Hello and welcome back to our corner of the newsletter where it’s been quite a long time since we’ve had to find something to chat about other than our latest toolkit release! While we are looking forward to when we can share some new toolkits again, we are also excited to dig into some other topics.
This week our focus is on meal planning, and we’ll If you find any tips or information useful we’d love to hear about it at hello@autismgrownup.com, as topics that people find interesting or helpful make for great blog posts and even toolkits!
Tip for Self-Advocates: If you are new to meal planning, don’t feel pressure to make everything happen at once.
Meal planning can seem so simple on the surface when in reality it can take quite a bit of mental effort and have a major impact on our quality of life. Meal planning can be meticulous or loose, frugal or decadent. When it comes to social expectations around meal planning, it can sometimes feel like a binary of either being a disciplined person who does it or an undisciplined person who doesn’t.
In reality there can be so much that goes into meal planning in a way that reflects your personal nutritional, enjoyment, and budgetary goals and it can take time to figure out how to make everything work within your life and schedule. Instead of trying to juggle every single new responsibility all at once, it is OK to get used to managing one or two before taking on more.
To use a real world example, one surprising reality of learning to cook meals at home is that while it is usually cheaper in the long run, there is also a high upfront cost to account for buying new ingredients and/or equipment. If you want to learn to cook a number of new meals at home, it might not be practical to pay all of those startup costs right away! Taking those meals one at a time can help you progress toward the meal plan you want without creating an unnecessary burden for yourself.
Tip for Parents: There are lots of ways to participate in meal planning!
If you are a parent or caregiver accustomed to being in charge of meals, you may have grown accustomed to making the executive decisions when it comes to meals as well. It is of course an important form of support to be able to assist with meal planning to whatever extent the autistic person in your life requires it. But it’s also an important form of support to ensure the autistic person in your life has an active voice in planning their own meals to whatever extent they are interested in doing so. For some people this might just mean indicating a few meals of interest for the coming week, while others could be interested in more meticulous planning or active participation in meal prep. Even if you currently have a great routine, finding small ways to ask about and encourage participation leaves the door open to building the system that best serves the person it is intended for.
Tip for Professionals: Good meal planning is not about forcing dietary changes!
Sometimes when we talk about tweaking the systems that we use to run our day to day lives, we have to be careful to make sure our advice is focused on using those systems to meet our personal goals and needs as opposed to the goals and needs some people might expect us to have. We make every effort to avoid this trap because it ultimately discourages people from working on those systems in their own lives and falsely leads people to believe that working on things like meal planning is more about becoming a “correct” person than building a system that caters to their personal needs. You might see where we are going with this already.
One all too common judgment of autistic people is that some are most comfortable eating a few particular foods and prefer not to deviate from them in their day to day lives. A well-intentioned professional or parent might observe this and remember their own experiences “broadening their horizons” and subsequently decide that is one important change the autistic person in question should try to make. Let’s be clear, broadening one’s horizons is not a bad thing when it is voluntary and it is great to offer those opportunities. But a willingness to try new foods does not have to be central to any particular meal plan and is not going to be a helpful component of meal planning if it’s not something the person in question wants to be part of their day to day life. A much more productive route is mutually developing a strong sense of the preferences and needs of the person in question and working together to build a plan that incorporates as many of those preferences and needs as possible.
That’s all for this week; we hope the new format has offered some helpful tips already and we would love to hear from you either on this topic or some other topics you’d want to see us discuss. Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and we’ll see you here next week! 
