If you have ADHD, meal prep can be more complex, but it can be manageable with the right approach. You can split up your planning and cooking, use common ingredients, and double portions.
Meal prep is an increasingly popular cooking method that involves making meals in bulk batches ahead of time. It usually involves cooking on the weekend, which frees up time during the week.
If you have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), it may be beneficial to approach the process of meal prep in a different way. Here are a few things you can do to make meal prep more manageable.
Since meal prep involves making food ahead of time, it’s important to plan what you want to eat before you go to the store. However, planning can be a lot to manage, especially if you’re prepping for a full week of meals.
One strategy you can try is planning in several sessions instead of just one long session.
For example, you can plan all of your breakfasts in one session, lunches in another session, and dinners in the last session. If you keep the three-session split, you could also plan for two full days per session.
There are a lot of moving parts in meal prep, as you are making several different dishes at the same time. This can make it difficult to keep track of everything when you are shopping at the grocery store or cooking.
One way to simplify things is to make dishes with overlapping ingredients. For example, if one meal calls for broccoli, you could make another meal that same week that also uses broccoli.
This can save you time both at the store and in the kitchen.
Example of common ingredients
The following recipes use both chicken and broccoli. If you make these recipes in the same week, you can prep the ingredients for multiple dishes together. You may consider making the following recipes in one week:
You don’t have to make completely different meals every day.
For example, if you eat the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 2 days out of the week — as opposed to a different breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day — you’re effectively making around nine unique meals for the week instead of 21.
If you’re OK with having less variety, you can eat the same meals 3 or 4 days out of the week to further simplify this process.
Though you make more servings for each meal, you prepare all the ingredients for a unique dish once and cover multiple days.
If you’re working on one meal, have all of the ingredients for that meal out on the counter in your line of sight.
Making sure you have everything before you start cooking can help to minimize distractions. It can prevent you from having to search for missing ingredients when you need them and potentially getting sidetracked.
You may also consider having a recipe pulled up next to you — whether on an electronic device or a physical cookbook — to remind you of which step you’re on and what you need to do next.
When meal prepping, you may be cooking multiple ingredients or dishes at the same time.
Setting timers for each item that is cooking — and labeling each one, if possible — can help remind you when each item is done cooking.
Cooking multiple meals at once can take several hours. It’s perfectly OK to take breaks when you need them.
It can be beneficial to physically leave the kitchen and just walk around your living area. A 2019 study found that breaking up tasks with movement can benefit people with ADHD.
You can also split up your cooking. For example, you can make meals ahead for 4 days out of the week and then cook again midway through the week for the remaining 3 days.
This can also prevent food from going bad if it’s made too far in advance.
Pack it up
Check out our reviews of the best meal prep containers here.
If you have ADHD, the idea of meal prep may seem like a lot to manage at first. However, you can do a few things to make the process easier.
Some things you can do include planning in chunks, using common ingredients, and dividing up the time you spend cooking.
Ultimately, everyone is different and has different needs. If meal prep isn’t for you, that’s perfectly OK, too.