AIBU to just give up shopping and cooking?

[Sodtbisforsold]

It’s awful. It’s lazy . It’s probably unhealthy but …
Every week I order a big household food shop. And every week it gets given away or binned.
Not sure what happened.
I just started to literally hate cooking. I hate washing up even more . I can have lovely quality food sat in the fridge and I’ll still just get take always. I am ill and I am tired. No one else in the household can cook . No one else in the household would wash up as they don’t do domestic stuff ( no issue with this as they literally pay for everything) . At 8 I was a latch key kid and had to make meals for my siblings , by 15 I lived with my boyfriend who expected a full housemaid and cook service. At 17 I was a single working mum cooking for child and myself every night , that was 20 years ago . Youngest is 4. I’m a brilliant cook I can make so many things and I even used to grow most of the food and herbs myself. It was a true passion and I loved feeding people. I’m sick to death of it. I’m done now.to be fair I find a lot of the stuff I used to find rewarding as uninteresting now. I loved gardening and growing stuff, I just pay a chap to keep it tidy now and haven’t even sat out there this year. But I’d literally rather not eat than bother to go and prepare food now and clear up after.
Does anyone else exist entirely on the offerings of Uber eats and a stack of menus on top of the fridge? Will we all be riddled with diabetes and heart problems because of it?
Ds is already chunky but he decided he hated the activity club I’d prebooked for the summer after 2 sessions ( wasting over a thousand quid!) didn’t go and has therefore done largely nothing all summer) he’s really healthy otherwise. It’s not ideal though is it?

@Wilkolampshade
Sorry to hear you’re struggling too. You sound a bit stronger than me. How long have you had it?

I am really sorry. You must be in an awful lot of pain all the time. My only suggestion is to do whatever works for you best considering your circumstances. There’s nothing wrong in having a takeout of grilled chicken, salad and pita a few times a week.

I am not a massive fan of takeaways but Cook seem to me just like home cooking (only done much better than I would).

Gosh I am so sorry OP. That sounds a horrendous experience. Awful that you were treated so badly.

What exactly does your husband contribute to your family life? Sounds to me as though you’re doing everything and he’s sitting around on his arse like a little fat prince.

@Boood
All errands involving leaving the house
Driving the car
All bills and expenses including my healthcare
Bins, lightbulbs ‘man jobs’
90% childcare
Anything my older kids need as their dad hasn’t sent so much as a Xmas card since 2004 he may even be dead , who knows?

He does alright. He can’t cook and doesn’t share my obsession with tidiness. He zones out when ds is asleep , always had a bit of a screen habit. I used to parade into the room singing Nina Simone or Shirley Bassey in my underwear for attention back in the day and it worked haha. I’m not fun anymore though and I don’t look any good in my knickers now

I replace 1-2 of my daily meals with Huel in the week and find that it takes a lot of the hassle away. I'll usually just have a basic chicken salad at lunch which takes two minutes to prepare as I batch cook the chicken in roasting bags (takes 10 seconds to chuck them in and put in oven) and just use prepared salad.

I'm then able to actually make a nice meal as it's the only one I properly cook in a day. If I decide I want a takeaway at least I've already had three healthy meals that day.

Forgot to add I eat four meals a day as I weight train a lot.

For me it's the planning I hate. So we Hello Fresh at the weekends and DH chooses the meals. I cook two of them and DS15 the other.

Then I use the recipes we like to fill in the weekday meals.

It's helped so much

Plus no excuse for other adults or teens to not help with the planning or cooking. I love my night off where I sit with a glass of wine and just appear at the table to eat.

@Sodtbisforsold about 20 years 😂 my DC all grown up, and thank goodness no 2nd brood, have v recently proclaimed a loud 'no!' to anymore of it. Menopausal decrease in oestrogen and all its nurturing impulses has helped, but my goodness OP, don't let the bastiards get you down. Don't wait 20 years like me. Xxxx

I'm so sorry you're suffering with pain. I have chronic pain (no where near as awful as yours sounds), and I know how draining and lonely it is.

Have you heard of the Curable app? I discovered it earlier this year and I have found it so so helpful. It's based on a lot of the new neuroscience of chronic pain, and has so much education on it and exercises for helping to calm our nervous system and dampen down the pain signals the brain is firing (it's categorically NOT saying "pain is all in your head", but delves into the pain pathways that get reinforced when we have trauma and injury and all the hyper vigilance and chronic pain that ensues after). If you're up for learning more I would really recommend the app, but if it all sounds a bit out there, they have a great podcast with loads of free info www.curablehealth.com/podcast

Also, if that does resonate, i would really recommend the work of Nicole Sachs, she has loads of free resources for healing and an amazing, inspiring podcast www.thecureforchronicpain.com/

This might not be something you're interested in, but I can just feel the sadness and exhaustion emanating from your posts, and I wanted to share incase it helped at all ❤️

Be kind to yourself

You sound depressed and your thoughts are in a negative cycle.I hope,you can get help from a professional and get back to your healthy positive life again.all the best

Please don't waste your money on a naturopath, they're absolute quacks. Sounds like you've been through a lot op and mentally and physically tired (and in pain). Is ds going back to nursery this Sept? That should give you time hopefully to sort out what to do next and give him some routine. Could you afford a chef service or something? There might be someone locally willing to deliver home cooked meals if you paid them? There's an amazing chef near us that started doing that during the first lock down and has continued, but sadly well out of our price range!

Hi OP,
I know you are feeling like you are getting medicines on top of medicines - but I think you need to go to your GP and ask for full bloods to look for deficiencies - specifically (in my very non medical opinion) a B12 deficiency.

"Gradually loosing appetite, memory problems, clumsy and wall to wall tiredness."

This shouts B12 deficiency to me - people with a severe B12 defieciency can be afraid that they are developing MS or dementia.

It can unfortunately be difficult to diagnose as there are (as I understand it) different types of the vitamin some of which are unusable by the body. The most common reason for deficiency is poor absorbtion (fitting your profile of stomach issues) but also can be from a restricted/vegetarian or vegan diet. Also gas and air (nitrous oxide?) in childbirth/pain relief/recreationally can use up stores of the vitamin.

I would suggest you don't jump to taking vitamins at this point as it could mask a defieciency for a clinical diagnoses (boosting your levels) get yourself to your GP. I know they are restricting non urgent blood tests due to vials but this is urgent (you are becoming clumsy!) so push for it. If appropriate the GP can prescribe a course of injections of B12.

If the GP says your B12 level is OK ask about what the level actually is as some people think our bottom level of "ok" is not ok and the lower acceptable level thresholds vary by country.

I'm so sorry for your birth experience, it sounds horrendous. You do sound depressed, particularly that you've stopped taking joy in things like the garden.

I think if you can source healthy meals without cooking, that's okay for now.

I thought I’d come back here to update, partly because people were so kind and caring and partly because someone feeling similar might benefit.
I have discovered I have anaemia, B12 and iron. Not majorly , but in the low ranges and am orally topping this up.
I’ve changed the shopping so that we’re stacked up with the princes tuna lunches, good cheeses , and fancy ham and cooked chicken and prawns.
Combining this with the steam fresh rices and prebaked McCain jackets and a well stocked fruit bowl , I’m still not cooking but we are eating far far less shit. I’ve managed to follow the boys out to a couple of adventure playground trips and although I just sat under a tree and observed , I must admit the sick , anxious feeling went quickly as I’m a nosy cow and throughly enjoy people watching the other families.
The new diet has yielded almost 10lbs in weight loss. It’s also revealing quite an impressive saggy apron as the fat shifts but if I meet my target weight by December my op can go ahead and I’ll be in so much less pain and will look better. I’m still very slow, grumpy and apathetic most days but I have hope that the years ahead will look very different. The main thing is that the guilt is gone surrounding our behaviour with food, a little weight has lifted.
A dear relative passed away recently , I was asked to use my talent to create something for the funeral. I was nervous at first as I thought I was too tired , might not be able to do it. The project is coming along fantastically even though I can only manage a couple of hours a time. It’ll be going through the final edits this week and ready in time.
It feels a bit like I hit rock bottom and I’m very slowly bobbing towards the the surface.
Thanks again to everyone who was kind and supportive and for all the really helpful suggestions

Aww good on you OP!! What a brilliant update!

That's lovely to hear :)

[quote Sodtbisforsold]@SausageRollFan
This makes so much sense. I can’t stand people being in my house though. If we have to have workmen I’m ill the days before they come, we haven’t had social visitors here for a year at least and that was my sister, she’s lovely but the sense of relief when she left was immense . HV / midwife was lied to and told everything was perfect just to make sure she didn’t bother us again. My homes lovely no idea why I can’t stand people outside the household being here . Gardeners usually hidden from so he doesn’t ask to come in. I’m really hard work with these phobias.[/quote]
OK. This is my routine. It might not work for everyone but it works for me.

Sunday is Sunday dinner day. If I'm energetic this is made from scratch, if I'm not then it's an M&S style deal with premade everything. Afterwards all meat gets stripped and dumped in the slowcooker with left over veg and gravy, a tin of beans, maybe a tin of carrots or something too and a few herbs. When it's cooked down a bit I whack a premade pie crust over it. That's two meals.

Also on Sunday: stick an entire bag of wholemeal pasta to cook. Whisk up an ultra quick cheese sauce. Stick half the pasta in there. Serve with premade salad. That's another meal. The other half - get some premade passata, mix some tinned sweetcorn and peas in there if your lot will eat that. Mix in some torn up ham and mozzarella. That's at least another two meals and each generally lasts us two days (me and two kids here). Stick clingfilm over them (and the pie mix) and you can keep them in the fridge for the week.

It's not fancy cooking but it's low energy and there are vegetables in there and it's bland enough to not cause fights with small ones.

That is great update well done! Good idea also for me. Fab ideas also @swg1 if you are going one thing an extra pan isn’t that bad as saving time and hardly notice washing up.

Well done op, good luck for the operation. Sorry to hear your relative passed away.