The Fridge is Lying to You...

Why the spinach always dies in the back of the drawer & what to make when you have nothing left but still have to eat...

I’m writing this to you from inside my very own disaster zone.

The state of my refrigerator right now is ridiculous (pictured above) and absolutely doesn’t even remotely resemble the food storage of a woman (and a professional chef ) who has it all figured out, or better yet, does this for a living. You see the aftermath of four back-to-back catering gigs, and a refrigerator that looks like a yard sale of half-thoughts. There’s a container of congealed oil marinating god knows what (maybe smoked olives?), three different kinds of onions in varying states of not-onion-anymore, and somewhere in there are foil-wrapped science experiments at this point.

I literally have three different types of mustard (I can’t explain this to you, I just can’t). A container of berries I bought on Sunday, that is, as of this morning, is rapidly becoming another thing. Everything is packed to the brim, everything vaguely chaotic, and every single time I open that door, my jaw tightens just a little bit more.

I am in the thick of it, and I know something needs to change. Yas and Millie are literally terrified to open the fridge for fear of something falling out or launching itself at them. Yes, I’m a professional chef and not to mention, a former professional organizer…I KNOW the right way to exist, the right systems to implement, the why behind the need for a tidy kitchen. But just because I KNOW doesn’t mean I DO. So why can’t I DO? That’s what I’m working through…that and fixing my fridge situation that looks like a storage unit where someone once cooked.

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I was diagnosed with ADHD late last year, right after I turned 42.

My late diagnosis of ADHD felt like a door I’d been pushing against my whole life that had finally just...swung open. The room on the other side was relief, mostly, but I also experienced a huge wave of exhausted fury that it took me this long to get the freakin’ thing open. Turns out I’m not lazy, or full of excuses. I’m not broken at basic adulting, I DO know these things…with ADHD, my brain runs on what they call an interest-based nervous system. That’s the clinical way of saying I can cook a 12-course dinner for 20 people, but I will absolutely lose a pound of chicken thighs to the back of my own refrigerator because the moment it leaves my sightline, it stops existing. Out of sight is literally, neurologically, out of mind. I am a professional chef who regularly loses ingredients in her own fridge-abyss…so there.

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Why the Fridge Breaks Us

What happens at the end of the day...whether you have a diagnosis or not, whether you’re a chef or have never once made a meal plan in your life...is that your brain is just done. It’s overloaded…quiet, cumulative…done. Your prefrontal cortex (the part that sorts through information, makes choices, keeps impulses in check) has been running since the moment you woke up. These small tasks, small decisions, and maybe some big important ones too, but all are relentless with our minds.

What do I wear to work today? What does this email mean? Is this an emergency, or does it just feel like one? When did I last drink water? Do I really have to take all 20 of these supplements this morning just to feel normal? I really hate swallowing these mega pills. Did I remember that thing I needed to do? What needs to happen first?

An entire day with these thoughts, the invasive and running dialogue in our heads all dang day, and by now it’s 7 pm, you’re standing in front of the open fridge, and that part of your brain is running on absolute fumes of whatever you started the day with.

When we open the door, our brains see a wall of noise instead of seeing dinner possibilities. The stacked containers and whatever’s been shoved in front of whatever else is back there, all of it asking to be sorted…evaluated…decided about. Our brains, which have been deciding things all day and are fatigued, route us to the easiest thing available…even if that easy thing is a bowl of cereal over the sink…again.

Last week, I mentioned our sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) gears that our bodies shift between all day. The allostatic load is the running tab our bodies have been keeping for years, all the times we’ve braced ourselves…adjusted and accounted for the gap between what we need and what we get. It’s the physiological wear and tear on our bodies where we find ourselves cracked and broken from the chronic exposure to stress. Our nervous systems are stuck in that sympathetic first gear, and no $80 adaptogen powder is going to out-supplement a body that doesn’t feel safe.

So…the reality is…the fridge isn’t a storage problem, it’s a stress response. The spinach you put in the drawer last Wednesday? If you’re like me, once that drawer closed, that spinach literally ceased to exist in our brains. We didn’t “forget about it”…it was never there. That wilted spinach isn’t evidence that we’re disorganized or failing…it’s evidence that our nervous systems have been running too hot for too long. When we’re stuck in fight-or-flight, our brains literally cannot prioritize what doesn’t seem urgent.

Combine that with a nervous system that’s already over capacity, and you have a well-oiled guilt and shame machine. That big box hums in the corner and whispers, every time you open it, you tried and failed, and you’re still trying & you’re still failing.

I am here to tell you…that fridge is lying to you.

(I definitely just said that in my best Brian Fellows-voice…iykyk)

These refrigerator failings are NOT evidence of a flawed character, it’s all clear evidence that your body has been on high alert for so long that it literally has NO bandwidth for vegetables.

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I have spent years cleaning out my mom’s fridge every time I visit. She doesn’t ask, but she knows it’s one of the first things I’ll do…especially when I go for a snack and an avalanche of leftovers tumbles out. When I’m there, I can feel what that fridge is carrying, so it’s a small service I can do for her without having to say too much about it (notwithstanding the occasional witty jabs at her ability to grow aliens in there).

For a long time, I thought I understood the problem. If she would just change her shopping habits, buy a little less, stay on top of things...she’d feel better. I’d sort everything, put it in order, and leave with the quiet satisfaction that I fixed something for her. But I didn’t…it was just a temporary band-aid. What I missed was that no system can hold tightly when the nervous system underneath it is struggling.

She wasn’t drowning in her fridge because of a lack of discipline or neglecting to rotate the produce. Her body was running on a low-grade dysregulation that made every small thing feel like too much, and the fridge was just where that showed up most visibly. Whatever organization I left behind fell apart within a day or two, not because she didn’t want to maintain it...but because we had only treated the surface. The root issue was still there, somewhere underneath it all.

Now, when I go through her fridge, I’m not trying to fix anything; I just do it. Every time there’s this shift...like something loosening, something she’s been carrying getting set down for a minute. She looks lighter, and the air in the kitchen changes. That small act of service, of love, reaches her in a way that the organizing ever did. I’m not asking her to change immediately or be different from who she is right now…I’m just saying: I see you, I’ve got this…come and sit, let’s eat.

We’re all carrying some version of this…the organized fridge will follow when the person living with it starts being tended to.

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What Restaurant Kitchens Taught Me

In a professional kitchen, the refrigerator does not get to be mysterious.

There is a system called FIFO (First In, First Out), and it’s one of the least glamorous but most useful things I’ve carried from restaurant life into the rest of my existence. Every kitchen I’ve ever worked in runs on it…it’s embarrassingly simple: the thing that came in first gets used first…new stuff goes behind the old. That and…ALWAYS label and date everything when it arrives or when it’s made. FIFO’s two best friends are masking tape and a Sharpie. The older things live in front, the newer things live behind, and the decision of what to use next has been made for you before you even open the door.

The reason it exists isn’t that restaurant chefs are more organized than everyone else. It’s because food cost and food waste are NO JOKE. At the end of a long service, when everyone is exhausted, running on fumes, and the kitchen still has to be broken down…nobody has the bandwidth to investigate expiration dates. The system does the thinking, so the people don’t have to. You open the walk-in, the oldest thing is in front, you use it, and you move on.

Our home fridges have no system; we have mystery boxes or science experiments in place of food, and the thing that permeates the most (beyond the rancid smell of said mystery box) is the guilt and shame that you wasted money and didn’t use those items before they went bad. The yogurt from last week and the one you just bought look identical, so you grab the newer one without realizing it. The chicken you meant to use on Tuesday gets pushed further back by Wednesday’s groceries. The spinach migrates to the very back of the crisper drawer where, as we said earlier, it ceases to exist. None of this is about being a disorganized person...we simply do not have a system in place that can run on autopilot when our brains have already checked out.

So here’s where I’m starting this weekend…three simple things because these days, I can only handle doing the smallest possible intervention with the most return.

Tape and a Sharpie by the Fridge
Date on anything you open, anything you cook, anything you transfer into a container. Not the expiration date...the date you opened or made it. It literally takes 2 seconds and will save you from doing calendar math at 10 pm…the label does that for you.

FIFO, for reals.
Once a week, before new groceries come in, rotate. Older items move to the front, and new things go behind. If something has been so far back for so long that it’s now unrecognizable, it gets trashed.

A Priority Shelf/Bin
This is for the things that HAVE to be used first. That’s their home, and every time you open the door, you see that shelf first, and the decision is already made. You’re not starting from chaos at 7pm...you’ve have a front-and-center sight line of things that need to be used first for dinner.

Giving ourselves a little organization is the first step to helping our nervous systems shift into that second gear, where we can try to catch our breath.

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A few years ago, I worked with my friend Laurie and her organizing company, Simplicity Organizers, in Charlotte, NC. I only worked a few shifts while I had a toddler-sized Millie at home, but I learned so much from those amazing women. To take such a cluttered mess and transform it into a systematic organized space, they gave the gift of freedom from stuff, and it was beautiful work.

The impressive part, the real work, was mental and emotional. As organizers, these women knew the clutter wasn’t a character flaw; it went deeper than that. They never organized for the client. Instead, their process involved hands-on work where they would counsel, model, and walk each client through the process of going through the cluttered areas and setting up systems that would help them not return to that overwhelmed state in the future. And, every time, they did it with grace…with kindness…and with patience.

I remember the ways of Simplicity, and even now, in my super-busy, overwhelmed state of mind (and by consequence, SO cluttered), I remember their practical, approachable methods. Simplicity taught me…you don’t start with the problem, you start with what’s still there. So let’s start with what’s still there…in our fridge.

I’m not talking about a visit-container-store-first kind of project…seriously, tuck that credit card back and bail on that Amazon cart you’ve already filled with over-priced plastic containers. This isn’t even a Sunday-afternoon-soundtrack-of-shame. This exercise starts with a very easy, one-minute audit…three questions so that we can maybe rest easier. While FIFO gives us the ongoing maintenance…this one-minute audit gives us the reset button when things get away from us.

What’s still good?
Open the door and look… what can you actually still use? A jar of olives, half an onion, eggs, a wedge of cheese, that miso paste you bought (thank you, past self), butter, etc. These are the wins, and honestly, there’s probably more there than you think. By physically putting your hand on these items and organizing them, you are pulling the food back into existence in your brain. Take this moment to also label things that need it…it’s a simple kindness to your future self.

What needs to be used today?
Not later on, but today. The half-onion…the opened can of tomatoes…the herbs that have one good day left. They get an immediate job…not to be complicated by a recipe…these items just need to do the work of being food, nourishment. The onion is going in a pan tonight, with whatever else…start there.

What makes you feel guilty or mad every time you see it?
These are the ones that inflict fear in Yas and Millie…the things that are stacked precariously, anonymously just waiting for an unsuspecting but firm pull of the door. These are the containers of leftovers from ten days ago…the mystery liquid in a jar… that random thing wrapped in foil that you’ve been avoiding eye contact. Throw that shit away now, without hesitation. There’s no guilt-tax here…there’s no “but I spent money on it” stress, no narrating the loss. Just throw it out.

When you throw it out, go ahead and toss away the guilt that goes with it. It’s important to free yourself from the shame of paying too much for something and then letting it go to waste. We should not be prisoners to the clutter in our homes, much less in our refrigerators. In the wise words of En Vogue…Free your mind, and the rest will follow.

There’s relief in looking inside and not being judged, not being reminded of seventeen small failures, and that relief is a parasympathetic moment. That’s your nervous system finally taking its hand off the gas and switching into second gear.

Your one-minute audit requires less time than it takes to scroll through one round of Instagram where you’re inundated by the algorithm trying to romanticize our wellness routines…trying to convince us to hop on whatever supplement bandwagon they're peddling.

Let’s choose freedom here…free your mind from any other plans or compulsion to buy any other quick fixes, and let’s just do the next best thing right at this very moment. Throw it away.

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Small Shifts, Small Pivots

These shifts, over time, will have the biggest impact. When you veer off course or find yourself stressed and back to a packed fridge…it’s okay, because these shifts don’t require a full triage, they only ask for a small restart, a small pivot to help reset. I told my therapist this week that I’m already SO overwhelmed and weighed down by the weight of my own expectations…I’m desperate for these shifts to be simple and small…easy lifts that don’t require many brain cells because, well, I have none to spare.

These small shifts aren’t some new protocol or regimen; they’re just a few things I’ve been paying attention to in my own kitchen and my own body. The best part? None of them requires an extra Trader Joe’s run (especially since mine is closed for renovations for the entire summer…I see you 72nd st).

One Warm Thing…every day
Not necessarily a full meal, but maybe just a bowl of broth or a mug of miso? Better yet, do that cup of bone broth with a swirl of butter and salt…SAY LESS. Anything warm, in a bowl or a mug, will help your body recognize it as care and not medicine. Your gut and your brain are connected by a nerve called the vagus nerve, which is basically the main communication line your body uses to decide whether it’s safe or not. When something warm, savory, or fermented hits the back of the throat, your vagus nerve celebrates.

Protein Before 10am
From my limited understanding, there’s a cortisol spike in our first hour after waking. Our body does this on purpose…the cortisol awakening response…and it’s how we get from horizontal to functional. But, without protein to stabilize that cortisol response, that spike crashes by mid-morning, and your blood sugar goes with it, and then you are chasing it for the rest of the day. As soon as I crossed over the 40yr-old-threshold…protein entered the main chat…in my inbox, at my doctor’s appointments, on my socials. And no, I’m not talking about the chalky-powdered drink kind of way because kill me now…I can’t and won’t.

When we’re in a constant state of stress, especially through restless nights of sleep, our cortisol is already elevated, our glucose is already volatile, and our bodies are desperate for something stable to build on. That’s the jelly bean grab at 11:30 am, the potato chip spiral at 3 pm, or the 10 pm cereal. The morning cortisol spike and our response to it sets the tone for the day…start with two eggs..some greek yogurt…a piece of leftover whatever. This dose of protein first thing gives our nervous systems the message that food is coming, and it’s coming in a form that our bodies can actually use.

The Meal You Know by Heart
We all have one…it’s the thing you could make in the dark, half-asleep, that needs no recipe or decision, just the muscle memory of having done it a hundred times. If you don’t have one, building one is the first step…just one dish you can cook from nothing. For me, it’s eggs…fried, poached, or soft scrambled on toast with some sort of chili crisp mayo situation. When everything is loud, and you have to feed yourself anyway, this is the meal that gets you to the table without further overloading your system. ADHD friends, this is especially for you. The fewer decisions between I am hungry and actually eating food, the less your nervous system has to do. Pick yours and cook it until your hands know how to do it without you.

Sit Down to Eat…Even Once
I know…in the hustle, more times than not, we find ourselves eating on-the-go or even standing at the counter while scrolling, and okay, that’s just what it is. But once a day...try to sit down to eat a meal, even for ten minutes. Standing up or moving while eating keeps your body in a low-grade stress posture (shoulders braced, jaw tight, already preparing for the next thing) and your nervous system reads that posture as information. It doesn’t fully shift into rest-and-digest mode (gear 2) because your body thinks you’re still in the middle of something. Ten minutes in a chair, the act of sitting down tells your nervous system that you’re stopping…it tells that vagus nerve, connecting your gut to your brain, to chill the EFF out. It says “we have time for this,” and your body’s digestive system responds appropriately.

Throw Away the Guilt AND the Bad Food
It’s that important…so, I’m saying it again. Yes, food waste is a huge global issue and one that is SO important for us to play our part in combating. And, yet…you’re only hurting yourself as you allow food to continue to rot in your fridge while you’re stuck feeling guilty for the waste. We need a larger reset on our nervous systems, and it starts with these small steps, these small pivots. When you open the fridge and see the spinach that quietly expired in the crisper drawer...just realize, your nervous system bought it during a moment of calm…when you were briefly in gear 2…briefly imagining a version of the week with more time in it. That was your body trying to take care of you…it just happened to run out of runway before the week came to an end.

The guilt is a LARGE part of what’s making us sick, not the food. Compost the guilt, the food can follow if it needs to…but the guilt goes first. And next time, label and implement your little FIFO steps and maybe…just maybe…there won’t be as much waste the next time, and that small step in the right direction is a HUGE step to giving us the balance and regulation we so desperately need.

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What to Make Tonight
Eggs…Because they’re my favorite and well, we’re starting here, and we’re starting simple.

Are they trending again? Who cares? I am of the philosophy that almost everything can be made better by putting an egg on it (and quite possibly the title of my memoir). Eggs were the very first thing I actually learned to cook on my own at the stove when I was in middle school. But beyond the hype…the nostalgia…the general obsessiveness from me, eggs are SO great because they actually also provide protein, fat, B vitamins & choline (a nutrient your brain uses to make acetylcholine & one of the main calming signals in your parasympathetic nervous system). Eat the eggs, these are the brakes, Kurtis Blow.

Simplest dinner when the fridge is testing you…heat olive oil or butter in a pan until it moves and shimmers. Pull forward whatever came to the front of your FIFO shelf...whatever vegetable, whatever greens, whatever odds and ends needed to go today. Salt them, season them, get sassy with them. Let ‘em cook without fussing for five/ish minutes. Make a well or two, crack the eggs in, lid on, low heat, three minutes. Toast underneath, or reheated leftover rice if you have it, or nothing if you don’t.

In total, like 10-12 minutes and less than $4, and is collectively doing the good lord’s work on your nervous system and regulating your body to a place of balance…which is more than I can say for the contents of that takeout bag on your counter that you may or may not have grabbed in a drive-through or from the hands of an UberEats courier…I’m not going to call it out, but we both know it’s there. (I have it, too. We do not need to discuss it.)

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Next week we go deeper into why your body wants what it wants when it’s running on empty...and why those cravings are not random or weak or evidence of anything except a nervous system that is trying, very specifically, to tell you something. Let’s figure out how to actually hear it instead of just pushing through it.

For now...tape and a Sharpie, three things to the front. You know what to do. It’s not glamorous, and it’s certainly not photogenic, and it doesn’t help the wellness culture sell you more. But it is...quietly, slowly...how our nervous systems begin to learn to take its foot off the gas.

Your fridge is lying to you…let’s change that.

xoxo,

Jess