What to do when you hate cooking

First, it's probably not cooking that you hate

This one surprises people, so stay with me.

When most people say they hate cooking, what they're actually describing is one of three things.

The deciding. Standing in front of an open fridge at 6:30pm, tired, with no idea what to make, is genuinely unpleasant. That's not laziness, that's decision fatigue. You've made a few hundred small choices already today and this one arrives when your tank is empty.

The cleaning. Plenty of people don't mind twenty minutes of cooking. They mind the pans afterwards.

The performance. Somewhere along the way, dinner became a thing you're supposed to produce. A recipe. A proper meal. Something with three components that go together. And that pressure turns a small task into a project.

Notice that none of those are actually about chopping vegetables. Which is good news, because all three have straightforward fixes. You don't need to become a person who enjoys cooking. You just need to remove the parts you hate.

Stop cooking. Start assembling.

Here's the reframe that changes everything, and I'd love you to take it seriously.

A meal doesn't need a recipe. It needs a shape.

Something with protein. Something with fibre. Something that tastes good enough to make you want to eat it. That's it. That's the entire requirement.

Tinned tuna, a bag of salad, olive oil and lemon. Greek yogurt, frozen berries and nuts. Eggs scrambled with frozen spinach, on toast. Cottage cheese, tomatoes, a slice of good bread. Microwave rice, a tin of beans, hot sauce and whatever vegetable is nearest.

None of those are cooking in any meaningful sense. Every one of them is a better meal than what most people eat when they're too tired to cook, which is usually toast, crisps, or whatever gets delivered.

The bar was never "make a proper dinner." The bar is "put together something with protein in it." Once you drop the first standard and adopt the second, eating well stops being a project and becomes something you can do in four minutes.

Decide once, not every night

Restaurants don't invent a new menu every day. They have about a dozen dishes and they make them over and over.

You should do the same thing, and most people who eat well quietly already do. They have a rotation. Five or six breakfasts, five or six lunches, five or six dinners, cycling round with occasional variation.

That sounds boring, and I'd like to argue that boring is precisely the feature. Boring means no decision. Boring means you already know what's in the house because you buy the same things. Boring means Tuesday requires nothing from you.

Variety is a lovely thing to have when you're in the mood. It's a terrible thing to require of yourself every single evening when you're exhausted.

So pick your handful. Write them somewhere. And then just repeat them for a while.

Buy every shortcut and stop feeling bad about it

There is a strange moral hierarchy in cooking where doing things the slow way is virtuous and doing them the fast way is cheating. I'd like to take that whole idea and put it in the bin.

Pre-chopped onions. Bagged salad. Frozen vegetables, which are frozen fresh and are often nutritionally as good as anything in the fresh aisle. Microwave rice pouches. Tinned beans instead of dried. A cooked rotisserie chicken. Frozen garlic and ginger. Jarred sauces with a short ingredients list.

Every one of those removes friction, and friction is the entire reason people don't eat well. Nobody is grading you on process. Your body cannot tell whether the spinach was chopped by you or by a machine in a factory.

If spending an extra dollar on pre-chopped vegetables means you actually eat vegetables this week, that's the best dollar in your grocery budget.

The one-pan rule and the double-batch rule

Two small habits that solve the cleaning problem and the frequency problem.

One pan. If you're going to cook properly, make it something where everything goes onto a single tray or into a single pot and then into the oven while you go do something else. Sheet pan dinners exist for exactly this reason. Ten minutes of effort, no supervision, one thing to wash.

Double batch. This is not the meal prep you've seen on the internet, where someone spends their entire Sunday filling identical containers. It's just this: when you do cook, make twice as much. That's almost no extra effort and it buys you a night off.

Cook twice a week, eat properly seven nights. That's the whole system, and it's about as much kitchen time as someone who hates cooking can reasonably be asked for.

The thing people who hate cooking miss most

Here's the pattern I see over and over, and it's worth knowing about.

When someone doesn't want to cook, the food they default to is almost always carbohydrate. Toast. Cereal. Crackers. A sandwich. Pasta with a jar of sauce. Not because they've chosen it, but because it's what requires nothing.

Protein is the thing that gets skipped, because protein is usually the part that needs cooking. And protein is the exact nutrient that keeps you full for hours, protects your muscle, and takes the edge off cravings later in the day.

So you end up in a loop. Low-effort meal, hungry ninety minutes later, snack, hungry again, low-effort meal. It feels like a willpower problem. It's an ingredients problem.

Which means if you hate cooking, the single most useful thing you can do isn't learning to cook. It's building a list of things with protein in them that require almost nothing from you. Get that list and most of the problem quietly solves itself.

So here's your week

Don't overhaul anything. Just do this one thing.

Pick three meals you can genuinely make with your eyes half shut, with protein in each, and buy the ingredients for all three this week. Then eat them on repeat.

That's the entire assignment. Three meals. Not a plan, not a system, not a new relationship with your kitchen. Just three reliable things so that the tired version of you at 6:30pm has somewhere to land that isn't the delivery app.

If you want the list made for you

If you're reading this thinking "fine, but coming up with those meals is itself the part I can't be bothered with," then honestly, you're the exact person I built the next thing for.

That's the whole idea behind The Complete Healthy Eating Bundle. It's six guides covering every part of your day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, smoothies and desserts, and every single idea in it is built around protein. That's the nutrient people who don't like cooking miss most, and it's the one that keeps you full instead of grazing all evening.

It exists so you never have to do the deciding. Open it, pick something, eat. The thinking has already been done for you, for every meal, including the 4pm snack and the thing you want after dinner.

You don't have to learn to love cooking. You just need a list good enough that you stop having to think.

👉 Grab The Complete Healthy Eating Bundle here 
Use code 2026 for 70% off

Pick three meals this week. That's all this takes to start.

Talk soon, The Healthy Mail 🍳

P.S. Most people who eat badly aren't choosing to. They're just tired at the wrong time of day with nothing easy in the house, and that same tired evening repeats itself a few thousand times over a decade. That's what actually shapes how you look and feel, not the occasional good week. The Complete Healthy Eating Bundle is how you stack the deck in your favour for those evenings, every meal already decided, all of it protein-first. It's 50% off with code 2026 right now. 👉 Grab it here

P.P.S. — We are now live on Youtube. I went through 100+ supplements to find the ones actually worth taking… and only 4 made the cut. Even better, my new video gives you the one simple question that tells you if any supplement is worth your money. → Watch it here