deliciousghosts:

realsocialskills:

littleghostpug:

realsocialskills:

Anonymous asked realsocialskills:

Related to the remembering food exists thing, do you have any advice for what to do when your depression is making preparing food seem so hard that you’d nearly prefer to just go hungry?

A couple of suggestions:

Order a pizza, or some other form of food that gets delivered to you

• Hunger feeds on itself and makes everything harder
• If you’re in a state of mind where preparing food seems too difficult to be bearable, ordering food can often break that cycle
• So can getting takeout or going to McDonalds
• This is not a frivolous expense
• And it’s not necessarily more expensive than preparing your own food. McDonalds has a dollar menu.
• When you’re starving from not eating, it is not the time to worry about health food. Making sure that you eat comes first. Eating anything (that you’re not allergic to) is healthier than regularly going hungry because you can’t bring yourself to eat.

Keep stuff around that’s easy to eat and doesn’t require any preparation or only need to be microwaved, for instance:

• A box of cereal
• Chocolate
• Granola bars
• Ice cream
• Popsickles
• Protein shakes
• Rice cakes
• Peanut butter
• TV dinners
• Frozen chicken nuggets
• It can also help to keep around disposable plates and utensils so the thought of having to wash dishes doesn’t deter you from eating

Get someone else to tell you that you need to eat:

• Sometimes it’s easier to remember that eating is important if someone else tells you
• For instance, if you text a friend saying “remind me that I need to eat” and they do, that can sometimes make it more possible

Get someone else to talk you through the steps of making food:

• If there’s someone you can ask how to find/make food, that can be helpful
• Sometimes what’s really exhausting is not so much doing the steps, as it is anticipating them, or figuring out what they are
• If someone can help you through that, it can make it much more possible

littleghostpug said:

If you’re like me and you’re frequently broke AND have a shitty stomach that gets even shittier when you have bad depression/anxiety and hunger, I’d recommend having a lot of fruit or fruit juice on hand. Canned fruit is good because it doesn’t spoil but if you’re able to have fresh fruit it’s a really good idea. Also I avoid ramen if possible because it dehydrates me really badly which also affects depression. 

Having frozen food is really good but it still sometimes is too much to handle when depression is that bad, so I go for canned soups that you can just throw in the microwave. 

This is just what works for me though.

realsocialskills said:

Thank you.

Do you have a strategy for keeping fresh fruit or fruit juice around when you’re dealing with depression/anxiety?

I’ve found that fruit juice and fruit can sometimes be useful things in getting me able to eat, but I haven’t found it possible to keep them around and not end up with a lot of spoiled yuck.

Do you have a way?

deliciousghosts said:

For fresh fruit, you could try the containers of fruit they prepare at the grocery store, which I like because you can get a small amount with some variety in the kinds of fruit, and it’s already washed and cut and all you have to do is eat it. They can be expensive though. Also, it may just be me, but I find bananas and mandarin oranges much easier than other fruit, because they come in convenient individually pre-wrapped packages and you don’t even have to wash them. Especially bananas, because I can keep them on the counter where I’m more likely to see them, and if they do get over-ripe I can put them in the freezer to use in baking someday and not feel bad about wasting them.

I cannot keep fresh grapes or berries but they freeze really well and you can eat them straight from the freezer. Frozen grapes are seriously delicious. Berries you could put on yogurt, ice cream, or oatmeal, too.

Vegetables are harder, but baby carrots are easy and last pretty long. Other things that are easy to eat: Oreos or other box cookies, pudding cups or applesauce cups, snack packs of tuna and crackers, or the kind of flavoured tuna that you can peel open and eat from the can, processed cheese slices, and raisins.

Another thing that can be helpful is to keep boxes of granola bars or cereal in different places in your house. There used to be days when I wouldn’t leave my room so I wouldn’t eat anything all day, until I learned to keep food in my room. Also sometimes it’s deciding on something that’s difficult, and if you have something that’s closer to you than everything else or separate from it, it’s easier to just grab that.

If you order food, I think most pizza places let you order online, which is full of magic and wonder to me cuz you don’t have to talk to anyone. There’s also things like just-eat.ca – I haven’t tried it, and it’s just in Canada, but there is probably something like it for a lot of major cities. Basically you can order food from a bunch of different restaurants, from one website.

I definitely second the part about this being the wrong time to worry about health food. It actually got *way* easier for me when I stopped thinking I should make “real food” and started thinking, you know, if it’s between eating nothing and eating only poptarts, eating only poptarts is much healthier, which basically means poptarts *are* health food in this case. Whatever you eat is an accomplishment and you can feel good about it.