Standard nutritional advice assumes a person with full executive function, planning capacity, energy, and motivation. It assumes you can shop, prepare, cook, and clean up. It assumes you have access to the ingredients it recommends, the cognitive bandwidth to follow a recipe, and the appetite to eat.

Depression attacks all of those. Anxiety makes grocery stores overwhelming in a way that is difficult to describe unless you have experienced it. ADHD makes multi-step recipes feel like an impossible series of decisions strung together without logic. ME-CFS means that cooking for 30 minutes may cost you three hours of recovery.

I built the low-capacity protocols in Simmerstate because the worst time to figure out how to eat for your mental health is when your mental health is at its worst. The system has to be built in advance. It has to be waiting for you.

There are five levels.

Level 5 is full capacity — you can cook a real meal, you have the ingredients, you are engaged with the kitchen. This is what most nutritional advice addresses.

Level 4 is moderate. You can manage 15 minutes of simple cooking. One pan. The lentil soup you made Sunday, reheated. Sardines on sheet pan vegetables, 15 minutes in the oven.

Level 3 is low. Standing is an effort. Multiple steps feel impossible. You open things and combine them: Greek yogurt with frozen berries and pumpkin seeds, thawed in the microwave for three minutes. Hard-boiled eggs from the batch in the fridge, half an avocado, cherry tomatoes, sea salt. Canned salmon, flaked, with whatever fresh vegetable is there, on rice cakes.

Level 2 is crisis-adjacent. The goal is not a Mediterranean diet. The goal is food in the body. You open the sardine tin and you eat from it. You eat a spoonful of peanut butter with a banana. You drink a glass of water. This is the protocol. It counts.

Level 1 is unable. You accept help. You order from your pre-set delivery defaults — the list you made before this moment, when you could think, of the restaurants that have a protein option and some vegetables. You eat whatever arrives. You do not evaluate it against any framework. Eating today is the right choice.

None of this is compromise. These are not lesser versions of good eating — they are well-designed systems for real functional states. The intelligence in the system is in knowing which level applies today and not requiring more than that level allows.

Beckie routes to the right level based on your check-in. You tell her how you are. She tells you what the next move is.

The pantry has to be stocked before you need it. The delivery list has to be built when you can think. The batch cooking has to happen on a Sunday when capacity allowed. This is the investment — not in any one meal, but in the infrastructure that makes feeding yourself possible when everything else feels impossible.