Flexible Meals: Cooking and Preparing Meals as an ADHDer
My clients often share how ADHD affects various aspects of their daily lives, including meal preparation. ADHD can create difficulties not only with attention regulation but also with many areas of executive functioning.
Challenges in the following areas are common:
Working Memory
Organization
Planning
Task initiation
Emotion regulation
Prioritization
Task switching
Impulse control
Sensory processing
For many ADHDers (myself included!), these differences can impact our ability to prepare meals.
My deepest wish for my clients is for them to have supportive environments that embrace their differences and enable their access to food. However, I know this isn't always possible. Adapting the way we approach cooking and meal preparation is one way to accommodate our needs and increase our ability to feed ourselves consistently and adequately.
When I talk about flexibility with meals, I do NOT mean that you have to just BE FLEXIBLE and EAT WHAT’S AVAILABLE (like Aunt Sue’s pasta salad that you despise) because you need to JUST GO WITH THE FLOW and BE A GOOD LITTLE ADHDER. No no. We don’t have time for that nonsense.
What I DO mean, is that, when we let go of neurotypical ideals of what feeding ourselves SHOULD look like, we can create a relationship with food that is more flexible and ultimately more accommodating of our unique needs and preferences.
Creating flexibility with meals and meal preparation means giving yourself permission to approach eating in a way that works for you and your brain, not that makes Aunt Sue happy because you finally ate her pasta salad!!
A moment for radical acceptance
In order to approach meals with flexibility, there are some things we need to accept
The way you feed yourself is not going to look the same every day, week or year. It will change depending on the season of life you’re in.
Your meals may not look the same as everyone else’s.
You do not have to eat Aunt Sue’s pasta salad to be a worthy human being. (I’m sorry Aunt Sue, we still love you).
Ok great :)
Loosening up our definition of a “meal” is one way to practice flexibility
Here are some rules that I give you permission to break. Because feeding ourselves is already a complicated task… why add unnecessary rules?
The food has to all go together to make it a meal.
Every meal has to have vegetables.
You can only eat certain foods at certain times.
The food has to all go together to make it a meal.
Breaking the rule:
You heat up some leftover fried rice and realize it’s probably not enough for what you are hungry for. So you make a pb & j sandwich to go with it. Does it “go” together? Probably not. But it’s what you have and what you feel you can eat right now.
Every meal has to have vegetables
Breaking the rule:
Every meal you have ever eaten that didn’t contain vegetables was still a meal.
You can only eat certain foods at certain times
Breaking the rule:
You want pancakes and eggs for dinner…so you eat pancakes and eggs for dinner.
Or you wake up and the only thing that sounds good is the soup dumplings you have in your freezer…so you eat soup dumplings for breakfast and move on with your life.
Breakfast for dinner? Yes, but please put some chocolate chips in those pancakes :)
When it comes to cooking
Many of my clients believe they need to cook meals from scratch to nourish their bodies. They might worry about eating out too often, whether because of financial reasons or concerns about health, or both. Sometimes this belief stems from feeling inadequate because they view cooking as something essential and simple that everyone does.
Client: “Well I should be able to cook, everybody does it. It’s not that hard.”
Me: “Ok, yes, I hear that. And let’s acknowledge that preparing and cooking meals requires a lot of skills and steps that are difficult for many people, especially for those with neurospicy brains like us.”
Client: “But it’s just cooking. Lots of people around me do it with no problems. I just need to do it”.
Me: “Do I think you are capable of cooking meals for yourself? Absolutely. At the same time, I think we tend to minimize how many steps are involved in the cooking process and forget that there are many ways to approach food preparation.”
For fun (!!), let’s think through all the steps involved in cooking a meal from scratch.
Below is my personal breakdown of what usually happens when I cook a recipe from scratch. Yours might look different (and I’d love to hear about it in the comments).
Initial planning of finding a recipe or figuring out what to cook.
Make list of needed groceries.
Gather the groceries for the recipe.
Purchase ingredients in a time window where you can use them up before they go bad.
Make sure that when you think you have an ingredient at home, you actually check that you do. But I didn’t and now I’m home and realize I don’t have said ingredient.
Decide whether to go back out and get the ingredient or figure out a way to make the recipe without it.
Initiation energy and motivation to start cooking.
Make sure the kitchen is clean because it’s too overwhelming to cook in a messy kitchen.
Clean the kitchen, because the kitchen is messy.
Get the ingredients out.
Figure out how to defrost the chicken that you forgot to pull out the night before.
Read the recipe and have it handy so that you can read it over and over again while you cook.
Find your headphones so that you can listen to a podcast while you cook.
Pick a podcast to listen to.
Rewind part of podcast you just missed because you were reading the recipe.
Manage the sensory experience of touching and smelling the food that is cooking.
Is something burning?
Set a timer, or likely, multiple timers.
Keep track of the different components you are cooking.
Decide once the timers go off, whether the food is done.
Taste the food.
Is anybody still reading this?
Make sure everything is ready at the same time or staying warm until you’re ready to eat.
Sit down to eat your food.
Get back up because you forgot a napkin.
Sit down again and realize the t.v. remote is in the other room.
Get up and get the t.v. remote and get your self a glass of water and your meds because you also forgot that.
EAT!
Get the motivation to get back up and clean up and put leftovers away.
DO YOU SEE WHAT IM SAYING ITS NOT THAT EASY.
I’m not sharing this to discourage you from cooking. It can be enjoyable for some people and there are certainly ways we can make it more accessible through accommodations. Alas, all that to say THERE ARE A LOT OF FREAKING STEPS IN COOKING. So let’s have some compassion for ourselves. Ok?!
Some ideas and accommodations for cooking
Choose recipes that only require one pot, or pan or baking sheet. This helps eliminate some of the multitasking required in cooking and also makes clean up easier (sometimes).
Try new recipes on days when you have more time, mental space and energy
Wear disposable gloves when dealing with ingredients you prefer not to touch (or when cutting up spicy peppers!!)
Stick to familiar meals on busy days
Have a “backup meal” in your freezer or pantry (mine is typically ramen, boxed mac and cheese or a frozen pizza) in case your recipe doesn’t work out
Use partially prepared ingredients.
Spaghetti and meat sauce: Jarred pasta sauce and with ground meat, meatballs (fresh or frozen) or meatless crumbles.
Chicken with green beans and mashed potatoes: Prepared refrigerated or instant mashed potatoes. Canned green beans or the pre-washed green beans that can be microwaved in the bag.
Ramen: Add more oomph by cooking a couple eggs in the broth and topping with green onions, sesame oil, American cheese and sriracha.
Chicken and dumplings: Use store-bought biscuit dough (like the kind in the poppable can), frozen mixed veggies and rotisserie chicken (ok I did steal this idea from a Joanna Gaines cookbook that was gifted to me…)
Stir fry: Use microwavable rice and a store bought sauce. Precut or frozen veggies can save time or just choose 1 veggie to include instead of feeling like you have to have a bunch (or omit veggies entirely if that isn’t your thing).
Egg salad: Use pre-hardboiled and pre-peeled eggs
Try a meal kit, it removes some of the steps
Ask a friend to teach you how to make a recipe that they like making
Bring a chair into the kitchen so you can sit down and take breaks without having to leave the room
Low-prep meal ideas
Please remember these are just ideas to get you started, for many of these options you may need to add sides to make it enough.
Examples of low-prep sides include cheese sticks, yogurt, bagged salad, frozen fries, applesauce, chips, microwave in the bag veggies, peanut butter crackers, pita chips and hummus, and granola bars.
-Snack plate: Your preferred combo of cheese, crackers, nuts, chocolate, jam, cured meats, deli meat, pickles, fruit, veggie sticks, bread, etc.
-Chicken wrap: Use frozen chicken strips, store bought dressing and precut lettuce.
-Frozen meals, if they don’t feel satisfying on their own, here are some ways to spruce them up:
Frozen pizza: Enjoy with a bagged salad or store bought fruit salad. Or add additional toppings to a plain cheese pizza.
Frozen enchiladas: Add some avocado, sour cream and more cheese, maybe even some cilantro! Chips and salsa on the side.
Frozen Mac and Cheese: with chopped up hotdogs, sausages or a side of chicken nuggets.
-Pb & J: it’s a classic for a reason!!!
-Deli meat sandwich
-Chicken nuggets with french fries (or bagged salad if you only want to heat up one thing)
-BLT: using microwavable bacon
More resources
-Check out this Customizable Recipe Template I made with ideas for pasta dishes, sheet pan meals and more.
-Stacie Fanelli, the owner of Autonomous Minds Therapy, created this awesome Executive Dysfunction Café menu with ideas broken up into sections depending on your needs that day.
-Aleta Storch, @the_adhd_rd, posts lots of neurodivergent-friendly meal ideas on her instagram.
Final Thoughts
Being flexible with meals means being realistic about your time, skills, challenges and energy. Yes, perhaps there are people on TikTok who make organic cocoa puffs from scratch for their well-behaved children every morning. But you don’t have to do that to feed yourself (or your kids). You can if you want to and have the time and mental space and energy and ability for it. But you don’t have to.
If you have more neurodivergent-friendly meal ideas or resources that you have found helpful, pop them in the comments. If eating is feeling too difficult right now, whether because of executive functioning challenges, neuronormative expectations, or diet culture rules, I am here to help. Get in touch via email madison@unravelnutrition.com.
