Making food easier: Meal planning, feeding a group, feeding yourself, and supporting neurodivergent eaters

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Transcript: Making food easier: Meal planning, feeding a group, feeding yourself, and supporting neurodivergent eaters | Community Q&A

Community Q&A Introduction

Danielle Sullivan: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Neurodiverging Podcast. My name’s Danielle Sullivan, and I am here today with my friend Dr. Anne Elrod Whitney. 

Anne Elrod Whitney: So here’s what we’re doing today. I’m here for this new podcast series. We’re calling it “Neurodiverging Community Q&A.” And honestly, Danielle, it’s because I have questions. Every time I meet with you, and every time I engage with something at neurodiverging.com, I always learn so much and yet I always have so many questions.

News flash, I am not alone. I think I am not the only one having questions. So, you and I are here today, we’re just going to take up a question and answer it if we can.

Danielle Sullivan: We are not promising easy or tidy answers to anything, but we are neurodivergent people raising neurodivergent kids with tons of experience coaching and teaching and otherwise engaging in this stuff. So, I think we have a lot to give to you.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Danielle, now I’m feeling nervous. Like, what if we don’t have a lot to give? But I’ll tell you one thing is that I’ve found in life, even identifying the question is usually a huge step. So, if nothing else, we’re going to discuss some questions, and if someone wants to call out answers, hey, that’s cool.

Today’s Question Is All About Food

Danielle Sullivan: Hi, and welcome back to the Neurodiverging Podcast. My name is Danielle Sullivan. I am your host and the founder over at Neurodiverging Coaching at Neurodiverging.com.

I’m here again with my friend, Dr. Anne Elrod Whitney. We’ve been doing this new feature for a little while called Community Q&A, where folks submit questions and we try to answer them. What’s our topic today? What’s our question today?

Anne Elrod Whitney: Recently, Neurodiverging hosted a Connect in Community pop-up event, and one of the big topics that came up is one that I have worked through my whole life, and that is food as an adult. What do we do? So whether that’s cooking – for me personally, I have big thoughts about dinners in the morning, but by the time evening comes, I just want to lie down and someone order me a pizza.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: You know, feeding children, that’s a whole other level. Planning about the food, eating the healthy food, just help me do food.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. That was one of the topics that came up in that group that, I guess, shouldn’t have been surprising to me, but it was surprising, and people were sharing recipes, and it was great. It was a great group.

But it did come up, and it comes up in coaching a ton, too. And I think it’s because, like sleep, food is one of these things that like we need to do. But it’s kind of complicated to do it in a useful way, like in a way that achieves the results that you want, which are like feeling good and, you know, being as healthy as is reasonable for your specific—So it’s like, it’s kind of like a heavy, it’s a heavy thing to make decisions about every single day. 

Anne Elrod Whitney: Well, and it just keeps happening.

Danielle Sullivan: People feel really tired. It just keeps happening. 

Anne Elrod Whitney: It just keeps happening every day, multiple times a day. We’re just faced with it again and again. And so, you know, I don’t mean to say that I don’t like food. I love food, and I want to eat food that is pleasurable to eat.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: That is not too hard to cook, um, that meets my health needs and is fun. And I want food to be a thing in my family where we come together at the table, and yet I find the labor and planning to do that really hard.

The Moral Component of Food

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. And so I’ll just say today that I can talk, I’ll definitely be talking about the labor and the planning and sort of the executive function pieces of food, but, you know, we’re not nutritionists over here.

One thing I wanna point out though is that there is a moral component to food, right? A lot of us have these preconceived notions about what good food is and what good eating is. And especially if you’re trying to feed your children, but also feeding yourself. Some of the work we have to do is around figuring out, well, what do we believe about food? And what are we thinking about when we think of food? And sometimes the reasons that like feeding kids is hard, for example, is because your kids like macaroni and cheese and chicken fingers, right? And french fries.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And that’s all.

Danielle Sullivan: And that’s all. We’ve all been there. And then we like get in our own heads and feel the shame around, like what our kids are choosing to eat.

And so I, I was, you know, I’m not a therapist, go talk to your therapist. But food is hard. Like it’s legitimately, it’s cultural, it brings up a lot of feelings. There’s history and family in food, and we don’t have time to talk about all that today, so just know that, like, if you’re dealing with it, if it’s hard, it’s real.

Understanding ARFID

Danielle Sullivan: I also just wanna take a minute before we really dive in and just, point you to some resources. So there is a, a—it’s not, I guess it’s technically an eating disorder diagnosis, called ARFID, A-R-F-I-D. It’s avoidant restrictive food intake disorder. It’s super common in neurodivergent populations because of our sensory differences and lots of other things.

And if you are somebody who yourself or has kids who are not eating a variety, are eating very few types of food. And especially leaning towards like processed foods that are the same every time, as opposed to, you know, fresh foods, which are slightly different every time; ARFID is something you might wanna look at and talk to a doctor about.

If you have children who don’t eat a lot of different types of food, there are occupational therapists who work specifically with food who are the people you want to talk to about supporting kids with ARFID. So I just wanted to get that outta the way up front. I’ll put some links down below for folks who ARFID is pinging for if you wanna get more information and then talk to like an actual medical professional about that.

Food Obstacle #1: Sensory

Danielle Sullivan: I think from my perspective as a neurodivergent coach who has worked with a lot of different people, that there are two main obstacles with food for most people. The first bit is the sensory bit, right? That when we are feeling good, we can tolerate, hopefully, a wide range of flavors, textures and like scents, smells right?

When we are not feeling great, when we’re overwhelmed kind of in our bodies, we want to get rid of as much extra stimulus as we can. And that means a lot of times we do not want things that will be especially flavorful or have like, like sours or mints or like things that have big flavors. We do not want things that smell certain ways. We do not want certain textures.

And so when we are overwhelmed emotionally or physically, our food palate kind of shrinks, and that’s nor—like it can be a problem sometimes, but it’s also normal. And so there’s the part of planning for days when you’re not gonna feel good and you need safe foods, right? Foods that you can eat regardless of your emotional or physical, I can’t think of the word, like self.

Food Obstacle #2: Executive Function

Danielle Sullivan: And then the second piece is the executive function piece, which is executive function is your planning, prioritization, understanding your feelings, and being able to think into the future. And also break down topics like, so when we think of food, we think of like, you know the 800 ingredients that go into a meal, we get overwhelmed. We think of like, okay, well, if I put this on the stove now, when will it be done? And when will I do this next thing? And those get all like clustered in our brains, and it makes it really hard for us to plan, and then we get overwhelmed, and then we don’t wanna eat.

So those are the two, like, main, I guess, issues that when a client comes in with like, “I need help making a meal plan, I can never do it.” Those are the two things we think about—

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah.

Danielle Sullivan: From a coaching perspective.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah, I’ve experienced both of those.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: In my case, and I don’t know if I’m the only one like this, but—

Danielle Sullivan: Probably not.

Anne Elrod Whitney: I experienced all of the second part.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. Everyone’s different, but everyone’s kind of the same too, you know, in a weird way.

Anne Elrod Whitney: I have experienced all of the executive function part, you guys. I’m a parent. I was working full-time all the way through my children’s, younger years and had to deal with the problem of there has to be a breakfast, a lunch, and a dinner every dang day. No matter, no matter what I’m doing.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: How to deal. And then it’s also, though, other people’s food preferences, sensory things and safety when you’ve got multiple people that you’re trying to feed. I’m really glad you mentioned emotions, because, for me, I care a lot about pleasing everyone.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: When I had both kids, I really cared that they would eat. So I felt like I’ve gotta provide something they will eat, and then I’m also wanting to cater to different people’s tastes. And then I’m also wanting to have food that meets my idea of what a good food is. And that was emotionally, honestly, too much and maybe practically impossible. So—

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: What I have from my experience is some good strategies that I got for the second part, like the executive function part, but I’m not gonna lie, a lot of it came from letting go of more of the first things. Right? That, once the, the child with a more limited range of foods got old enough to go to the fridge and get their own things.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Right. I had to kind of let go of cracking the code. And it changed as the children have grown, and it changed a lot with divorce, where now sometimes I have kids, sometimes I don’t. I have a partner now. What does that person want to eat?

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: That is still very difficult, and it gets in the way of planning because I immediately think, “Oh, but they won’t want that.”

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Oh, but they don’t like that.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Then there’s the problem that I did make a plan, but now I’m tired.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And the plan calls for action that I, I just don’t wanna do. And I’m like, forget it. Yeah.

Danielle Sullivan: That was, those are all really good examples of executive function challenges. Right. And I also just wanna say that they’re common across popula—Like if, whether you’re neurotypical or neurodivergent, executive dysfunction is common because like our brains didn’t evolve to do the things we’re doing. Is like the easy answer, right? Like, none of us really evolved to be cooking three complex meals a day for eight people and figuring out grocery stores and figuring out budgets and like all these things that come into choosing foods every day.

You’re doing more than you think you are. Every time you make a meal. You’re holding more information and processing more information and doing more with that information than you think you are, every single time.

So, of course, it’s fatiguing. Like, it’s, you know, once you break it down, it’s obvious why it becomes fatiguing.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Well, thank you. Thank you for honoring the challenge, you know?

Division of Responsibility

Danielle Sullivan: Of course. I mean, and I’ve been there too. Um, it, it’s a lot. So let me talk to parents out there and also people who have like partners or family members. If you are the main, cook, the main person responsible for food, one of the things I really like is a saying from Ellen Satler. Sadder, I think it is. I’ll put a link down below.

She does this thing called division of responsibility in feeding. Which basically boils down to if you’re the parent, you decide what goes on the plate, and your child decides what to eat. Right. And those are your divisions of responsibility.

So my job as the parent is literally just to put food on the plate at certain times of day and offer that. And then the child’s responsibility is to decide if they eat it or not. Right.

And, uh, there’s like, adjustments you make, right, for neurodivergent children. Like maybe two of the three things on the plate are safe foods, and one thing is a new thing. And maybe we encourage them to interact with the new food, like by touching it or smushing it or like playing with it in some way. But also, they can just ignore some of the food on their plate. I put barbecue chickpeas on my son’s plate last night, and he did not touch ’em, and that’s fine. So I take them back and they go in the trash, and that’s part of, uh, our understanding of him exploring new foods is that sometimes they get trashed. Right?

So the investment is—which was hard for me when I was a young mom because I was like, any food in the trash is like a waste of money, right?

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah.

Danielle Sullivan: And we did not have a lot of money. Now I view that as an investment in his learning to like different kinds of food, because if we don’t put new kinds of food on the plate for him to investigate, he will never eat new kinds of food. And so even when he declines one, it’s still a win because he has looked at it, he has smelled it, and he has eaten around it. And those are skills he’s gonna need when he’s older.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, outside of, you know, disordered eating—

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: or issues with food that are more for a clinician, like a nutritionist, a psychiatric provider, sometimes your family doctor—

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And certainly an OT who is strong around sensory issues. Most of those people are payable by insurance, and have knowledge that we do not have.

But just in terms of my issues around trying to please everyone, a lot of it has been looking at the other people at the table and now that they’re adults and teens and saying, “Well, I’m giving a gift, which is I have prepared this meal for you.”

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And what you make of it, if you go eat crackers after, hey, that’s on you. You’re a grown man.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Or you’re a grown woman. You know, I don’t have to—

Danielle Sullivan: There’s a division of responsibility. That’s perfect.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Exactly. And so it became important for me to teach my family to receive the gift in a spirit in which I intended it.

I made my kids learn to say thank you, “Thank you for this meal”. My former husband, I had saying, thank you for cooking.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm

Anne Elrod Whitney: Because a lot of my problem in preparing was this feeling that it was being rejected—

Danielle Sullivan: Yes.

Anne Elrod Whitney: after all of the work. 

Danielle Sullivan: That was me, too.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah. And I took that personally. It felt like nobody cared—

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: that I was working. And that, of course, is a toxic space to be in.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: So appreciating that we are coming together, and I have given a gift of a meal. And then also kind of owning that they may go eat candy afterwards, whatever.

Danielle Sullivan: Yes. Yes. And that’s on. Yeah. I think there’s a lot there.

And that rejection piece is so important, especially for a neurodivergent population that, many of us work so hard to create a food, and then to have it rejected or even to reject it ourselves. Like, have you ever made something that you thought you were going to like, and then it comes outta the oven and you’re like, and then you avoid it for a week, and then it gets moldy and you throw it away. Right?

Anne Elrod Whitney: Often. I thought it was the only one.

Danielle Sullivan: No. And there’s so many reasons that happens, right? And so, like you’re saying, there’s the gratitude of the gift, there’s the self-compassion around sometimes you can’t actually predict what your body or your brain are gonna do around certain foods, even foods you make for yourself. And I think there can be some resistance baked into having to feed yourself all the time.

Visual Schedules

So like practically, a couple of things I’ll just say really quick are, first of all, not to harp on them too much, but the visual schedules y’all. If you have a visual aid of any kind, and here’s some examples:

When my daughter gets overwhelmed about food choices will often, in the morning, just say, “Can you make me a plate?” She doesn’t wanna think about what’s gonna be on that plate. It’s like too much. Immediate overwhelm. One way we’ve solved this is I just literally put stuff on a plate and she chooses what to eat, and sometimes she doesn’t.

And sometimes I make a really nice balanced breakfast, and sometimes she gets like a waffle and some dried cranberries, but at least then she’s gotten some food, and then she can make her own food decision.

Another way we’ve done this is we’ve had just a list on the fridge of what everyone likes to eat. I don’t have to hold that in my memory anymore. I can go down the list and be like, oh, this child likes peanut butter and jelly, and this child likes tuna fish. So I’ll make them each a different thing. But now I know, like I  don’t have to think about what I’m doing. I just look at the list and see what we have

Anne Elrod Whitney: Is this like a piece of paper on your refrigerator? Is it magnets? I mean, like, gimme the nitty gritty. 

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah, the practical. So, we have in the past had a piece of paper on the fridge. I do have a piece, well, right now we’re moving, so it’s not on my fridge, but traditionally we have in our fridge a like printed worksheet thing that came—I wish, if I can find the website, I’ll put it down below. But like back when I was a very young mom, I was following the mom blogs, you know, when mom blogs were like really in their prime, and somebody had created a printable like grocery shopping list. For vegetarians, ’cause we’re a mostly vegetarian family.

And, I literally just printed out and put it on the fridge because it helped me think through, like, what could I offer my kids? Like, oh, I could offer them a fruit, I could offer them a vegetable, I could offer them a sandwich. Right.

Anne Elrod Whitney: That reminds me—

Danielle Sullivan: Like a lunch printable. I don’t even know now.

Anne Elrod Whitney: They’re reminding me of a printable that was for cute bento box type lunches, which—

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: I never made cute lunches, but I did, I, I liked having the little list of what you could put in them.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And I used to do a lot of freezer cooking, but my freezer— I’m fortunate to have a huge freezer, like a separate freezer, but it is in the basement and has always been in houses I’ve lived in.

And I kind of forget what’s in there. When I’m hungry and tired, I can’t think what there is.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And it all sounds very hard. So I had, in the back of my notebook, I used to keep a list of what was meals that were in the freezer. So— and that was everything from a lasagna I had pre-made and frozen on some energetic day to one of those dump crock pot meals where it was like a can of soup and some chicken—

Danielle Sullivan: I love the dump meals. 

Anne Elrod Whitney: —add a bag of this to that meal. I love those things.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: I’ll tell you, my children did not enjoy food mixed together. And so that was problematic. But I, I learned a strategy. So remind me. We can—

Danielle Sullivan: Okay. 

Anne Elrod Whitney: I can tell you my strategy about that. And then even just things like, oh, I have frozen french fries, and I have frozen fish sticks. And I would remind myself that, oh, fish sticks and fries, that’s a meal

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And then I can cut some fruit. So it was like a reminder to me of what we already had. Because, you know, I would look at the fridge or something and I would just see these ingredients and I wouldn’t see—

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah, and I’ll just jump in really quick and say one of my clients—shout out, you know, who you are—showed me a picture of her freezer.

She has a chest freezer, and she got a whiteboard marker and just wrote directly on the freezer. What’s in there and then, when it’s eaten, erases it from the freezer. And I’m sure you have to have like a certain kind of freezer for that to work to like test it.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Disclaimer, she’s not buying any, anyone a new fridge or don’t go get your Sharpies.

Danielle Sullivan: You’re responsible for your own markings on your freezer. However, to me, that was like genius because also I’ll just say upfront we tried to do that, and I could not, like, I have very poor working memory. I look in the freezer and cannot remember what’s there for the time it takes me to write it down. And so I just have my own executive function block there, but to write it right on the freezer while the freezer’s open was somehow doable for me. Just tossing that out, you know, but making yourself a map or a list, of what’s in there really, really helps.

Anne Elrod Whitney: That’s really good news. Having that menu, it’s for me, like, here’s what I know, we can cook.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And then it’s a thing I can put in my routine. So, I’m kind of out of a routine and struggling in this area right now, but when I had younger kids and I was working full-time, I was really on it. One way that I had success was that in the morning I, at that time I was using a planner that had a little spot where you wrote what’s for dinner.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: So every morning when I was getting dressed for work, and I was looking at what my first appointment was gonna be, there was this blank asking me what was for dinner, and I could flip right back to my list of what I had.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And I could just pick one, and like put it in the crockpot or put it on the counter, or just know that I would be cooking fish sticks or whatever it is. That was really useful, just that prompt.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And I’m only thinking of it now. Maybe I need that in my morning routine.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: It’s just that question: What’s for dinner? So that I, and, and write it down on a whiteboard. That’s smart.

Meal Planning with an App

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. And I can say that for our family, I use this app called Plan to Eat. I think it’s paid, but it’s cheap. You can save recipes from blogs or from your cookbooks directly in that app with a picture. Every week, I go through and there’s a little daily planner in that, and I can add the recipe into my Monday morning, Monday afternoon, Monday evening.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah.

Danielle Sullivan: And then I can also scroll back and see what we did like last month or last week or whatever. If I’m feeling particularly uninspired. But it helps because all my meals that I know our family mostly eats are in one spot. So I can just look at ’em all and then I can think about, okay, well what ingredients do I have or what do I need to, like how much energy do I need to have? Do I have a ton of meetings this day?

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah.

Danielle Sullivan: And actually this recipe is like way too big. That kind of stuff, because it’s all like in one place. And I’m sure there’s tons of apps that do this, and I’m also sure you could do it in like a Google calendar. But it really helped me to have it in one place and to be thinking about like, balancing the energy, the energy management is a part of this, right? Like on a day that I know I have a million things, maybe a crockpot meal is gonna be better than like a fancy pie for dinner or something—

Energy and Capacity in Cooking

Anne Elrod Whitney: Right.

Danielle Sullivan: That I have to roll out pastry for and stuff. And so, ’cause you will get tired and, I think that knowing your own, like energy schedule is part of this too, right? Because if you—

Anne Elrod Whitney: Oh my goodness, yeah.

Danielle Sullivan: Have a ton of energy at lunch, then maybe you want to pre-cook dinner at lunchtime while you’re waiting for your soup to heat up or whatever. I had one client who prepared everything for the next day’s dinner.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yes.

Danielle Sullivan: So if there was chopping or like you had to cook some onions or whatever, they did it right after their dinner because that’s when they had the most energy. And so again, being a little flexible and like, you don’t have to do it at a certain time.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Right.

Danielle Sullivan: Like, when makes sense for you to do it.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Absolutely. That thing of looking ahead, you know, looking ahead is not easy for me because, I mean, first of all, many of us struggle to even picture the future.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: But also in my case, when I look to the future, I imagine that I am a superhero. So I think—

Danielle Sullivan: I know that feeling.

Anne Elrod Whitney: In the morning, I’m always thinking that I’m going to be so great in the evening. And it turns out no, I’m never a superhero, and I’m really only energetic in the mornings.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Making Double

Anne Elrod Whitney: So, facing that reality. Facing that reality, there are some things that I learned like that to do. One was that, for a long time when I made any dinner, I just made two.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: So if I was making crockpot, I just made sure that there was enough to put half of it in a container.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And I would stick that container in my freezer with a piece of masking tape on it, saying what it was.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And then bam, now I’ve got a freezer meal for another day. No extra work except for pouring it into a container.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: If I roasted a chicken, I roasted two. If I cooked noodles, even just for noodles and sauce, I would go ahead and boil the whole pack of noodles.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Or the two packs, and I would just put the buttered or oiled cooked pasta in a baggie in my refrigerator, because then when some kid was tired and grouchy and was like, there’s nothing to eat, or when I was tired and grouchy and I don’t wanna cook, I could go, oh look, buttered noodles. And there it was.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: So with no, again, no extra work. I didn’t think, “oh, time to pre-cook”, you know, that was, I’ve done that and it’s great. But, freezer cooking as a big batch was too hard.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm. 

Anne Elrod Whitney: Just making two.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Just making two of something. Buying two of almost everything.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm. 

Anne Elrod Whitney: Uh, is a, is a way that I did that. And, um, related to that, I always made lunch ahead of times.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Deconstructed Lunches

Anne Elrod Whitney: For me now, it’s a different version of the same challenge actually, because now I’m at home and I don’t remember when to eat lunch.

For a lot of years, I had preschool kids. You had to send a lunch.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And then I had myself and a partner, both of whom were wanting to take our lunch to work because, to eat lunch at work was about to spend about 15 bucks by the time it was all said and done, you know. So, packing a lunch. Some years on Sunday night—I had those little containers that, they’re pretty common now as as meal prep containers. They have little pockets of different portions that don’t touch each other.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Do you know what I’m talking about?

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. Yes. We have them for my kids’ lunchboxes. Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah. So I had a pile of those. It was not a fancy kid Bento box. It was not starting over with new stuff. It was literally like Gladware things from the grocery store. And then I just fill the pockets every night. So if I was cooking something that would work in there. You know, this person has a microwave, this one doesn’t. I would drop it in one of their compartments. Um, then I would just look on the, on the shelf in the fridge. Are there some grapes? Okay. Shove some in.

Some kind of fruit, and I would put it. I had a jar of applesauce I could pour in. I would put some pretzels in. I would put just cold pieces of deli meat in. It was kind of charcuterie for toddlers, you know, but even for me. 

Danielle Sullivan: That works well.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And that worked really well. 

Danielle Sullivan: Still charcuterie for toddlers. Um, that’s just my ’cause like, and this is maybe the time for the thing you mentioned earlier about, um, that, when kids don’t like things mixed together, right? Like—

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yes.

Danielle Sullivan: When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I don’t like things mixed together, and I do really like my food, and I will eat a wide variety of food. And I like my, my soups and stews kind of. What does my—my partner calls them, “I like soggy bread with mush on it.” That’s what I like, so like I, I like my,

Anne Elrod Whitney: That does not sound good when you say it that way.

Danielle Sullivan: No, it doesn’t, but that’s what I, a lot of what I eat right?

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah.

Danielle Sullivan: I like my soup with some bread or some croutons or some crackers in it. Um, or I like my, my grits with like, you know, some, some, anyway, um, yeah. So you don’t have to think it tastes good, but my kids are still in that phase of life where they mostly like separate things. And so a lot of their lunches are like ingredient lunches of like—

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah.

Danielle Sullivan: Here’s some nuts and some dry fruit and a sandwich and some salad, or some like crackers or whatever else I had around. Right?

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yes. Yeah, and that reminds me of the hack that I was gonna mention was when I would make ahead, like a food that was mixed, like a crockpot meal or whatever. I’m sure you’ve seen the strategy of giving them the deconstructed meal.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: For example, let’s say everyone’s having a stir-fry. Well, maybe you’d leave some of the rice plain. And you leave some of the broccoli out of the stir fry so that some people will choose ingredients. 

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And other people will choose the fully cooked dish.

Danielle Sullivan: Yes.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Well, crockpot, which I did a lot of, and freezer cooking, which I did a lot of, it wouldn’t work because everything was already frozen.

But what I realized is this. It’s not that I have to separate it for them to eat right, then it’s still that I’m touching lots of ingredients that they will eat if I don’t put it in this bag. So I learned, you know, maybe I was putting broccoli in a frozen beef with broccoli. I could just put some broccoli in someone’s lunch kit.

Maybe I had roasted a bunch of chicken and now I’m chopping it for chicken salad or something. I could just also put some of that in someone’s lunch kit. That really helped me with the bunch problem.

Accommodating Texture Preferences

And the other thing it did was that it made it where I could eat a sandwich. So one of my picky things is I cannot stand if the bread is at all soggy on a sandwich. 

Danielle Sullivan: You don’t like soggy bread with stuff on it. 

Anne Elrod Whitney: No, I like texture. Nothing. Nothing soft.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: So, you know, it’s hard if, if I wasn’t gonna have a microwave, for leftovers, I also didn’t want a sandwich. What was I gonna eat?

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And the answer was chips. That was what I basically, what I was gonna eat, chips and granola bars. So yeah. What I learned to do was I had that cart compartment thing. I put the bread and the filling, you know, meat or whatever in the big one, but dry. Then I would put the different condiments in the little containers, like squish some of the mayonnaise, put the pickles in a little compartment, so everything was staying separate. And then I could build the sandwich and eat it.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And it sounds like a small thing, but I got to eat sandwiches for lunch, and I still will not pack a sandwich in any other way. Even, you know, egg salad. I would make the egg salad, but not put it on the bread. And I also would do that for my kids. It sounds silly, but I probably saved a hundred dollars a month just doing that because I finally figured out how to eat sandwiches.

Danielle Sullivan: I mean, this is something that comes up a lot as a theme, but it’s like you have to be really clear in what the problem is that you’re trying to solve, right?

Is the problem actually that you don’t like any sandwiches? Or is it that the sandwiches get soggy, right?

Anne Elrod Whitney: Right.

Danielle Sullivan: And if it gets soggy, how do you solve that? Right? And so being really, like, non-judgmental about what you see yourself doing and just kind of like, logical, rational, right, about how do I solve this problem? It would save a lot.

Stay Tuned for Part Two!

Danielle Sullivan: Ya’ll we had so much to say about this topic that we recorded a monster of an episode. So, I’m going to go ahead and split it up into two for you. C’mon back next time for the continuation of this conversation about food, meal planning, and just feeding yourself here on Neurodiverging.

In the meantime, you can find the transcript over on neurodiverging.com. And learn more about me and Anne at neurodiverging.com or Anne’s website anneelrodwhitney.com.

Just remember, we’re all in this together.