It is six in the evening. You are hungry. You have spent all day making decisions, and the part of your brain that decides things has gone offline. You stand in the kitchen, open the fridge, close the fridge, open it again. Twenty minutes later you order a takeaway you cannot afford and feel guilty about for the rest of the evening. This is decision fatigue, and you can plan around it.
Why dinner is uniquely hard
Dinner brings together several things ADHD can make harder: planning, deciding and starting. It requires planning ahead, when you are bad at planning ahead. It requires a sequence of small actions, when sequences are exactly what executive dysfunction breaks. It requires deciding, when you are out of decisions. It happens at the exact moment your medication is wearing off, if you take stimulants. And it has the added load of being needed roughly seven times a week, every week, forever. No wonder it falls apart.
The solution is not a meal plan
Many people with ADHD have tried meal planning. It works for two weeks, you don't follow it for one day, the whole system collapses, you feel like a failure, you go back to standing in front of the fridge. The problem with meal plans is that they require future you to be the same person as past you. They are not built for ADHD. These are.
1/6 Reduce the decision to a coin flip.
Write down five dinners you like and will eat. Five, not twenty-five. Pin the list to the fridge. At 6pm, you are not choosing what to eat, you are choosing one of five known options. This is a fundamentally different cognitive operation and your tired brain can do it.
2/6 Embrace the "same dinner" thing.
Many ADHD adults eat the same two or three dinners for weeks at a time, then switch, then settle into a new set of two or three. This is a totally valid way to eat. The shame around it is borrowed from food media, not from nutritionists. Pick three dinners, rotate them, restock the ingredients on the same day every week, done.
3/6 Make decisions when you are not hungry.
Sunday afternoon you, with a coffee, is a completely different person than 6pm Wednesday you. Sunday you can decide what Wednesday you eats. Write the four or five things on a piece of paper. Buy exactly the ingredients for them. Wednesday you doesn't have to decide anything.
4/6 Have a "no-decision dinner" on standby.
Frozen pizza, a tin of soup, beans on toast, a meal-deal salad. Something that requires zero decisions and zero cooking. When you have one in the freezer or the cupboard, the spiral of "I have nothing in" gets shorter, because you always have something in. The no-decision dinner is not failure food. It is insurance.
5/6 Use the supermarket meal deal.
£3.60 for a sandwich, a snack and a drink is cheaper than the £18 takeaway you order when standing in the kitchen has defeated you. Twice a week of meal deals on the days you know are decision-fatigue heavy is not giving up. It is harm reduction.
6/6 Meal kits can help.
Meal kit boxes are expensive per meal compared to cooking from scratch. They are also dramatically cheaper than takeaways, and the cooking-from-scratch you are comparing them to is not happening. For decision-fatigue dinners, they remove the planning, the shopping, and most of the deciding. For many ADHD adults they are the most useful expensive thing they have bought.
The "I have nothing in" loop
The most expensive kitchen pattern is the loop: you have nothing in, so you order takeaway, so you don't restock, so tomorrow you have nothing in. To break it, the only rule that matters is "buy the same ten things every week regardless of plans". Pasta, rice, frozen veg, tinned tomatoes, eggs, cheese, bread, beans, frozen chicken or a vegetarian protein, an onion. With those ten things you can make about thirty dinners. Without them you are stuck in the loop. Make the list, repeat it weekly via your supermarket's "buy again" feature, do not deviate.
You don't need to cook from scratch every night. Eating something, on time, counts.