How to Make Food Easier ; Neurodivergent Meal Prep & Planning ⋆ Earth and Water

The pressure to achieve healthy, home cooked meals weighs heavily on so many of us. Particularly those of us who are neurodivergent, as we tend to struggle heavily in the area of food for a multitude of reasons. Media paints a picture of a lone chef executing culinary masterpieces, giving the illusion that food is simple (and even stress relieving *exasperated sigh*), but this expectation simply doesn’t reflect reality. In fact, meal planning and cooking were never meant to be a one-person job.

Historically, meal preparation was a communal affair. Families and communities gathered around the hearth, sharing tasks and conversation. This collaborative approach not only lightened the workload but also fostered a sense of connection and belonging.

Fast forward to today’s fast-paced world, and the solo cook reigns supreme (at least in societal expectations). This ideal is further complicated for neurodivergent individuals who may struggle with executive function, sensory sensitivities, or time management. Planning a week’s worth of meals, let alone prepping and cooking them, can feel overwhelming and lead to frustration and unhealthy choices.

I, myself have struggled HEAVILY with this area of life. I’ve done my best to bring it back into being a group effort but the truth is that it’s hard to find help when everyone’s schedules are all over the place. Meal prep has been a life saver and we try our best to make it a team affair when we can. In between, we lean heavily on convenience meals, that have their downsides for sure but don’t deserve near the bad rep they get.

The challenge of meal planning becomes even more complex when you factor in food allergies, sensitivities, or other health concerns. Restrictions on certain ingredients can limit recipe options and add an extra layer of stress to the already demanding task. Diet culture and the constant barrage of the latest internet food trends only exacerbate this feeling. It’s easy to get caught in the vortex of “miracle” diets and restrictive eating plans, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and afraid to eat anything that doesn’t fall within the narrow confines of the trend.

But here’s the truth: there is no one-size-fits-all approach to food. Ditch the pressure to conform to the latest fad and embrace mindful and intuitive eating. Focus on what works for your body and your unique needs. Listen to your hunger cues, savor your food, and enjoy the experience of eating. This doesn’t mean you can’t explore new recipes or try trendy ingredients – just do so in a way that feels safe and manageable for you. Remember, a healthy and fulfilling relationship with food is about creating a sustainable system that works for your lifestyle and health, not blindly following the latest trend.

Reclaiming the communal spirit of mealtime can be a game-changer.

Embrace the Team Effort: Cooking doesn’t have to be a solitary act of heroism, though the difficulty of it definitely makes you a hero if you can effortlessly pull it off. Involve family members, housemates, or friends. Delegate tasks based on skills and preferences. One person might enjoy planning menus while another finds joy in chopping vegetables.
Batch Cooking is Your Best Friend: Dedicate a specific time each week to prepping ingredients for multiple meals. This can involve chopping vegetables, pre-cooking proteins, and preparing sauces. This way, assembling meals throughout the week becomes a much simpler task.
Embrace the Power of Repetition: Having a few go-to meals in your repertoire that are easy to prepare and everyone enjoys can be a lifesaver. This reduces decision fatigue and streamlines the cooking process. Most people rotate between the same 12-15 meals anyway without even realizing it.
Flexibility is Key: Life throws curveballs. Don’t get discouraged if your perfectly planned week goes awry. Leftovers are your friend, and frozen meals can be a healthy and convenient option when needed.

For neurodivergent individuals, a few additional tweaks can make a big difference:

Visual Aids are Invaluable: Use pictures, charts, or color-coded systems to organize recipes and grocery lists. This can provide a clear and easy-to-follow roadmap for meal planning and preparation.
Break it Down: Large, open-ended tasks can feel daunting. Find simple recipes with as few ingredients and steps as possible. Break down meal prepping into smaller, more manageable steps. Setting a timer for each step can be helpful for time management.
Minimize Sensory Overload: The power of headphones to neuro-spicy folks is unfounded. It feels like multitasking to be able to listen to music or a book, you drown out all outside distractions so it’s just you and the food, and listening to music while accomplishing tasks has been shown to help people like us, specifically, accomplish tasks more efficiently.
Start Small: Don’t try to jump into the deep end of this vast subject all at once or drowning is a real danger. Start with one simple recipe or task at a time and allow them to build and compound on themselves a little at a time. There’s no urgent rush to master this skill, you have to eat for the rest of your life.

Experiment with different foods and modalities to find what works best for you. By working together, sharing responsibilities, and tailoring the approach to individual needs, mealtime can become a source of joy, connection, and nourishment for everyone involved. Let’s ditch the pressure of the solo chef and embrace the power of shared plates and shared responsibilities. Remember, a kitchen filled with laughter and collaboration is a recipe for a more fulfilling and stress-free culinary experience.

Beginning –

The word “diet” has been tainted. Often times it means throwing out everything you’re doing and completely overhauling your kitchen overnight but only for a short amount of time. Diet culture is full of ‘quitting’ and rules portrayed as universal but almost never are. They’re stressful which is counter productive to the goals we’re trying to use them to achieve.

Instead of ‘dieting’, conscious mindful eating can teach us what works specifically for our own unique body, despite what the latest expert would have you believe. Everyone’s body is create differently and thrives in a different set of circumstances. Figuring out what works best for you is a matter of getting to know yourself and your body.

The internet will overwhelm you real quick with what’s good for you versus what’s bad. If we listen to everything it said, there would be nothing left to eat. When food is already one of the biggest struggles most of us have, we don’t want to make it more complicated, we want to make it as simple as possible.

Many people use dieting to gain a sense of control over their lives when they feel like they lack control elsewhere. These control habits tend to become more rigid over time as they compound and build on one another.

In another sense, deprivation of certain foods causes us to want them that much more. Like a child at the store told not to touch something, being told we can’t eat something automatically draws us to it.

Mindful, intuitive eating creates a sense of intimidation because it puts all of the responsibility on the individual to decide what works for them and what doesn’t. In a world that spends so much time teaching us not to trust our own bodies and intuition, panic and distrust over making our own decisions can set in. By nature, people want both complete freedom and for someone else to take the responsibility and tell us what to do. That way, if something doesn’t work out, we don’t have to shoulder the blame alone.

We have to spend time analyzing and learning our body’s different cues. So many of us are so out of touch with our bodies that we’ll eat a whole box of cookies, start to feel really bad and it won’t even cross our minds that it may be the cookies. Variety is important and great. We need a ton of variety in our diets to fulfill all of our needs. There’s a time and place for cookies just like there’s a time and place for salads. You have to check in with your body and honor what it’s telling you it needs more of or less of.

Most of us were raised in the “clean plate club” where we were made to finish our plates which required eating past fullness. This can be pretty harmful to learning our hunger and fulness cues. We’re not blaming our caregivers here. Perhaps there was food insecurity so you had to eat what you had when you had it or perhaps that’s just how they were raised and they didn’t know any better (how could they of known better).

9:10 –

What does hunger feel like if it’s not a grumbling stomach? Most of us are taught that this is the only hunger cue we get but our body gives us a whole host of different hunger cues. Especially if you’ve had a history of ignoring the grumbling tummy. Different hunger cues can include headache, fatigue, nausea, general malaise or something else that doesn’t seem related at all.

We’re taught, instead of listening to when we’re hungry or not, that meals follow a certain schedule and that set universal schedule may be a great fit for you or it may not. Those of us who have time blindness and forget to eat may benefit from a set schedule with reminders on our phones. We may also not require feeding at those times. You have the flexibility and freedom to experiment with what works for you and what doesn’t.

Food Journal

Neurodivergent people in particular have a hard time differentiating their hunger cues and may exasperate the issue by putting off eating because it’s viewed as a task. Not necessarily a diet culture type thing but just a time consuming, energy and time needed task that we have to get around to doing when we would rather put those efforts somewhere else.

Making food for most people is just the task of making food. Neurodivergent people view it as +/- 25 tasks which makes us even more resistant to it. We generally find it hard to focus on this under stimulating task and wonder off, leading things to burn. So instead of even trying to cook, many of us will grab whatever single serve thing is available and end up eating just a piece of cheese or a pack of crackers.

Making a point to learn how to food prep can help to counteract our issues with food and variety. Turn on music, a podcast or invite a friend over (body doubling) at a certain time with the purpose of prepping food for the week so that you have a good variety of healthy options to just grab and eat. Label your containers, you will forget how long everything has been in there.

Convenience foods are not all bad. Frozen foods have nearly the same nutritional value as fresh. Sure, many convenience foods are wrapped in a lot of single serve plastics but we’re working on stepping stones and baby steps here. Whatever helps you gain control over your ability to feed yourself in a healthy way is what’s important. From there, you can build and transition to healthy for you and the earth but right now, our focus is on you. You can’t be any good to anyone else if you’re not at your best first.

25:33 –

Feeding yourself and everyone else was never supposed to be a one person job. We use to live in villages where the responsibility of this task was shared by many involved. Now, we expect each and every person to be responsible for it independently and we were never meant for that. It’s a large task and a whole, very large area of life.

ADHD fridge organization. Put the condiments and things you’re going to think about and be willing to search for in the drawers and put perishables like fruit, veggies, sandwich meat, etc. front and center so you see them as soon as you open the doors. This helps with the whole ‘if you don’t see it, you forget it exists’ problem.

We can easily and quickly drown in all of the information available online. The best way to counteract this is to stop consuming information and instead start implementing something, anything. We don’t want to pressure ourselves to take anything out of our diet in the beginning. Instead, we want to focus on adding more good stuff into what we’re already eating.

Adding veggies to a frozen pizza or some mac and cheese is a great place to start. Drench it in ranch if you need to right now. However you can get the fruits and veggies into your system is best. The nutritional value is not diminished because you drenched it in sauce. In some cases, the sauce is essential to the absorption of the vitamins, minerals and overall nutrients.

Don’t write off a particular food because you tried it once or twice and didn’t like it. Our pallets change and with it, what we like and dislike. Most of the aversion is in our heads. You haven’t tried broccoli or brussel sprouts in all of the thousands of ways they can be prepared. Try them again and again. If you still don’t like them, fine, at least you tried. You may be surprised though. Always be trying new things.

Is it important for our food to taste good? Absolutely. However, food is medicine and making yourself eat a couple of bites of something that you’re not a huge fan of but also doesn’t make you gag, is good for you. Your body will appreciate those few nutritional varieties that you wouldn’t otherwise get.

40:08 –

There are a ton of different foods that have the same or similar nutrients in them. Make sure you’re getting what you need and not leaving any open voids. Smoothies are versatile and under rated. Yogurts are becoming much more versatile than they use to be.

There was such an anti-fat campaign in our food that villainized healthy fats that are crucial to our health and well being. Historically, the word ‘fat’ wasn’t a bad one. It was used often to express many good things. “Fat free” is not better and does not keep you from retaining weight. All it does it deprive you of an essential substance your body needs to regulate.

There are several different types of fat and you have to learn which is good and which is bad and how to read labels to decipher what has which. Keeping a food journal is so crucial because the hardest part of implementation is remembering to remember. It’s so easy to get things mixed up, confused and forgotten. Write it down with as much depth and organization as you can.

Food is intimate. It’s an attachment and extension between ourselves, the things we’ve experienced, as well as our relationships. You may have an unhealthy attachment to cookies because that was the only time you remember connecting with your mom. It can be a comfort thing, a coping thing and once you heal the underlying emotional cause you may find out that you don’t even actually like cookies (or whatever food is in question here).

We are what we eat goes deeper than the basic components of the food making up every cell in our body. Food is a great place to start healing anything you want to heal, be it physical, mental, emotional or whatever have you. The energetic component of each food has just as much impact on us as the vitamins, minerals and nutrients present in the food.

About Our Guest

Samantha is a registered dietitian who offers weight-inclusive care to individuals struggling with eating disorders, disordered eating habits, and chronic dieting. Samantha’s passion for nutrition began during her undergraduate studies in Culinary Nutrition at Johnson & Wales University, where she learned about the essential role of food in overall health and well-being. During graduate school at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Samantha discovered Intuitive Eating, a philosophy that changed the way she approached nutrition and helped her heal her relationship with food, movement, and her body.

This transformative experience led her to use the Intuitive Eating and Health At Every Size (HAES) frameworks to help clients develop a peaceful and sustainable relationship with food and their bodies. Samantha’s approach to nutrition counseling emphasizes self-compassion, body positivity, and health-promoting practices. She believes everyone deserves to feel comfortable and confident in their bodies, regardless of shape or size, and works with clients to cultivate a positive and non-judgmental attitude towards food and their bodies.

Samantha’s goal is to provide a safe and supportive space for individuals to explore their relationship with food and body and empower them to make decisions that align with their unique needs and values. Now that she has healed her relationship with food, Samantha loves to cook and bake all different types of cuisine. Her favorite cooking project currently is making different styles of fresh pasta from scratch. Soon Samantha will be spending time on a food-focused trip to Mexico City, this is something she would never have been able to enjoy without the conscious decision to heal her relationship with food.

Website: www.sammibnutrition.com