In this episode, Ash and Dusty dive into the complexities of food management for individuals with ADHD. They discuss the various challenges faced when it comes to meal planning, cooking, and maintaining a clean kitchen, all of which can lead to frustration and overwhelm. Dusty shares personal experiences and strategies that have helped clients, including the importance of simplifying meal prep and recognizing when to let go of food that will not be used.
The conversation emphasizes the significance of creating supportive practices, such as doing dishes before cooking and establishing a list of no-prep meals. Ash and Dusty highlight the importance of tackling one aspect of cooking or meal management at a time, fostering a guilt-free approach to food waste, and ultimately finding joy in the cooking process. The episode serves as a reminder that while feeding oneself can be challenging, there are practical strategies that make it easier for those navigating ADHD.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Ash: Hi, I’m Ash, [00:00:01] Dusty: and I’m Dusty. [00:00:02] Ash: and this is Translating ADHD. [00:00:07] Dusty: The ADHD Boot Camp is starting soon. Register on my website or by contacting me on social media. The ADHD Bootcamp is a mega body doubling series of sessions led by me. So they are structured, designed to help you reset and declutter your entire home, go through your paperwork, maybe get your fridge reset, which is pertinent to things we’ll talk about today.We will all work together as a group. We’ll take lots of breaks. It’s very fun. And at the end of it, you’ll be able to actually implement some of those really cool ADHD hacks that you learned on TikTok and actually have them be effective because your space is organized and you have what you need.
Sliding scale rates are always available. My website is https://www.adhdstudio.ca/ or you can go to https://www.vancouveradhdcoaching.com/. It’s starting soon, so go get it now.
[00:01:06] Ash: I have my purpose course beginning on April 1st. This is a group coaching course intended to bring clarity to questions of who am I or what do I want to be when I grow up or what is my bigger why. For more information on this course, visit https://translatingadhd.com/, click on the group coaching tab, pricing information and the application are all right there.So Dusty, what are we talking about today?
[00:01:34] Dusty: Today, we are talking about food, wonderful food, glorious food. [00:01:40] Ash: Is that from something? [00:01:42] Dusty: I don’t know. [00:01:43] Ash: Or did you just make it up? [00:01:44] Dusty: No, I think it might be from, like, Annie or something. [00:01:49] Ash: Yeah, it had a familiar tinge to it. [00:01:51] Dusty: I don’t even know if those are the lyrics, that just came out of my brain somewhere. [00:01:55] Ash: Well, listeners, if one of you knows the answer to that question, let us know. So Dusty, what do you have to say about food? This is certainly a fraught topic for those of us with ADHD. [00:02:06] Dusty: Oh my god, what don’t I have to say about food? Food is hard when you have ADHD. That’s what I have to say about it. And there are so many reasons why. So many. Would you like me to enumerate on that? [00:02:18] Ash: Yes, Dusty. [00:02:20] Dusty: So, let’s start with the fact that people with ADHD tend to have really kind of wonky eating patterns. We know that there’s a connection between ADHD and binge eating disorder, right? So, more people struggle with weight stuff or binge eating. People with ADHD struggle more with weight stuff, being overweight, binge eating, and then sometimes we struggle with the opposite.Because of meds, we may under-eat or not feel hungry and eat too few calories. But sometimes, because of poor interoceptive awareness, we may also under eat, right? Not being aware that we’re hungry until we’re suddenly ravenous. And then interoceptive awareness can hit us the other way where we ate, we overeat and we eat way too much again.
That’s kind of binge eating, I guess, but because we’re not aware that we’re full, right? Or we may be eating for dopamine or sensory stimulation rather than hunger. So that’s just one part of it. But the next level is that feeding yourself actually requires so much more organization than you would think.
Like again, if you’re ravenous, you’re not gonna have the willpower and capacity to cook. But can you cook if your kitchen is filthy, and the dishes are not done, and there are pots and pans on every surface or maybe you don’t have the tools that you need. Maybe you don’t know that you don’t know how to cook.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t really enjoy cooking So I’m always rushing and just like burning things and then I don’t want to eat them because they’re burned and they’re disgusting and I’m not a very good cook because I can’t get myself to slow down to like learn the proper methods.
I find cooking boring. So I’m liable to avoid it, forget that I’m doing it in the middle of doing it or because of working memory issues, start cooking before I actually check that I have all the ingredients or things that I need and get halfway through a recipe and realize that I don’t have what I need to cook it.
So there’s that. And then, if we go another step beyond that, you have to decide what you want to eat. And deciding what to eat in and of itself is really hard. After deciding, you have to make a plan – do I have these groceries, or do I have to go get them? Then you have to go to the grocery store.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made a meal plan, and then been too busy to go to the grocery store. And so I’m like, okay, I’ll go to the grocery store, like Sunday or Monday, and meal prep. And then next thing it’s Thursday, and I’ve been eating McDonald’s all week, because I keep thinking every day I gotta go to the grocery store, I gotta go to the grocery store, I gotta start my meal plan. But time just passes.
So then let’s say you get to the grocery store, and you buy all your things. You gotta bring them in the house, you gotta put them away. Sounds like it should be simple but it is not. Have you ever had groceries go bad because you left them out, like on the counter, because you didn’t put them away? I have.
Let’s say you put them away, if you can, because maybe your fridge is packed full of old, rotting and moldy food and it’s like a no go zone, okay? So you get it in the fridge, then you gotta get it back out of the fridge, and you gotta have the time to cook it, okay? So let’s say you get that far.
Have you guys ever spent hours and hundreds of dollars shopping, planning, meal prepping, only to cook that thing and then leave it on the freaking stove or in the oven overnight because you forgot to put it away and have all of that go to waste. I have had that happen to me multiple times. And let me tell you, it is like the most frustrating, most heartbreaking feeling to get yourself all the way to that point.
I literally will just forget. Like, I’ll be like, oh, I’m really tired from all that cooking. I’m gonna go watch a show and come back and, you know, put this away later. Totally forget that it exists, walk out the next morning, see the pot on the stove, and my heart just drops. And I’m like, oh my god, I can’t eat that now, it’s not food safe, right? And then you gotta get it back into the fridge, again, maybe the fridge is like a huge dumpster fire. And then you gotta get it back out of the fridge and remember to eat it. And also get yourself to eat it because sometimes after all that work and you make a plan that this is what I’m gonna eat, then your brain is like, I don’t wanna because you’re telling me that I have to.
So there’s so, so many points in that journey that things can go horribly awry. Sometimes even when you do all that, it’s still easier to spend the money to eat out or order in. And then on top of all of that is this layer of perfectionism, right? Feeling like you’re supposed to be feeding yourself a certain way, like, nutritionally or healthfully.
Again, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made these super over the top elaborate meal plans because I’m trying to nail how much protein, and getting a variety of fruits and vegetables every day. Or this food or that food is like “bad”, like, getting into diet culture about it. And then also, environmental waste, right?
So when I work with clients on trying to find ways to make meal prepping easier, there’s this big pushback on not wanting to buy pre-cut fruit, pre-cut vegetables and bagged salads because, oh, all the environmental waste.
But it’s this big cognitive distortion because we’ll buy all these fruits and vegetables with the intention of chopping them. But we don’t chop them, we let them rot in the fridge, and then go get McDonald’s anyway. Like who are we kidding? We’re not saving anything. We’re not saving the rainforest by letting the fruits and veggies rot in our crisper.
But there’s that mindset, right? When you go to the store, you think, oh, it’s stupid to spend extra money on the pre-cut fruit and vegetables in the little plastic clam shells. So there’s just so much Ash. There are so many layers.
[00:07:32] Ash: Dusty, everything you described is what makes it so hard because matching intention with action is really hard with ADHD, and when it comes to feeding ourselves, you have to do it at multiple points. As you said, you have to know what you’re going to eat, you have to make sure that those things are in the house, or that you’ve taken them out of the fridge.There’s so much room to miss a step somewhere, and we’re so good at skipping steps, not intentionally, with ADHD that we think we have a plan, and then we don’t. This is something I’ve really been grappling with in the last couple of years, because going from a two parent household to a one parent household, where my kid is with me, all week during the school year because I live closer to her school, I am now solely responsible not just for feeding myself, but also for feeding my 14 year old.
And so this has been an area for me that’s had a lot of my attention in terms of cultivating good practices because when I was still married, my co-parent took care of the lion’s share of both the grocery shopping and the cooking. So I feel like in a lot of ways I was starting from square one and I’ve certainly run into every barrier you just named and then some probably.
So how do we, where do we go from here?
[00:08:54] Dusty: Well, yeah. So it can be quite overwhelming. I think the good news is that there’s so much you can do about this. Like, there’s so many options. And there’s no wrong way to feed yourself. There’s a lot you can do depending on what your goals are but I think it starts with first of all, getting out of shame.Because, again, this seems to be a thing that all other adults don’t have a problem doing, right? Like, everybody feeds themselves and maybe they feed their kids. It seems like they can manage their budget when it comes to grocery shopping and eating out and we can’t. So I think first, is to accept and understand that this is something that is hard for like most, if not all, adults with ADHD and it’s normal. This is a part where the disability impacts you and if you can kind of work through the shame, then I think we move on to looking at what is realistic for you, right?
So I’m a very busy person. I do very minimal meal prep and the majority of the meals I eat today are grab out of the fridge and eat – like no cooking. And so I would have to change my lifestyle to be able to cook more meals and I don’t have the time, and I don’t have the interest. I don’t like cooking.
I’m not that good at it, and I don’t have the time. That doesn’t mean that I’m eating out around the clock, but it does mean that the way I feed myself and my child looks different than how it might look for some other people. Like we do a lot of instant oatmeal with the water, cereal, cottage cheese, hard boiled eggs (pre-chopped).
Cooked chicken breast, rice cooker, frozen stuff that goes in the air fryer, bagged salads, fresh fruit and vegetables, and lots of stuff that can just be eaten cold is what I’m saying. And if we heat it up, it’s usually like one step and then they’ll be ready.
I’m starting just now, but there’s a couple of times a week that I’ll make a proper dinner. But it’s taken me a while to reorganize my day and my schedule to the point where that’s possible because I used to not even think about dinner ‘til 7:00pm and then I would cook and it wouldn’t be on the table ‘til like 9:00pm.
So, I’ve only gotten to the point where I can start cooking a few easy dinners by managing my schedule, setting lots of reminders and changing my calendar to be like, okay, at 5pm, start cooking dinner. It feels like it’s too early, but it’s not. And then deciding in advance what it’s going to be and making sure that I’ve shopped for it.
Like, that’s a lot of steps already, so it’s taking me a while to get there. But that’s me, right? For other people, the major issue might be cleanliness and space. Again, if you really struggle with clutter and cleaning and your sink is really packed full of dishes and stuff…
I actually had a client who was struggling with this and who had depression. And so we did red Solo cups with instant oatmeal. That was it. That was this person’s first step – to give themselves permission to eat oatmeal out of a red Solo cup and throw the cup away when they were done. Because then they could just not even go in the kitchen at all. And that’s what they had to do.
So if you’re dealing with a messy kitchen, you don’t have to get good at cleaning before you can feed yourself; but, you probably are gonna have to do more paper plates and more deli options. Like pre-made sandwiches, pre-cut fruit and give yourself permission to opt out of environmental guilt and spending a little more money.
[00:12:08] Ash: You’re still spending less money than eating out every meal and you’re not risking getting yourself sick or having to battle the shame. Like you can separate these things – these can be separate things.Dusty, I want to come back to kind of the simple meals because that is something that I rely on as well. Although, I have been putting effort towards learning how to cook and putting some intentionality there and I’ll talk about that in a minute. But one supportive practice for me is making sure I kind of have a list of our no prep meals.
[00:12:40] Ash: Meaning. It’s a box of macaroni and cheese, or it’s frozen chicken, or it’s something really easy that requires no steps in advance so long as the item is in the house. And these days, I pretty reliably have at least one of those options on hand because that’s a supportive practice for me.So I make sure to check for those things every time I go to the grocery store and replenish them when I don’t have them. And where that’s been really nice for me is when I do make a mistake throughout the week. This week, I’ve made the mistake of not taking a chicken breast or a piece of fish out of the fridge for my kid who likes very simple grilled protein all week.
I’ve had the intention of taking one of those things out of the freezer and have failed to do it just because I didn’t match intention with action because actually, I didn’t carry through with my own supportive practices, which I’ll talk about later. And having a backup plan really helps prevent me from going the takeout route or otherwise having an ADHD meltdown because I failed to prepare dinner, right?
So I always have a couple of options on hand that are low to no prep that only require basic preparation. Nothing needs to be defrosted. No specialty ingredients are required. If I have the box of the thing in my house, then that can be a good enough dinner for tonight.
[00:14:05] Dusty: Yeah. I think that’s really key. And also something that’s worked for some of my clients is, if there is the budget, to use a meal delivery service, not a meal prep service, right? So there’s like HelloFresh, they send you a box and that might work for some people, right? I’ve used it myself, it worked for a while. They send you the individualized portions, they send you the steps and the whole meal takes under 30 minutes. So it’s kind of nice because it solves all the executive functions around choosing what to eat and cooking it if you still want to cook it.But I’m saying there’s whole companies, like basically catering companies, that will send you hot meals or meals that you can put in your freezer or fridge and then heat up and they’re often very nutritionally balanced, can meet different dietary needs and while they’re not the cheapest, but are still cheaper than eating out.
And so if your issue is time, decision, feeling overwhelmed, messy kitchen and you want to feed yourself with a more nutritionally wide range of things – meal delivery, honestly, can be an amazing option if you are kind of at that point where you can afford it and everything else is really hard.
You know, if you have a clean enough kitchen to work in and you have the proper tools and you have some time, but not a lot of time, and you’re still struggling with executive dysfunction, then one of the meal prep services might be good for you, like HelloFresh.
But yeah, for me personally, it’s just like you, Ash. I just like to have a wide range of quick options. And here’s the thing, I’ll say that five years ago, I had very different eating habits. And I can tell you honestly, I did not enjoy a lot of what people might consider “healthy” foods or super nutritionally dense foods. I just subsisted off a lot of carbs. And I think I had to deal with a lot of “diet culture” guilt of should I be eating that or this or should I be eating that. What really helped me move on was giving myself permission to eat 90% of what I wanted and just 10% to build the skills to eat the things that I sort of wouldn’t normally eat, right?
So a good example of this is plain Greek yogurt. When I first heard that people were eating plain Greek yogurt, I was like, that’s disgusting. I’ve never liked yogurt. I’ve never been much of a dairy person at all. And plain yogurt just sounded awful. Like, have you tasted it? It’s bitter. It’s disgusting.
But I knew I was, at that time, doing a lot of weightlifting and people were talking about how it was just such a good source of protein. So I really wanted to essentially get good at eating Greek yogurt. I started with Greek vanilla yogurt and I found a couple recipes that I could use plain Greek yogurt in.
And what really turned the table for me, and one of my favorite meals to this day, is making myself a parfait. It’s so easy, I can make it in 10 minute breaks between clients, like scoop some vanilla yogurt into, or not vanilla, sorry, scoop some plain yogurt into a cup, throw some store bought granola in there, a couple scoops of peanut butter, that is the key, because the peanut butter is so sweet and the yogurt is so sour that they like offset each other in like this very pleasant way that it’s just enough, it’s not too sweet, it’s not too sour and so I’ll just eat like, couple scoops of peanut butter, some granola, and then the plain yogurt.
I actually found a way that I like to eat it. And so now, because I’ve had it in a context where it tastes good to me, it’s easier for me to incorporate it into other things in my diet. But it took time and I didn’t do that alongside every other thing that I felt like I sort of “should be eating”. I added them in one at a time, and just gave myself permission to eat whatever else I wanted to eat to keep myself fed.
[00:17:41] Ash: So Dusty, I actually love the taste of plain Greek yogurt. So I might be an anomaly there. And also as an aside, you might really like overnight oats. I will send you a recipe. It’s in a similar vein to a parfait, but you add oats to it. That is my morning go-to, especially on mornings that I am getting up and working out for similar reasons. It’s really easy to put together. You put it together the night before, stick it in the fridge and it is ready for you in the morning. Five minutes or less to put together.But you said something really interesting about skill building, and that’s really where my attention has been when I’m in the kitchen. I think where we get frustrated as people with ADHD is there are so many steps. And so a big thing for me has been over time, just telling myself to slow down and not skip steps. So that starts with, if I am going into the kitchen with the intention to cook and I know I will be doing a lot more actual cooking than I ever have in my life, I do my dishes first. I start by doing my dishes and that way whatever I need to use for cooking is clean.
And my countertops – I have a small kitchen, my countertops are available for prep. And that does make a huge difference in terms of levels of frustration once I get into the actual cooking process. Another thing that I do is I set out all of my ingredients first, I measure everything. So I measure all of my dry spices into a little bowl. Yes, that creates an extra dish, but I’ve got a dishwasher. And I get everything ready and set up before I even start assembling the recipe. Just one step at a time.
And I think that’s where we get into trouble. So often as people with ADHD we want to skip steps. We want to multitask, right? Something sauteing, so let me run over here and do some dishes or do something over here. And now I’ve burnt the thing I was sauteing. So a big practice for me has been slowing down and being repetitive. I think that so many of us think that we’re bad at cooking because we give a recipe a try one time, and maybe we don’t love it.
And then we throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? Oh, I’m just bad at cooking. Well, maybe it was a bad recipe. Or maybe, there’s something that you need to do differently. So what did you like? What didn’t you like about it? How can you find a different recipe?
I spent so long making myself this beef stew that was very bland. I was very disappointed. I love beef stew. I was so stoked and it was not very good. But I was able to sit down and think about what I didn’t like about it and find a different recipe. And I went back and tried it again and now I like that one a little bit better. And so now there’s an opportunity for me to keep practicing that because repetition makes it easier to do the thing, right?
If you’ve made a recipe once, it’s going to be immensely difficult to do. If you’ve made a recipe 50 times, it’s going to be second nature to put that recipe together. And so for me, I try to find things that sound good to me. Most of the time, I do a lot of comfort food, soups and stews. In the summer, I make a lot of big salads, stuff like that.
And, I find that the more time I spend in the kitchen and the more I repeat certain steps, even things like chopping vegetables, I’ve never really done a lot of prep work in that vein in my life. And so it takes practice, but the more I do it, the easier it gets. And the less of a wall of awfulness there is to engage with that task, because instead of it feeling like an unknown, I know about how long it’s going to take me to chop up vegetables.
I know what the steps are. And so, I don’t know. I just think there’s something to finding a recipe or two that you like and making an effort towards repeating those recipes a few times. Then go searching for another one that you want to try and make an effort towards repeating that a few times because the more you do it, the easier it gets.
[00:21:39] Dusty: Yeah, and so that actually made me remember, have you ever seen the episode of How to ADHD with Jessica McCabe featuring a guest whose name is Hannah Hart? In the episode they’re talking about exactly that. Hannah Hart’s asking Jessica McCabe, show me how you would cook a thing.So Jessica’s like, what do I feel like eating? I feel like eating chicken, what’s some ways to make chicken and she Googles for a minute, and then she sees spatchcock chicken, that sounds interesting. Then she just pops off to get the things to spatchcock a chicken and Hannah Hart is like whoa slow down, have you ever done this before? Jessica says no and Hannah asks how do you know how to do this?
And I’m like oh my god. I relate to that so much right and we want that novelty, we want that variety, so I think you’re hitting the nail on the head here in that I think we do often get ourselves in over our head.
Something that I did with a client one time because he was really overwhelmed by the grocery store. He didn’t like to go grocery shopping because he felt he was spending too much money and found meal prep hard. So I’m like, okay, let’s make this easier. What is something you could eat for breakfast everyday this week or like most days and he was like cereal. I’m like, okay, could you eat that every day? He was like, yes, I’m like, okay. So I asked, do you have any cereal right now? He said yes and so I asked him to go check and see if he had enough for approximately seven days. He went and looked and he had a full box. So I asked, do you have enough milk for seven days? And he went and looked and he’s like, no, I’m almost out of milk. So I had him put milk on the grocery list.
Next, I asked what is something very easy, low effort that you could make yourself that you could eat every day or most days for lunch? And he said a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I confirmed, you could eat that every day? He said yes. So I asked if he had 14 slices of bread? And he went and counted, no. So he put that on the list. Same thing for the jam and peanut butter. He had jam, and he had peanut butter. So on the list, all we’ve got is milk and bread. But we’ve got breakfast and lunch covered all week.
And I’m like, okay, you’re gonna want some variety. You’re gonna want to spend some money, cause you’ve been doing it. So let’s not plan for you to have to make your own dinner every night. Let’s pick two times this week that you’re gonna order out or go eat out. That takes it back down to five dinners, so let’s pick a couple easy things, like frozen dinners that you could make yourself like frozen pizza, frozen burrito, hungry man dinner, whatever right and so he wrote down something.
Next I asked him to pick one simple dish and you’re just gonna cook it with the plan to eat it that night and the leftovers the next day. So, in the whole meal prep, he picked one simple thing to cook and put the ingredients for that on his list. So his shopping list was milk, bread, three frozen burritos, and a couple of things for his simple dish.
And so he knew he was going to the grocery store but he had his whole week planned out. And if you plan to eat a can of soup every day for lunch, and you go and you buy seven cans of soup, congratulations, you’ve successfully meal prepped. It doesn’t have to be every meal. Every meal doesn’t have to be perfect, perfectly planned out or even something that you cook.
Which sounds so obvious now that I say it, but that is definitely where I got stuck back when I was starting to meal prep.
[00:24:46] Ash: That’s a place that I got stuck as well. And that’s actually what you described is kind of the way that meals tend to work in my house. I cook separately for my kid because she’s autistic and she has special needs in terms of food and that’s totally fine.But when I cook for myself, I usually make something that I can eat the leftovers at least two more times that same week. When I’m talking about making a dish from scratch, I’m making something that will give me multiple servings or sometimes even give me something to put in the freezer for later.
I made a chicken noodle soup a couple of weeks ago that was three meals plus another meal that went into the freezer, which was really nice. And then the rest of the week, I kind of went for things that were easier to assemble like canned refried beans in a tortilla with some cheese and taco sauce for a bean burrito, right?
Stuff that’s really simple. And I’m looking at my week and setting my intentions for the day that I’m going to do a big cooking day to be an evening where I don’t have a lot else planned and where I’m wrapped up early enough in the day that I can do it.
So it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can find that space between. Speaking about steps in the kitchen and skipping steps – another step I take before I start dinner, so I do my dishes and before I start dinner, I inventory. By inventory I mean I open my freezer, I open my refrigerator, and I look at my pantry shelves, which are open, which I love by the way, I love being able to just look and see what I do and do not have at a glance. But I do inventory to answer the question, what is for dinner tomorrow?
So you were talking about how that decision making process, that what am I having, can be the very first place that hangs us up. I decide the night before, and the reason, as I said earlier, I was skipping steps and kept forgetting to take stuff out of the freezer for my kid. It’s because I was skipping the step of taking a moment to ask myself what is for dinner tomorrow so that if something does need to come out of the freezer, because I do rely a lot on frozen meats, I don’t like dealing with fresh meat because it so often will sit in my fridge and go bad. So I just do frozen chicken breasts and frozen fish for my kid and I.
We eat both of those things a lot, but I have to remember to take them out of the freezer in order for them to be edible. They have to come out the night before so that they can defrost in the refrigerator. So part of my process in the kitchen is answering that question of what’s for dinner and reliably if I do the dishes before I make dinner, I will remember to ask myself that question and to prepare for tomorrow.
But if I skip the step of dishes, then I also skip the step of what’s for dinner tomorrow and then…And then thankfully, I have the backup plan of there are still things that I can make to feed us, but it is important to link those steps together for me in order to kind of keep the process running.
[00:27:45] Dusty: You hit on something that I actually didn’t cover, that’s also really important because you said you decided the night before and this is one thing that I think people get stuck on as well. That oppositional defiance or “safe foods” like sometimes when you plan to eat something then you just have no appetite for it and you’ll eat just about anything else in the world and so that’s hard to work around too because we don’t reliably know what we’re gonna want and for a person with ADHD it’s not just because you don’t want to eat it. No, it’s harder than it sounds.I’m pretty good, like, I don’t have that problem. If I just write something down, I can just eat something because I told myself to eat it. Honestly, like, I don’t care. But I know that is really hard for some people. And so I think that choosing in the moment or choosing between a range of limited options is a good idea. And if people really feel like their best option is to choose in the moment, I would recommend having a small menu.
I actually had a client print up like a template menu from a fancy restaurant and then put her options on it. I thought that was so smart because again, that’s sort of like that gamification. You probably want the oatmeal and the hard boiled eggs more if you get to pick them from a fancy menu, right?
And there’s just so many good hacks like this for no matter what you’re dealing with. Like if it’s dishes just use frickin’ paper plates. I promise you are not going to be the straw that broke the camel’s back on climate change and environmental damage, okay?
We’re not suddenly going to hell in a handbasket because you bought and used a package of paper plates and threw them away. You’re fine, I promise, you guys. In the words of the indomitable Casey Davis, you can’t save the rainforest when you’re depressed.
And there’s something that I keep coming up against when I’m working with clients, which is almost like food hoarding and dish hoarding. So one time, actually when I was doing the ADHD boot camp, one of the earliest boot camps, I had a guy in the boot camp and he was a young man who lived alone and didn’t cook a lot. He showed us his kitchen and every cupboard was jam packed full and it was because he had an old girlfriend and old roommates that had moved out and left some stuff and his parents had given him some stuff.
So I said to him, how often do you cook? He said maybe once a week. I asked him to go get a sheet from his bedroom, like a flat sheet, and I wanted him to lay it down on the living room floor. After he got the sheet I said, I want you to take everything out of all of those upper cupboards, with all the pots and pans, and I want you to lay them on the sheet in the living room.
So he laid them out and he had so many pots and pans and lids! I had him spread them all out on the sheet so he could see them and then I told him to pick what he actually wanted to keep and what he thinks he needed based on how much he cooked. So he looked at everything and he selected, like, one pot and one pan or whatever.
And I was like, okay, now I want you to go put those back in the cupboard. You can imagine opening a cupboard that is jam-packed full of all these pots and pans, and then visualize opening a cupboard that has one pot in it. Pretty easy to grab that pot and put it back. No dread opening that cupboard, pretty easy to wash one pot and put it away.
And then all that other stuff left on the sheet, I said do you want to store it? Do you want to donate it? So he donated pretty much all of it. And so we went through every drawer and cupboard in his kitchen like that.
And guys, this is why you should come to boot camp, because I’ll help you with this too. And we just pared it way, way down. It made washing dishes not scary. So much easier for him to keep his kitchen clean, to know where his things were. And it also made it more enticing for him to cook because who wants to cook in a kitchen that’s crammed to the rafters of stuff.
And it’s the same for our fridges and freezers in a different bootcamp. I actually had a client who realized that they had so much food in their freezer that they actually didn’t really need to buy groceries for the next however long. So I had them make a list of all the things in their freezer and then they made a plan to work through all the backlog of freezer food that they had because they kept buying more food and putting things in the freezer. They literally had a year’s worth of food.
I’ve had to do this myself with my pantry from time to time, just take stock of everything in my pantry because I’ll buy things. I’d rather buy a new thing or I’d rather eat something else.
So like that one lonely can of whatever kind of soup or the tin of sardines or whatever, you know it sits there and it rots and it doesn’t get eaten and so you can gamify it, right? Like making a game out of the goal. It weirdly feels so good to finish a jar of something or finish the last can of something. There’s something so satisfying about using a whole thing up or fully getting rid of things.
And then once you’ve gotten rid of that backlog of food, try to experiment with how much food you actually need, not how much food you think you should buy. Because I tell you, when I first started grocery shopping as a young adult, I would buy enough food for like an army. And then of course, most of it would rot. And what I came to realize is when I was a young adult without a family, I didn’t need to buy a bag of apples, I needed to buy two apples. And it feels stupid to just buy two apples at the grocery store, but that is the amount of apples I would eat in a week.
It saves you money, saves you space, and when you open your fridge and it’s mostly empty, like it’s mostly negative space, and you see two apples and that one dish of leftovers, you actually want to eat them, right? When those two apples are like crammed in there amongst all the other stuff and the dish of leftovers is like half spilling, it’s not appetizing.
But when the fridge looks beautiful and you can see what you’re seeing and you’re like, ah, here are my two apples, they are crisp and red – I’d like to eat those. It makes a difference, right? So this issue of inventory management is often where I see people getting stuck.
[00:33:25] Ash: Couple of thoughts on that Dusty – with the client and the dishes. As a former professional organizer, my kitchen is really well organized because that helps me with my ADHD, but there’s also the thing of, I really only have one thing per job. And the reason for that is twofold. Number one, if I use the same frying pan every time I make a certain dish, I’m going to get better at making that dish because there’s consistency there. If I grab a different frying pan every time I do it, I’m going to have trouble with consistency.Number two, if I only have one frying pan of that size, then I have to wash that frying pan in order to use it again. If I’ve got three frying pans of that size, that’s when you can really run into a nasty dishes backlog because you don’t have to wash the dishes in order to prepare the next thing.
On the food thing, I want to double down on the “don’t be afraid of being an environmental menace” if you just throw food away. I have gone the opposite direction of you in terms of, I’ve tried to make myself sort of work through the pantry thing. It never works for me. It just makes me avoid my kitchen altogether. It just makes me resentful. And I hate food waste. I always feel bad when I have to throw food away, but that is something that I’m more often giving myself permission to do. Because for me, the visual clutter of a bunch of food that I’m not and maybe never going to use again can make it hard for me to make sense of what I do have that I might actually want to make.
And so, the way that I have learned to manage my inventory is to just be really careful and thoughtful about what I buy in the first place. I don’t buy a lot of new things and I don’t buy things without an intention behind them. Meaning if I don’t have a recipe planned for this that I know that I am going to make soon and that I am getting all of the things for I’m not going to buy the thing willy-nilly in hopes that I will find it later.
And on rare occasions that I do make that mistake and something that just sits or if I buy something and I don’t like it, I bought some orange chicken from Trader Joe’s that everyone raved about that I thought was kind of gross and it was like three or four servings in the bag. I made one. I threw the rest away because otherwise it was just going to sit in my freezer and get freezer burn until I eventually threw it away anyway, so why not just make that decision now and let it go?
So it is okay, even if the food is not expired, it is okay to let something go if you know that you aren’t going to use it again and having less can make it easier for you to see what you do have and to make sense of that, and it’ll help you start to find what are the regular things.
I’ve got a pretty good groove now in terms of what are the regular things that I like to keep around. The regular things that are always in my pantry, that as soon as I’m low, not even out, as soon as I’m low, it goes on the list to restock. And that’s because I can open my fridge or my freezer or look at my inventory really easily. I easily identify what I’m out of because I know what I have and I know what I keep around.
[00:36:39] Dusty: And I didn’t say that part, but I, in my sort of journey to get better at feeding myself, I was a relentless food thrower, a weigher. And look, like you said, I’m not saying that food waste is good, we know that globally food waste is a huge problem but two things. I would like to remind everyone listening that when we’re talking about food waste being an issue, it’s probably not you and your tiny amount of food waste.You guys have to remember that there are very rich people out there wasting a lot of food. There are companies throwing away tons and tons of food. Like, when we’re talking about food waste, we’re largely talking about that, not you wasting $60 of groceries that you’re throwing in your compost or your garbage, right?
Like, it sucks. Yes, it sucks to waste money. It sucks to buy things that you’re excited to cook, not cook them, have them go bad, throw them away, and feel all the shame of wasting money and environmental guilt. I get it. But it’s part of the journey, right? We’re not, Ash and I are not saying, whatever, who cares, throw food away all the time. Like the reality is it’s gonna happen anyway, right? Just spare yourself the guilt and the shame and the beating yourself up. Leaving the rotting thing in the back of your fridge for like three weeks, which is gonna make you not want to open your fridge – just chuck it, guilt free.
Okay, and then observe how much extra you bought that you didn’t need, and let that inform your grocery shopping in the future. Try to under buy, right? Buy less than what you think you need. Cause you probably are overestimating but if on the journey to getting good at shopping, planning, cooking, the casualties are several hundred dollars worth of groceries over the year, it was gonna happen anyway. Just like, cut your losses.
You know, all the metaphors here. You want to make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs. It is okay. I personally have wasted so much food. Am I proud of it, no. But do I feel guilty about it, absolutely not. Because it was through giving myself permission to ruthlessly just get rid of overstock and throw away things I wasn’t gonna eat, or things that were rotting, or things that I bought for a recipe but then didn’t use. It was only through doing that, that I was able to give myself permission to keep moving forward and do what worked.
And the main thing for me, like you’re saying, Ash, the main thing is keeping the fridge, the pantry and the kitchen clean and clear. When the fridge is overwhelming, it’s bad news. When the pantry is overwhelming, it’s bad news. Right? I have to be able to visually see what I have. I need there to be some negative space, because even if I have things I like to eat, if it’s too crowded, I find that I don’t want to eat them, they don’t look appetizing. I don’t know what it is.
I need my kitchen to sort of look like those kitchens when you go into Ikea and you open all the cupboards and there’s barely anything in there. That’s what works for me, right? If I have two apples in the fridge, and there’s nothing else on that shelf, I’ll want to eat them. If I have a bag of apples crammed amidst everything else, I’m like, blah, and I just close the fridge and order a pizza.
So, I have no shame about the amount of food waste that I’ve created. And, because of all that, these days I create way less food waste.
I’m even good now, like this is something that’s never happened for me before. This has just happened recently where I’ve gotten good at looking at leftovers or looking at random ingredients that were supposed to be for something but then they didn’t end up in it. And being like, oh, this needs to get eaten. Here’s something in the fridge that we need to get rid of and we need to eat it.
And so, I’m actually at the point where I’m wasting less food than ever because I actually am finishing leftovers. But it only came at the end of this really long journey that went in phases that included ruthlessly throwing away whatever I didn’t need.
And so, just do it. It’s ADHD tax paid up front, learn from it, move forward. Feeding yourself is hard and it’s a journey. And it’s probably like several different steps and phases, which on the one hand can feel overwhelming, but the good news is there are so many cool ADHD friendly hacks and interventions along the way. And somebody has figured out some way to manage the thing that you are struggling with.
It’s probably not one thing, feeding yourself. It’s probably a cluster of things, and it’s okay to just deal with one of those at a time and let the rest of them lie. Like, just get good at dishes, or get good at inventory management, or just get good at deciding what you like to eat or get good at remembering to feed yourself. You can just work on one thing at a time.
[00:40:54] Ash: I think that’s a really good place to leave it today, Dusty. Just to pick one place, start with that. And when I think about the system that I’ve built for myself now that’s working really well, it really did start with doing the dishes first. Doing the dishes first before I cook, because I have to cook for my kid every day, whether or not I’m cooking for myself, doing that first really did pave the way for more desire for me to cook for myself alongside the clearing out of all of the things that weren’t serving me in my kitchen. So listeners, until next week, I’m Ash, [00:41:28] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.[00:41:29] Ash: and this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
