Meal planning with ADHD: how to make one that lasts longer than a week and a half

Most meal plans do not fail for want of recipes. They fail because they demand more decisions than there is capacity for on a Wednesday. Here is what usually does help, and how to build a week so that one bad day does not bring the whole thing down.

Why is planning food so hard with ADHD?

Because meal planning looks like one task and is really thirty small decisions, and decisions are exactly what costs the most with ADHD. On top of that come time blindness and fluctuating capacity: the plan is made by your best self and has to be carried out by your most tired one.

Think about what »make a meal plan« contains. What are we having? Do we have it in? When am I shopping? Did I remember to take the meat out? Each decision is small, and small decisions are precisely the kind that cost the most when working memory is short and starting is heavy.

On top of that sit three things most people with ADHD recognise:

Decision fatigue. At half past five there is nothing left to give. Even an easy choice between two meals can be one too many, and then it becomes a takeaway.
Time blindness. »I will do it later« and »there is still time« are hard to tell apart until the clock says what it says.
Fluctuating capacity. The plan is made on a good day by somebody with energy and has to be carried out on a random day by somebody who may not have any.

That is why a plan rarely holds if it is written for your best self. It has to be written for your most tired one.

Nine things that usually work

Plan for the bad day, keep a small fixed repertoire, shop once a week, let the list follow the shop's layout, cook double, move the decision away from half past five, set a reminder about defrosting, make »I can't face it« a legitimate choice, and do not build a system you have to maintain.

1. Plan for the bad day, not the good one

Put at least two days a week into the plan where the food takes under a quarter of an hour and needs nothing but a frying pan. Not as a fallback, but as part of the plan. A week that can only succeed if all seven days go well is a week that does not succeed.

2. Keep a small fixed repertoire

Ten to fifteen meals you can cook without reading. It sounds boring, and in practice it almost never is. What is boring is eating porridge for dinner for the third time because no choice had been made. Write the list down somewhere you can see it when your head is empty. You cannot remember your easy meals precisely when you need them most.

3. Shop once, not four times

Every trip to the shop is another start, and another place where three things go into the basket that were not on the list. One big trip a week is cheaper and quicker, and it needs capacity once instead of four times.

4. Let the list follow your route through the shop

A shopping list in the order the meals happened to come in sends you back and forth across the shop. A list sorted the way the shop is laid out — fruit and vegetables, meat, chilled, dry goods, frozen — becomes a route instead of a hunt, and you can see in a second whether anything is missing from the aisle you are standing in.

5. Cook double, and plan the leftovers as a meal

Two days of food for one day's starting. Write »leftovers« into the plan as a real day rather than as something that will hopefully work out by itself. Then you can count on it, and then you do not have to shop for it.

6. Move the decision away from half past five

The decision you make on a Sunday costs a fraction of the one you make when you are hungry and tired. That is the whole idea of a meal plan. It is not there to make you disciplined, but to move the choice to where it is cheap.

7. Set a morning reminder if something has to defrost

The freezer is the most common reason a plan collapses. A message at eight o'clock saying something needs to come out of the freezer saves more evenings than any recipe.

8. Make »I can't face it« a legitimate choice

Ready meals, a pizza or eggs on toast are dinner too. The plan needs an exit that does not feel like losing. Otherwise a single bad day turns into the whole plan being put away, and then you are back at the fridge at half past five.

9. Do not build a system you have to maintain

Spreadsheets, boards and colour codes are fun on the first Sunday. What decides whether a plan survives to week five is how little it asks of you when you cannot be bothered. Choose the most boring thing that works.

What do you do when you cannot face cooking at all?

You lower the bar in advance and in a fixed order: leftovers first, then something in the freezer that only needs heating, then a meal you can make in a quarter of an hour without a recipe, and otherwise bought food. What hurts in the long run is not the pizza. It is giving up on planning because the pizza felt like a defeat.

The point is that the order has to be settled before you are standing in it. A decision about what to do on a bad day cannot be made on a bad day. That is the whole reason »I'll think of something« ends in takeaway three times a week.

So write your own emergency order down while you have the capacity, and put it on the fridge: leftovers → freezer → a fifteen-minute meal → bought food. Four lines, and they have to be readable by somebody who is done for the day.

How Madmakker helps with that

Madmakker is a free Android app that does the nine things automatically: it lays out the week, works leftovers in, gathers the shopping list in your shop's order, reminds you about defrosting, and has a »can't face it« button where one of the options is buying something ready-made. 212 recipes, no account, no ads. The app itself is in Danish; an English version is planned.

The nine things were not bolted on afterwards. They are the reason the app looks the way it does. Leftovers are worked into the plan as real days, the list is sorted by your shop's order, and the day's meal can be swapped for the easiest version with one tap when the capacity is not there.

There is a button called »Orker ikke«, Danish for »can't face it«. It gives one single suggestion instead of a list, and one of the options is buying something ready-made. The app does not tell you off, does not count days in a row, and has no streak you can lose.

The app is free to install, needs no account and works without an internet connection.

Get Madmakker on Google Play Free · Android 7.0 and later

And what it cannot do: Madmakker is not treatment, and it does not replace a conversation with your doctor, a dietitian or an ADHD organisation. The app does one thing, which is to take the decisions about the week's food out of your hands, and that is also all it promises.