Meal Prepping: ADHD Edition
About 4 weeks ago I started meal prepping lunches for myself and my husband for the work week. That’s a sentence I never thought I would write.
In fact, an old tik tok of mine popped up in my notifications this morning where I was meal prepping for my bearded dragons before vacation and then said “it’s ironic I can meal prep for the bearded dragons but I don’t have the brain capacity to do it for myself.”
That is what ADHD does for me a lot of time. There are a lot of ways it affects me but those brain blocks on a task can be the most frustrating thing.
One major thing that has changed since that video is that I started medication for my ADHD about 8 months ago. Life. Changing.
My brain is quiet more than she’s spiraling and I never dreamed that was a possibility.
How does that fit into meal prepping?
Medicating my ADHD and having that peace in my brain enabled me to break that brain block and also recognize that meal prepping doesn’t have to be perfect.
I always imagined it as this task that would take up an entire day of my weekend consisting of making a list, shopping, and cooking. The reality? It’s about 10 minutes of making a grocery delivery order and 1-2 hours of cooking. Those couple of hours make my week so much easier.
No more decision fatigue trying to decide what to eat. No more spending half of my lunch break prepping something. More food variety in my lunches. More meals that leave me satiated.
My approach is not a perfect list making, plan it all out meal prepping.
When I do my grocery list for the week, I make sure to add in frozen veggies and some forms of protein. Doing that also means some weeks I don’t even have to get groceries for meal prep. I don’t stress about planning. I decide how I want to do the protein and go from there. I do wash steamable frozen veggies or whatever needs to be used from the previous week’s trip to the farmer’s market.
If you watch my meal prepping videos on social media, you’ll see what I mean by ADHD edition. Sometimes it gets wild and off track, but it always gets done.
Lately I find myself looking forward to that part of my Sunday. That satisfying sound of clicking on the lids when everything is ready? Best sense of accomplishment.
If you’ve been wanting to meal prep, but it feels like too much, I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be. It can be random. It can be unplanned. It can be whatever you need it to be that week. That time on Sunday is investing in myself and my husband for the rest of the week and it is worth every second.
