Learning to cook for myself in recovery

This is a composite story, drawn from common experiences shared in the schizophrenia community. It does not depict a real individual.

I am a 28-year-old man living in Sacramento. I have schizophrenia. I have been on olanzapine for six years. For the first four of those six years, I lived almost entirely on frozen food. Pizzas, burritos, microwaveable pasta, the occasional protein shake. I gained forty pounds. I had no idea how to cook. I want to write about how I taught myself, slowly, to make actual food, because almost everything written about nutrition and schizophrenia assumes you already know how to walk into a kitchen and make a meal. For a long time I did not.

Why cooking was hard

It was not that I did not want to cook. I had cooked, in a basic way, before my first hospitalization. The problem after my diagnosis was a combination of three things, none of which I had vocabulary for at first:

• Cognitive symptoms. My working memory had gotten worse. Following a recipe with five steps and three ingredients was hard. Following one with twelve steps was impossible. By the time I got to step eight I had forgotten step three. See our overview of cognitive symptoms.
• Negative symptoms. Avolition — the lack of motivation that is part of the illness for many of us — meant that even when I had the ingredients, I could not get myself to start. See our piece on avolition.
• Side effects. Sedation from olanzapine made the evening, when most cooking happens, the worst time of day for me. I would lie down at 6 p.m. and wake at 8 with no energy left.

None of this is laziness. All of it is illness. Naming it that way was the first step.

The day I started

The day I started was a Saturday morning, two years ago, after my therapist asked me what I had eaten for dinner the night before. I said, "Frozen burrito." She asked what I had eaten the night before that. Same answer. She did not lecture me. She said, "What is one small thing you used to be able to make from scratch?" I thought for a long time. I said, "Scrambled eggs."

That afternoon I bought a dozen eggs, butter, salt, and pepper. I went home. I made scrambled eggs. They were not good. I made them again the next day. By the third day they were edible. By the second week I could make them without thinking. I did not move on to anything else for a month. The therapist had told me, "Repetition is the goal. Variety can come later."

The structure that worked

Here is the system I built, after a lot of trial and error. It is not a cookbook. It is a way of working around the cognitive and motivational obstacles that the illness produces.

Three meals, four ingredients each

For most of the first year, I had three "real" meals in my rotation. Each one had four ingredients or fewer.

• Scrambled eggs with toast
• Rice with a can of black beans, lime, and salt
• A sheet pan of chicken thighs and a vegetable, salt, olive oil, oven at 425

That was it. Three meals. I rotated them. I did not try to add a fourth until the third was easy. Adding the fourth meal was a milestone.

Cook in the morning when I can

I learned that I could cook better in the morning than at night, because the olanzapine sedation hit hardest in the evening. I started making my main meal at 11 a.m. on weekend days and eating it for both lunch and dinner.

Buy the same things every week

Decision fatigue was real. I made a grocery list of about fifteen items and bought the same fifteen items every week. Eggs, bread, butter, rice, beans, lime, chicken thighs, broccoli, frozen spinach, olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, oats, milk. The list took the thinking out of grocery shopping.

One recipe at a time, written out, on the counter

When I tried something new, I printed the recipe and put it on the counter. I did not try to remember it. I did not try to do it from a phone screen that kept timing out. The piece of paper, with each step crossed off as I did it, was the working memory I no longer had.

Tools, not skills

I bought a rice cooker. I bought a small slow cooker. I bought a sheet pan. The tools did the cognitively demanding work — timing, temperature regulation, attention — that I could not reliably do in my head. The rice cooker was the most important purchase I made that year.

Permission to use shortcuts

Pre-cut vegetables. Rotisserie chicken. Canned beans. Frozen rice. None of this is cheating. All of it is reducing the activation energy that gets between me and a real meal. The right comparison is not a home-cooked, four-hour meal. The right comparison is a frozen burrito.

What changed in two years

Two years in, I have about ten meals in my rotation. I have lost twelve pounds. My fasting glucose, which had been creeping up, is back in the normal range. I cook five or six nights a week. I still buy frozen food on hard days, and I no longer feel guilty about it. My sister came to visit last summer and I made her dinner. She cried, which embarrassed me, but I understood. The last time she had been in my apartment, the only thing in my fridge had been ketchup and a bottle of water.

The Mediterranean-style eating pattern that some research has linked to better outcomes in schizophrenia — see our piece on the Mediterranean diet — turned out to be roughly what I had stumbled into anyway. Olive oil. Vegetables. Fish or chicken. Whole grains. Beans. The connection between gut health and brain function in serious mental illness is an active area of research, summarized in pieces like the NIMH science updates, but for me the simpler point was that I felt better when I ate real food, period.

What I would say to someone living on frozen food

• Do not start with a recipe. Start with one ingredient you can prepare in two steps.
• Repeat the same meal until it is automatic before adding a new one.
• Cook at the time of day when your meds let you function, not at the time of day when "people cook."
• Buy the same groceries every week. Fewer decisions, less paralysis.
• Print recipes. Put them on the counter. Cross off each step.
• Buy a rice cooker. Buy a sheet pan. Buy pre-chopped vegetables.
• Permission to use shortcuts is part of the plan, not a failure of it.
• Tell one person what you are working on. Their occasional "What did you make this week?" can be the small accountability that keeps you going.

For more, see learning to cook again with cognitive symptoms, cooking on clozapine, and the Mediterranean diet and schizophrenia.

This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified mental health professional. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 in the US, or your local emergency number.