Simplicity was important for me. I started with just getting breakfast right: something I like, that’s healthy, every day. Boring, but I can do it.

Once you have that nailed, do something similar for lunches.

This plan doesn’t account for nutritional needs at all. It’s just something I can do.

Edit: meals you can make in a slow cooker or large pot are ideal. I turn the temperature off low and can take breaks to play computer games or whatever to break things up. Once I’ve everything chopped and added, I turn on the heat. It takes me quite a while this way, but I can make enough for a few days.

Crockpot/slow cooker meals. Especially ones that are good as leftovers. I do everything from beef stews to pulled pork bbq to shredded chicken etc. I also find it’s so much easier to eat healthy and still feel full which makes me less interested in beer and snacks.

A constantly changing schedule would be detrimental to me cooking, that might be the case for you as well. I need the oppressive clock to say it is time to cook dinner and if the time when I need to cook dinner keeps changing, I will forget to cook dinner and end up doing a quick meal of BS just so I can sleep.

You can also try meal prep, that is just to give you a meal that is as convenient as ramen during the week with a low daily time commitment. The idea of it may be kind of daunting, but it is just a bunch of smaller steps that you can AD4K off between without much issue.

That’s the thing - you don’t, live on edge😎

I dont know and i actuallu like cooking. I also don’t have a routine of consistently eating meals at a set time. Dinner can be anywhere from 4PM to midnight. Or never. Or gorging on snacks for the entire evening and hating myself.

when I don’t feel like cooking anything and can convince myself to stay home to eat here are my go tos:

1. get a rice cooker. an Asian one you get from the Asian supermarket or invest in a Zojirushi (white people rice cookers suck). they are super easy to use. you throw the rice in with some water and about 15-30 minutes later you have a fresh pot of rice. go watch a show while it finishes. if you can remember you can even start a pot before work or eat the rice from the previous day (as long as it was in the keep warm setting). it can also cook brown rice, other ancient grains, beans, lentils, etc.
2. eggs. fry the eggs and throw them on the rice with some soya sauce. takes like two minutes. my hack here is i have a Japanese tamagoyaki pan. it’s small and perfect to cook a portion for a single person so i don’t have to deal with and clean a giant skillet. i just rinse it out (if i remember) and leave it on the stove top for the next time I use it since I use it so often.
3. toaster oven chicken thigh. i get like those ten packs of chicken thighs at the supermarket. throw one on with some salt and pepper (and other spices if you feel like it) onto a small sheet pan. drizzle with olive oil and stick it in my toaster oven (which is a convection toaster oven) for 30 minutes at 350degF and you get delicious roast chicken. the toaster oven is a great hack for lots of foods actually (including toast) since you don’t have to deal with preheating a huge oven. i don’t even usually preheat it at all. takes about the same time as the rice so i can take 5 minutes to start both at the same time go watch an episode of DanDanDan and have a chicken and rice dinner ready when it’s done.
4. salad mix and premade dressing. get kale mixes. they take longer to go bad. they are prewashed. all you do is throe dressing on and you’re good. adding more toppings is up to you.
5. those tiny tomatos. rinse them and eat them on their own or on your salad.
6. cucumbers. again in the no-cook veggie category. just rinse and chop roughly. top with soya or vinegar and salt. get english or persian cucumbers since the skin on normal cucumbers isnt very nice. they now even have tiny ones you probably don’t even need to cut through the power of science.
7. roast broccoli/cauli/other veggie in the toaster oven. when you do your chicken break off a few florets of broccoli and throw it on the pan with the chicken when you’re seasoning and oiling. voila, roast broccoli done at the same time as the chicken.

i don’t do all of these everyday. some days i just have energy to do one like make rice and top it with dried seaweed or cheese. still better then eating out or ramen everyday (though I still eat ramen sometimes – but it’s usually more effort since i usually fancy it up with eggs and kimchi [another hack i forgot-if you like kimchi-buy a jar of the stuff and throw it on rice. great meal on its own])

and visit your Asian supermarket once a month. their frozen sections are filled with premade crap you can just microwave but are still good quality like potstickers or scallion pancakes and they are usually cheaper to shop at

i used to work from the office. i would get home from work, turn on the oven, then go get dressed into evening clothes.

this forced my to think about what i was gunna put in the oven and got me in the habit of thinking about dinner every night before i got hungry.

When I get off work I go to the kitchen and look at what perishables I have in the fridge, then search for “perishable recipes” and read a few results until I find something that sounds interesting, I have the other stuff for, and doesn’t take too long. Then search for side dishes that would go with it. I also read the reviews from people who have made it as they often suggest substitutions that make work or don’t. Then I start cooking.

You quickly learn which recipe sites have recipes and which are just blog about grandma, the dog, and everything else before they get to a recipe that probably won’t even turn out, since the only point was to get you to look at the ads. (I wish there was a way to not see those in search results…)

Once in a while I see something that looks good but takes too long so I do it next week planning ahead. This is rare though - I’m not good at planning a head.

I need to eat so this is just what I do every day. After a lot of practice I can now make some great meals at home, I can rarely find any place to eat out that isn’t a disappointment - I can make a much better meal for a lot less money.

There is no shame in supplementing with Huel, YFood or alike, even muti vitami is fine. I’m also a fan of a refreshing alcoholfree beer!

Lots of good advice here. I like frozen meals or even veggies to keep the routine on some of these days. They need to be heated in a pan opposed to frozen pizza which u just shove into the oven.

I can also recommend a simple rice cooker which u can set and forget, as it switches into warm holding mode when it’s done w cooking the rice.

It’s really hard to have a routine when your work schedule is irregular. I don’t think you are wrong to rely on easy to prepare stuff but you need more nutrition, yes? My kids say I have ADD, and most of them do, my second to youngest was having trouble because Adderall so I got her some easy things.

Bagged salad packs with the dressing.

Packaged Hummus from the grocery, on Triscuit crackers, has a lot of calories with fiber & nutrition from the hummus.

Apple with sliced cheese or peanut butter

Do you like tuna? Make tuna salad at the beginning of the week, or a can dumped on one of the aforementioned bagged salad mixes.

Hard boiled eggs last a long time in the fridge, also an egg dropped into your ramen would add nutrition.

Keep your work schedule in your phone calendar and set an alarm for dinner.

For breakfast cold fermented oatmeal is amazing, we call it summer oatmeal. Mix rolled oats with yogurt, coconut water and/ or kombucha/kvass/tepache if you have it, juice or water if you don’t. Mix in dried fruit and nuts and seeds, even chocolate if you want. It should start a little sloppy as the oats will take up the liquid. Taste and adjust, sweeten if you want, I don’t. Put it in the fridge and each morning take a little for breakfast.

And also, don’t stress about eating regularly if you don’t have weight issues. If your body is feeling ok and staying in a healthy size you don’t need to force yourself.

Mostly by being an ingredient-only house. If there’s nothing too convenient around and you’re hungry enough, you might be more inclined.

Also you can make big things that you can pick off of throughout the week. I used to make giant pot roasts, which are great because you just dump stuff on top of a roast and pop it in the oven for a couple of hours without having to fuss over it, and eat that for a day or so, get bored with it and make tacos with the meat, etc.

lol, this advice is excellent, but the sheer number of options is completely overwhelming with ADHD.

This kept me from deciding for one option for a long time. I settled with a hot air fryer eventually, but it doesn’t really matter.

What helped me a lot to take the pressure off is engineered staple food: Something that’s always ready, and much more healthy than most takeout. This is Food, Huel, all good. With 0 appetite on meds, a This is Food drink is perfect.

With that fallback in place, the stress of “must cook” is gone so I can actually cook :-)

If you lose motivation because of the amount of time that you’d spend cooking, you should consider using days off to prep building blocks that can be used for different meals. Keeping the initial cook simple can give you a broad canvas to change things up on the spot so that you don’t get fatigued over the flavor. You can salt a large chunk of meat like a pork shoulder or chuck roast and use a long cooking method like a braise or a roast. The longer cook times will make these cuts extremely tender, and you’ll only have to do it once. Use them throughout the week in whatever application you feel like on the day, even if that means just adding it to your ramen. Since it’s just salted, it’s versatile enough to adapt to whatever seasonings or sauces you add to it. If you’re using store bought ingredients, you can put together pasta, bbq sandwiches, or quesadillas pretty quickly.

As far as vegetables go, you can also prep individual portions of things like a mirepoix a week ahead of time, to cut down on the work you have to do every day. You could even freeze it in ice cube trays to make them last longer if you have the space. You can mince garlic ahead of time and store it in a neutral oil. If you don’t mind acidity, pickling and lacto fermenting your vegetables is a good way to both preserve them and have something that’s ready to go on demand. Some vegetables like broccoli can be parcooked without sacrificing texture to reduce the amount of time you have to spend cooking on the day of.

Meal kits may not have worked for you because they simplify the shopping, not the actual cooking process. It still takes the same amount of time to cook a meal kit, which doesn’t exactly help when you’re hungry and exhausted. I think that prepping pieces of a meal in advance will give you the tools to throw something together almost as quickly and easily as ramen, which might lead to you cooking more often. I hope this helps, and I’d be happy to expand on anything that was vague or otherwise lacking!

For me the desire to put up with the effort to cook something came, when I bought a Ninja Speedi… because the time reduces to pretty much throwing the ingredients together. Pick something to cook (potatoes, vegetables, pasta, rice,…) and throw it in the bottom. Put the divider in and put the thing to fry at the top (meat, fries, veggy pattie, whatever). A bit of water in the bottom, timer to 12 mins, temp to 180°C and hit start. 16 or so minutes later you have your meal. It starts to heat the water to produce steam and then turns on the recirculating heat for the configured time, so your food gets steamed and fried at the same time. Not having to juggle different pots and pans at the same time made cooking much more pleasant.

You don’t need to jump straight to cooking full meals.

Stuff like rice/beans with some sauce can be made in like 2 minutes. Like, with as much effort as ramen.

But that stuff will stay in your stomach and slowly get digested, so you’ll need less energy drinks at the end of the day.

But cooking is like anything, start out small and easy and then just slowly start adding stuff. Once doing the small things feels natural, add an extra step or two. Like just throwing a chicken breast in a pan.

Even if you used to be a good cook, it sounds like you need to go back to basics and work yourself up to the fancy stuff.