Monday Reset: When the vegetables in your fridge are a weekly guilt trip
This week’s focus: Stop the meal planning guilt cycle
You saw a recipe online, got excited, and bought all the ingredients. The vegetables are sitting in your crisper drawer right now. But every night, you stare at the fridge and feel nothing. The recipe that seemed so good on Sunday feels impossible on Wednesday. So you order takeout. Again. And the vegetables rot. Again.
Your Brain This Week
Meal planning requires a lot of executive function. Deciding what to eat, remembering what you planned, having the energy to cook it when the time comes. Our brains struggle with all of this. And generic meal planning advice makes it worse by telling us to plan seven different dinners every week, as if variety is the goal. It’s not. The goal is just feeding ourselves consistently without the daily mental battle of “what should I make?”
This Week’s Strategy: The Meal Loop
Stop trying to plan different meals every week. Create a short rotation of 5-7 meals you actually like, and just repeat them.
Here’s what to do:
Write down 5-7 meals you actually like to eat (not meals you think you “should” make)
Meals you’ve made before and liked
Meals that don’t require a lot of steps or fancy ingredients
Meals your family will actually eat without complaining
Keep this list visible (fridge, phone notes, wherever you’ll see it)
When it’s time for dinner, pick one from the list. That’s it. No meal plan. No calendar. Just pick from the loop.
Buying groceries every week is easier as the ingredients don’t change because the meals don’t change.
Why this helps: This removes the decision-making every single night, and instead you’re just choosing from a menu you already know works. And when you eat the same rotation every week, there’s no guilt about wasted ingredients or abandoned plans. You’re feeding yourself consistently, which is the actual goal.
Planning dinner and grocery shopping used to be major struggles for me.
Then, I noticed that my neighbor kids (who were always over at our house playing with my kids) often asked what we were having for dinner. Presumably, they were on the lookout for something more interesting than what was being served at home. At first I would respond "uh...I don't know, I haven't even thought about it.." but one day it occurred to me to ask THEM what THEIR mom was making. "We're having spaghetti and meatballs," they answered - so I said "What a coincidence, we're having that too!"
I started asking them every day what their mom (a super-organized mom with a big family and a shockingly clean house) was making, and then I'd make the same thing. I noticed that my super-organized neighbor had about 10 dishes that she made on regular rotation; and one night per week they'd get pizza or Chinese; there was also sometimes a "fend for yourself" leftover buffet, or a "breakfast for dinner" night, or something fun like that.
That was enough to get me started on a 2-week meal plan. Somehow, I had gotten the idea that I needed to cook a new, never-before-used recipe every night for dinner - when in fact it's much better to just perfect your "standards." Plus most children prefer familiar foods over whatever new, exotic fusion cuisine recipe that you read about in the New York Times food section.
The way to get children to reliably eat nutritious foods is to serve them the food consistently, over and over again, so that they get used to it. Two of my kids were very picky eaters, but I found if I served the food in question on a weekly basis, after several months of constant exposure they would decide that they liked it.
This is important for all kids, but especially ADHD kids (and we ADHD parents tend to have ADHD kids). If you always default to making them Kraft macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets (two foods that ADHD kids seem to universally love), you're going to end up raising adults with sharply limited palate who eat mainly processed food and may even be fearful of things like vegetables, roast chicken, fish, salads, etc..
Given that ADHDers tend to struggle with their weight even more than normal people, it's really important to get them used to eating a variety of healthy foods and not develop a dependence on processed food and/or takeout.
I like to cook, and enjoy trying new recipes - so every two weeks or so I'd try something new. Usually, it was a variation on something that we already ate, but as the kids got older and less picky I got more and more adventurous.
I'd involve them in helping to pick a recipe to try, and then at dinner they would review it (politely, of course.) They loved this - they could say things like "Well, the texture is good, but I think it has too much rosemary," or "I like the taste of the sauce, but the brussels sprouts were too mushy." We'd talk about possible tweaks to make it better, and then if everyone liked it, I'd ask them to give the dish a name and we'd add it to the rotation.
As my kids got older, we started assigning each one with responsibility for making dinner one night per week. I'd tell them "you can pick the meal that night," which they loved doing, and I'd teach them how to make it. By the time they went to college, they were all competent at planning meals, shopping and cooking.
Or just move to South East Asia where executive function is outsourced to a guy on a motorbike delivering incredible food for $2 👌
Jokes aside, the “meal loop” idea is brilliant for those of us currently struggling in the west!