these days thanks to innovation by food manufacturers in recent years – and it’s way more time-consuming than people admit.

When I say I rely on ready meals, what I’m actually eating is often, say, a cardboard box from a supermarket “Kitchen Deli” range – filled with teriyaki chicken and sushi rice. They’re designed to be eaten fresh that day and score mostly green for nutrition in terms of their traffic-light labels. Or a meal deal which includes a box of grains and vegetables, with carrot sticks, and a coconut water. Or if I see it on offer, I bung a posh lasagne or beef chilli in the oven, which comes in a wooden tray and has minimal UPFs. These all cost me around £5 per meal.

Still, friends will say “but isn’t that expensive?” I used to cook my dinners – usually BBC Good Food recipes like spaghetti or risotto – and found myself spending far more than I planned on raw ingredients and wasting food too, finding it impossible to use up everything. My weekly shop used to be around £40 when I cooked. Now I just buy things to make breakfast and the occasional lunch, it’s around £20 plus £25 on ready meals. An extra fiver feels cheap given the amount of time I have gained back. Better still, I can just pop into the supermarket on my way home from work every couple of days to buy what I need, and what I fancy.

Cooking is too time-consuming. Even for one batch cook on a Sunday night, I’d spend an hour doing the supermarket shop before, a couple of hours cooking, washing up and cleaning after myself. Before I knew it, I’d lost the entire evening. I felt a failure too because after all the hard work, my food never tasted as good as the curries my mum painstakingly cooked growing up.

I came to dread cooking. I’d find myself getting hungrier and grumpier as I fought my way through a crowded Aldi in the hour before it closed, and then heaved my bags home to chop onions and grind down spices. Even after eating I’d still have to clean the kitchen and scrub pans. I’d go to bed later, and feel less refreshed by the morning. I got zero downtime by the time I’d come home from work, bought ingredients and cooked. Nowadays, I can sit in the park with a mate on a evening, go on a date, or play a tennis match. It makes me feel like I’ve made the most of my free time.

I thought giving up cooking would be failing at adulthood. There’s a reason a stock put-down of public figures is to say they wouldn’t even know how to boil an egg, or make a cup of tea. I didn’t want to be one of those people who couldn’t look after themselves. But I came to realise that being an adult is also figuring out what works for you personally, and relying more and more on “ready meals” made me happier, and feel just as healthy. I discovered I’d only been cooking for the sake of feeling virtuous.

I’m not sure that home cooking automatically means healthy food, either. Even back in 2012, the found that celebrity chefs’ recipes contained more calories, fat and saturated fat, and less fibre than supermarket ready meals. And since then, every supermarket has increased their healthy ready meal offering.

More than anything, I switched to “ready meals” because I realised it frees up evenings, all for the sake of spending a fiver more. We’re weirdly sentimental about the idea of homemade dinners. But I feel more sentimental about what giving cooking up has given me – spontaneous plans with friends, time with the people I love, breezy summer evenings ended up watching rosy sunsets. Life is too short to spend it meal prepping.