There's a question that breaks my brain every single time someone asks it.
“What do you want for dinner?”
Which is weird, because I love food. I love cooking. I've coached people on nutrition for years. I hold a Precision Nutrition Level 2 certification and I've spent more time than most people thinking seriously about what we eat and why. Food is genuinely one of my favourite things.
But that question — asked fresh, with no plan, at 5pm when the day has already taken everything — floors me every time.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2024, with suspected autism alongside it. And while the diagnosis explained a lot of things that came before it, one of the things it clarified most was this: meal planning is a genuinely hard cognitive task that we collectively pretend is simple.
Think about what it actually requires. You need to hold multiple variables in your head simultaneously — what's in the fridge, what everyone likes, what's nutritionally reasonable, what you have time to cook, what you cooked last week. You need to make a series of low-stakes but endless decisions. You need to project forward across a whole week and account for nights when energy will be low and willpower won't show up. Then you need to do it again next week.
For a brain with ADHD, that's not meal planning. That's a cognitive assault course. The decision fatigue hits before you've even started cooking.
And the cruel irony is that people who struggle most with meal planning are often people who care deeply about food — they just can't get the planning machinery to cooperate.
That's me. Probably some of you too.
I'm Darryl. I'm based in Ōtepoti Dunedin, I run a fractional technology consulting practice, and I co-founded a neurodiversity community called ThinkDifferent. I'm also a CrossFit Level 2 coach and a person who genuinely loves to cook.
A couple of years ago my wife Lesley started following a structured eating programme. It was a good framework — solid nutritional thinking — but the meal planning side created real friction for our household. Rigid plans, limited room for personal preferences, and the constant mental load of figuring out how to make one person's eating plan work without making it everyone else's problem.
So I built something for us.
Plan My Kai started as a personal project. A way to take the weekly dinner question off the table — literally — so the plan was just there, built around what we actually like to eat, what Lesley was working toward, and what would make it through a real week in a real household without falling apart by Wednesday.
Then strangers started signing up. I hadn't told anyone it existed.
That's when I knew it was worth building properly.
Plan My Kai is for Kiwi households — whānau where not everyone's eating the same way, where someone's following a programme and someone else isn't, where the mental load of food decisions lands on one person and quietly exhausts them. It's built on Precision Nutrition principles: adherence over perfection, flexibility over rigidity, real food that real people will actually eat.
And it's built to answer that question before anyone has to ask it.