Cheryl Johnson believes that a better life is worth fighting for. She’s the founder of Box Lunch Lifestyle: a common sense practice for a more satisfying life built on better food and better ways to invest your time during your workday lunch break. The framework is simple. A 30-minute workday lunch break becomes 15 minutes to eat better food (that you prepared yourself), and 15 minutes to pursue a “quiet dream.” The virtuous cycle created by this practice fuels itself. Aligned with the work of habit experts like James Clear, Judson Brewer, and B.J. Fogg, Box Lunch Lifestyle is a practical way to get started immediately and make progress a habit.

For many years, her career as a test development research director for Pearson was the perfect intersection of Cheryl’s curiosity and her drive to distill, organize, and simplify complex ideas into something actionable. But after nearly twenty years, her love of learning outgrew this role, and too many days felt like a slog rather than making the world a better place. She left in 2018 to do more things that made her feel alive, and to launch Box Lunch Lifestyle with the goal of helping people believe that richer, more satisfying lives aren’t as distant as they seem.

Box Lunch Lifestyle is rooted in a passion for boxing training. When you get to know Cheryl, you can see why boxing is such a good fit. Her friends describe her as disciplined and not afraid of hard work. Boxing training was at the heart of developing the courage to leave corporate life for something that feels more like “her.” In part to be a good boxer, Cheryl’s done her homework on food and nutrition, and shows no favoritism for any one institution or school of thought. An admirer of Michael Pollan, she agrees that “real food should eventually rot.” When people ask food-related questions, she has answers, but also steers them back to their own common sense, and the important “why we eat” that matters just as much as “what we eat.”