Cooking and Kitchen Organization With ADHD

I open the fridge door, look, close it. Half an hour later I do the same thing. The fridge is full, I know I am hungry, and in the end I stand in the kitchen eating a packet of biscuits.

For years I took this scene for a lack of skill. I thought I did not know how to cook. But I do. The place where I get stuck is not the cooking itself but what comes before it.

This article is about that "before": why the kitchen is such an expensive place in ADHD and what, when I changed it, made things start to move.

The difficulty is not in the cooking

A meal contains at least four steps before the pot ever goes on the heat:

1. Noticing that you are hungry.
2. Deciding what to eat.
3. Knowing whether the ingredients are at home.
4. Starting.

In ADHD each of these four can stumble separately.

In the first, body signal blindness comes into play: hunger is noticed only when it has turned into a headache or irritability. This is very marked in me. By the afternoon it is four o'clock, I am cranky and I never connect it to being hungry. I described the mechanism separately in the article on body signal blindness.

In the second there is analysis paralysis: unlimited options means an option that cannot be chosen. That half hour I spend in front of the fridge is in fact a decision process, and by the end of it I have no energy left to decide.

The third is a memory job. Knowing what is at home requires remembering something that is not there. The fourth is another subject altogether: not being able to start a job you know, have decided on and have the ingredients for.

Not being able to cook is experienced as a lack of skill. In reality four separate decision points stack up, and all of them wait to be solved at the same time.

Cutting the number of options

What made the biggest difference for me was to stop trying to get better in the kitchen and to shorten the options instead.

Make a short list. Six or seven meals. Meals you know how to make, with simple ingredients, that you feel like eating. Keep the list on the fridge door. That way the decision stops being a choice from an infinite field and turns into pointing at one of seven lines. My list is seven lines and has hardly changed for a year.

Do not shy away from repeating the same meal. Variety is presented as a virtue, but deciding every day has a price, and the person who pays it is you. Eating the same lunch for a week is better than skipping lunch.

Look at the number of steps. Recipes that do not go beyond five ingredients and finish in a single pot. The number of dishes is part of the meal too: a meal that dirties ten bowls does not get made next time. Taking the washing-up into account when choosing a recipe completely changed my criteria for choosing recipes.

Always have a ready option. Frozen vegetables, canned chickpeas, instant soup, eggs. I do not count these as a cheat; I see them as part of the infrastructure. Having something edible at home on a bad day is the most important preparation for that day.

Tying shopping to the kitchen

When the meal list and the grocery list are thought about separately, neither holds. What worked for me was turning the ingredients of the short meal list into a fixed grocery list.

That list stays the same every week. I do not think about what to buy; I look at the list and mark what is missing. Because I do not think about it, there is no chance of wandering around the shop and forgetting what I was going to buy. I described the details in the article on groceries and shopping.

Eating patterns and ADHD

There is one more picture to talk about in this area and I do not want to skip it.

Research shows a relationship between ADHD and disordered eating patterns; the systematic review by El Archi and colleagues (2020) reports that negative affectivity and emotion regulation difficulties play a mediating role in this relationship. The meta-analysis by Cortese and colleagues (2016) shows an association between ADHD and obesity.

There is no single reason for this. The prominent ones are:

• Impulsivity. Food chosen on the spur of the moment takes the place of the planned meal.
• Skipping meals. Not eating for a long time, then eating a lot. This is the pattern I see most often in myself.
• Emotional eating. Food can become a quick and easily reached means of regulation. I covered this side in the article on ADHD and binge eating.
• Medication effect. Appetite suppression is a known side effect of stimulant medication and is listed in the World Federation consensus statement too (Faraone et al., 2021). Not eating through the day can lead to making up for it in the evening.

If your eating pattern worries you. Skipping meals, binge eating or carrying a constant guilt about food may not be things to manage alone. It would be appropriate to talk about it with your doctor or a specialist. If you are on medication, be sure to mention its effect on your appetite; this information helps in adjusting the treatment.

Practical arrangements

Set an alarm for mealtime. If waiting for hunger does not work, the clock does. In the glossary it appears as meal routine. I have three alarms and none of them says "eat," they say "look at what you will eat." Reminding the decision step helps more than reminding the eating.

Put protein first. It is often reported that eating something with protein in the morning reduces fluctuation through the day. I covered the general nutrition debate in the article on nutrition in ADHD; there I separated what is evidenced from what is disputed.

Set the kitchen up so that it is visible. Keep the ingredients and tools you use often out in the open. Ingredients that go into a cupboard do not get used, because what you cannot see is not remembered. The pots hang on my counter, and this is not an aesthetic choice but a working system.

Put water on the table. Forgetting to drink water is very common in ADHD, and thirst directly increases distractibility. A pitcher in view works better than a reminder you have set up.

Count the washing-up as part of the meal. When the meal is finished the job is not finished, and not accepting this was one of the reasons that made me put off cooking. Washing half of the dishes in the gaps while cooking markedly reduces the resistance in the evening. I described the general logic of housework in the article on housework in ADHD.

And there is this: there is no such goal as a perfect kitchen

For a while I tried weekly meal prep. On Sunday I would stand in the kitchen for three hours and prepare everything.

I did it for two weeks, did not do it in the third week and the whole system collapsed. Because that system had no small version: either three hours or nothing.

Now I do the opposite. If I am going to prep, I do twenty minutes: chop an onion, soak lentils, cook a pot of rice. On the day those twenty minutes are missed, nothing collapses.

The kitchen brings together in one room the three things ADHD struggles with most: making decisions, sustaining a multi-step job and receiving the body's signal in time. The solution does not seem to me to be about being more disciplined; it is about cutting the options and keeping the infrastructure ready in advance.