I am not giving up because I hate wasting food, although, you would never know it. I just have to align my buying with reality. My reality is I don't cook as often as I think I am going to.
When work is running at a reasonable pace, then I cook as planned. If work is busy, then at the end of the day I'm tired, and I get home late. That's when having prepared ingredients is so important. We do grocery shopping on Sunday, and that is when I have the most emotional energy around food preparation. So I harness as much as possible of it right away. Have you read _The Everlasting Meal_? It was a great eye opener for me and helped me understand what I had been doing haphazardly and plan for it more.
I set up a menu before I go shopping (looking at the flyers), which also helps. Complicated meals go towards the beginning of the week and towards the end of the week, we're eating more out of the freezer (e.g. soups I prepared earlier) or pantry. That way, if we need to move a meal at the beginning of the week, there is already a low-effort meal planned for later, so we just swap them. E.g. this week Monday was supposed to be a roast chicken meal, and later in the week it was meat pies from the freezer. But I had to stay quite late on Monday. So we swapped in the meat pies, moved the chicken to Tuesday, and everything else moves along one day. (And the chicken carcass went into the freezer for stock, and the fat went into the freezer for potstickers or potatoes.)
Right now my problem is potatoes. The price for them loose is silly high, but in bags I have trouble using them up fast enough. I think we're halfway through and they're already sprouting.