Had this issue for years now, meds nuke hunger and I’m terrible at eating breakfast by the time I get back from work they’ve worn off and I have zero motivation. Fallen into the diet of nearly always having ramen, energy drinks and a beer here and then with a muti vitami.
Tried planners, can never get them to work my job having constantly changing shift patterns probs contributes to that, even tried one of those meal recipe box thingies stopped due to it A: being expensive and B: still didn’t really work.
I’m not even a bad cook either just cannot force my brain to bloody do it.
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Keep your work cloths on when you get home until you’ve made a meal.
I’ve found if I quit the “work mode” and get cozy my odds decrease exponentially. If I don’t have someone to cook for (which is easier than cooking for self).
Trick your brain.
Get some ready to eat meals from Costco. Most the time youre just heating in a pot for good food that can be jazzed up as needed for minimal effort.
Heb has meal simples that are incredible one portion oven meals for like $10
This is the trick, as soon as you shower after work, shit ain’t getting done.
You gotta keep the work clothes on until all your shit is done.
This is probably the one thing that would work for me, but I’d have to get out of the habit of immediately taking my pants off when I get home lol
i used to work from the office. i would get home from work, turn on the oven, then go get dressed into evening clothes.
this forced my to think about what i was gunna put in the oven and got me in the habit of thinking about dinner every night before i got hungry.
It’s really hard to have a routine when your work schedule is irregular. I don’t think you are wrong to rely on easy to prepare stuff but you need more nutrition, yes? My kids say I have ADD, and most of them do, my second to youngest was having trouble because Adderall so I got her some easy things.
Bagged salad packs with the dressing.
Packaged Hummus from the grocery, on Triscuit crackers, has a lot of calories with fiber & nutrition from the hummus.
Apple with sliced cheese or peanut butter
Do you like tuna? Make tuna salad at the beginning of the week, or a can dumped on one of the aforementioned bagged salad mixes.
Hard boiled eggs last a long time in the fridge, also an egg dropped into your ramen would add nutrition.
Keep your work schedule in your phone calendar and set an alarm for dinner.
For breakfast cold fermented oatmeal is amazing, we call it summer oatmeal. Mix rolled oats with yogurt, coconut water and/ or kombucha/kvass/tepache if you have it, juice or water if you don’t. Mix in dried fruit and nuts and seeds, even chocolate if you want. It should start a little sloppy as the oats will take up the liquid. Taste and adjust, sweeten if you want, I don’t. Put it in the fridge and each morning take a little for breakfast.
And also, don’t stress about eating regularly if you don’t have weight issues. If your body is feeling ok and staying in a healthy size you don’t need to force yourself.
That’s the thing - you don’t, live on edge😎
You don’t need to jump straight to cooking full meals.
Stuff like rice/beans with some sauce can be made in like 2 minutes. Like, with as much effort as ramen.
But that stuff will stay in your stomach and slowly get digested, so you’ll need less energy drinks at the end of the day.
But cooking is like anything, start out small and easy and then just slowly start adding stuff. Once doing the small things feels natural, add an extra step or two. Like just throwing a chicken breast in a pan.
Even if you used to be a good cook, it sounds like you need to go back to basics and work yourself up to the fancy stuff.
Rice in 2 minutes? This is where I realize maybe I’ve never bought precooked rice before. How can it take so little time though? The water still needs to boil right, or is it a microwave thing?
Those 90 second pouches…
Like I said, start as simple as possible and build on it.
There’s microwave rice too. Check your local Korean store
I’ll have to check local grocery stores, maps showed my closest Korean Grocery store was 59 miles away, haha. I’m sure Kroger or Aldi should have something. I’ve just always bought 5-10lb bags of rice so I never thought about it being quicker some other way. Although when I moved in 2016 I left my rice cooker for a friend, and I never replaced it for some reason, miss that thing
This is most likely a symptom of something. Maybe get a in depth physical, some blood work; and possibly see a licensed professional to check for signs of depression.
Lack of energy is a symptom of a lot of things so I wouldn’t rule anything out.
I had no idea how to cook so I just got meal kits like hello fresh and they’ve got me in a decent routine now, I actually really enjoy it.
I used to work as a chef, but I still find it hard to cook for myself because of all the little tasks of deciding and shopping and so on. For a good while I used hello fresh just because it made things easy and uncomplicated week nights, and then at the weekend I’d cook fun or more elaborate stuff.
They’re not as cheap as cooking for yourself, but adhd’s poor planning and impulse control led to a lot of wasted food and expensive takeout. So in the end it didn’t feel like to changed my overall expenses, and at least I was eating a cooked meal with meat and veg, not just eating instant ramen or ordering unhealthy deliveries.
Edit: fixed some typos
My husband is a chef and doesn’t cook literally anything, ever, at home. I feed him graciously, as I totally understand why he doesn’t want to cook at home, and I love to cook. That’s my motivation to cook, I’ve others to feed, so it’s routine. People will joke he must cook for me all the time, but nothing is further from the truth lol
The man would live off crackers and pb&j if he could.
lol, this advice is excellent, but the sheer number of options is completely overwhelming with ADHD.
This kept me from deciding for one option for a long time. I settled with a hot air fryer eventually, but it doesn’t really matter.
What helped me a lot to take the pressure off is engineered staple food: Something that’s always ready, and much more healthy than most takeout. This is Food, Huel, all good. With 0 appetite on meds, a This is Food drink is perfect.
With that fallback in place, the stress of “must cook” is gone so I can actually cook :-)
If you lose motivation because of the amount of time that you’d spend cooking, you should consider using days off to prep building blocks that can be used for different meals. Keeping the initial cook simple can give you a broad canvas to change things up on the spot so that you don’t get fatigued over the flavor. You can salt a large chunk of meat like a pork shoulder or chuck roast and use a long cooking method like a braise or a roast. The longer cook times will make these cuts extremely tender, and you’ll only have to do it once. Use them throughout the week in whatever application you feel like on the day, even if that means just adding it to your ramen. Since it’s just salted, it’s versatile enough to adapt to whatever seasonings or sauces you add to it. If you’re using store bought ingredients, you can put together pasta, bbq sandwiches, or quesadillas pretty quickly.
As far as vegetables go, you can also prep individual portions of things like a mirepoix a week ahead of time, to cut down on the work you have to do every day. You could even freeze it in ice cube trays to make them last longer if you have the space. You can mince garlic ahead of time and store it in a neutral oil. If you don’t mind acidity, pickling and lacto fermenting your vegetables is a good way to both preserve them and have something that’s ready to go on demand. Some vegetables like broccoli can be parcooked without sacrificing texture to reduce the amount of time you have to spend cooking on the day of.
Meal kits may not have worked for you because they simplify the shopping, not the actual cooking process. It still takes the same amount of time to cook a meal kit, which doesn’t exactly help when you’re hungry and exhausted. I think that prepping pieces of a meal in advance will give you the tools to throw something together almost as quickly and easily as ramen, which might lead to you cooking more often. I hope this helps, and I’d be happy to expand on anything that was vague or otherwise lacking!
For me the desire to put up with the effort to cook something came, when I bought a Ninja Speedi… because the time reduces to pretty much throwing the ingredients together. Pick something to cook (potatoes, vegetables, pasta, rice,…) and throw it in the bottom. Put the divider in and put the thing to fry at the top (meat, fries, veggy pattie, whatever). A bit of water in the bottom, timer to 12 mins, temp to 180°C and hit start. 16 or so minutes later you have your meal. It starts to heat the water to produce steam and then turns on the recirculating heat for the configured time, so your food gets steamed and fried at the same time. Not having to juggle different pots and pans at the same time made cooking much more pleasant.
Slow cooker, put 2kg brisket and ~120ml water in, low setting, 8 hours. Put brisket on rack, coat with a mix of tomato sauce, BBQ sauce, and mustard. Into oven at 200°C for about 20 minutes. Take it out, wrap in foil, cool until near freezing, then slice thin.
This is cheaper for 4 days of lunches than one day of takeaway for me. No nursing the food, just set a reminder and forget.
Crockpot/slow cooker meals. Especially ones that are good as leftovers. I do everything from beef stews to pulled pork bbq to shredded chicken etc. I also find it’s so much easier to eat healthy and still feel full which makes me less interested in beer and snacks.
Mostly by being an ingredient-only house. If there’s nothing too convenient around and you’re hungry enough, you might be more inclined.
Also you can make big things that you can pick off of throughout the week. I used to make giant pot roasts, which are great because you just dump stuff on top of a roast and pop it in the oven for a couple of hours without having to fuss over it, and eat that for a day or so, get bored with it and make tacos with the meat, etc.
I cook a pot of spicy beans and use it throughout the week with tortillas, chips, toast, or rice.
Cook one day, eat for 5. Finding a meal you like, and can do this with is pinnacle imo, I agree
Kidney beans and rice with kielbasa. Though in the portions I cook it in, it’s more like cook for one day, and have at least 3 weeks of food to shove into the deep freeze.
A constantly changing schedule would be detrimental to me cooking, that might be the case for you as well. I need the oppressive clock to say it is time to cook dinner and if the time when I need to cook dinner keeps changing, I will forget to cook dinner and end up doing a quick meal of BS just so I can sleep.
You can also try meal prep, that is just to give you a meal that is as convenient as ramen during the week with a low daily time commitment. The idea of it may be kind of daunting, but it is just a bunch of smaller steps that you can AD4K off between without much issue.
If you don’t mind eating the same food as a main meal for a bit this method works:
Make a big entree of something on an off day. Chili, lasagna, slow cooked food, whatever.
Have some stuff ready to go as sides that require very minimal effort (sides like rice, frozen bagged veggies or fresh - fresh is best but if apathy takes hold then frozen is fine
In the evenings microwave some leftovers from your big entree and supplement it with a quick and easy side. It helps break up the monotony if that matters to you, and it’s easy
