A casual community for people with ADHD
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my meds stop me from feeling hubger, its not healthy, so i have to force myself to eat my daily nutritional intake. its mostly the protein content thats hard due to the dense nature of it and how long if takes to digest.
go for walks, listen to music, have healthy snacks only. fruit, vegetables, nuts, dried chickpeas with seasoning for crunch. works for me.
I only have to have willpower at the grocery store. That's it. I'm too lazy to go get snacks if they aren't in the house.
What worked for me: Don't have too much calorie dense and convenient food around. Track what I eat. Assume I ate 20% more calories withiut noticing. Get exercise doing interesting things like long walks in nature because it keeps me from snacking because I'm bored.
Worked for a few years, then of course I thought it wasn't necessary anymore and started adding weight back. Starting up again, and really the biggest weak point for me is still the impulsive snacking when I don't keep myself occupied.
Eliminating snacks was the biggest thing for me.
Nowadays on weekends I've also stopped eating breakfast and lunch unless I'm actually doing stuff that day. If I'm just sitting around not doing anything I don't need the energy, I can fast.
One particular thing that helped me with 'eliminating' snacks:
Replace things like potato chips... with trail mix.
You can usually get a fairly decent sized bag, you can probably pick from a few different mixes of varying kinds of nuts, dried fruit, m&ms or some tiny treat mixed in.
Of course, if you have nut allergies... sorry you're SoL for this one, but if not:
Its a crunchy, salty snack, and you can get a whole lot more full feeling, satiated... from a lot less of a portion of a bag... its just literally more dense, and has protein and other good stuff that isn't in chips or cheetos or what not, at all.
I will get a 40z mix bag and either have a handful or two or three, and an apple, as a small snack... or maybe along with some other meal I'd normally have chips with.
And that 40z bag tends to last me roughly 3 weeks.
Way, way, way more cost effective than the cost of eating chips in that way... chips are just stupidly expensive now, and are quite unhealthy to eat regularly.
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But yeah, if you can turn a 'snack' from basically junk food or candy or mini cakes of some kind... into something like trail mix and fresh fruit?
Way healthier for you, and probably works out to costing about as much or potentially less, especially if you can acclimate your 'sugar' desire back to some kind of fruit that is not seasonal, not stupid expensive.
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Also, make a big ass salad with some kind of meat, maybe some shredded cheese (buy a block and a cheese grater, pre sliced or shredded cheese is way more expensive per volume)... but no high calorie dressing... into a normal just 'whole meal'.
(This is also a good idea in tandem with eating more nuts: you're gonna want more fiber or you're gonna be shitting constipated bricks if you're older than about 30, rofl)
Vinegrettes tend to be lower calorie, but you have to do some investigation, a lot of them are also as bad as ranch or blue cheese or whatnot.
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Beyond that: Get a rice cooker and / or crockpot, and either keep some kind of stew always going, or learn how to cook rice properly, and make soups/stews with veggies, seasoning, beans or meat ... a whole category of things you know how to cook well.
Personally, properly making rice still eludes me, but I am learning... crockpot with just some chopped up veggies, potatoes, and either meat or beans is... easier for my culinarily disinclined white ass, lol.
You can also get various broths and soup stocks to basically turn making decent stews into easy mode, they're fairly cheap by volume, and you often don't need as much as you might think you would.
Skipping meals might be my next approach. I ate when I was hungry as a kid and teen when not hungry and the transition to a job in a chair and scheduled meals seems to be the biggest contributor to consuming excessive calories.
Beat saber VR is great cardio. Ring fit has a nice variety of workouts too.
For me, hyper fixate on calorie counting and weight tracking plus going to the gym while listening to a book I can't get enough of.
From ~260 to 180 over nearly 3 years.
This is how I do it; my problem, however, tends to be the inverse where I forget to eat.
Oh oh I can tell you my secret to that! Inherit hypoglycemia from your family. The headache will prevent you from forgetting 😂
When I was in the best shape of my life, I was taking a karate class. We met every Tuesday and Thursday, and the only penalty for missing a class, was the razzing you'd get from the rest of the class. Nothing mean, just stuff like "someone must have been feeling lazy on Tuesday!"
That low pressure accountability made me go every time. If it was any more or less strict, I'd probably would have just ended up never going.
So, how do you recreate that? Find a friend or two with similar goals and set a plan. It'll be harder to "just skip this one" if you know someone's expecting you.
One day, try going the whole day on just water. Pick your day carefully so you are free to do nothing if you choose.
Whenever you get hungry, pause, drink a glass of water, and check in with yourself. Odds are you aren't that physically hungry, but your mind is going ape shit trying to get you to eat.
You don't have to go crazy here, if you start not feeling well, then eat.
Try that again a few times at your leisure, but aim to actually go a full day at some point.
The point of that exercise isn't to lose weight per se, it's to gain a better understanding of how much of your eating habits are mental/psychological and also to show yourself that you have the ability to go a full day without food, so when a random Tuesday rolls around and you're slightly peckish, you can grab a banana and get past it rather than going bananas at a Chinese buffet and downloading five thousand empty calories into your gut.
That is an imperfect approach, but it helps you get to know yourself and provide context for how "hungry" you are when it's two hours past breakfast and two hours until lunch.
Obviously don't do this if you have any kind of medical condition that requires you to eat. I am not a doctor.
I don't notice body signals when I hyperfocus, so if I eat a good breakfast on my days off, and don't keep s ack food around, I might go all the way to bedtime without another meal. I think that's called intermittent fasting?
But fr, the main thing that helped me was accountability. I used one of those paid apps that turn tracking and nutrition into a group activity and partially gamify it. I got lucky with a good coach and a good group but it did help. Just knowing that someone was looking over my shoulder to make sure I did the food logging made it easier to remember to do. And the "numbers go bigger" part of my brain turned out to like "numbers go smaller", so the gamification helped too.
Take your meds regularly. One of the side effects is losing your appetite.
first: don't stress it, sustainable weight loss is slow everything else will end up with you regaining the weight when you stop with whatever hyped up diet or hardcore sports program you tried.
find an activity, that burns calories that you enjoy doing, and do it because it's fun. try new things when something is not fun.
identify a high calorie source that you can somewhat easily eliminate, for many people that's sugary drinks (including fruit juice).
get yourself to step on a scale every morning. weight is on a downwards trend week to week? you are on the right track. keep doing what you are doing.
weight goes up sometimes? don't worry that happens we are running a marathon here. if it keeps increasing you'll either can do more activities that burn calories or find another calorie source you can cut back on.
It might also help, to either eat slower, because "being not hungry" has a delay or drink a glass of water before every meal, so you'll feel full faster.
and always remember, this is not a sprint, sometimes you'll gain weight, that does not mean you failed, you don't start back at zero.
A solid routine can help. For years now I've started my day with oatmeal. Cup of oats, cup of frozen blueberries. It's become a morning ritual. Oats are good for fiber which help you feel full.
Stock high fiber items (same reason as above).
Rethink what "feeling hungry" means. Your level of hunger shouldn't indicate how much food you eat. It should indicate how soon you eat.
Before eating, chug water until you feel physically full. This will force you to eat slower and trigger your sated feeling quicker. If you just sit down to a meal and start inhaling food, your body can take a few minutes to really register you're eating. This is why people sometimes "hit a wall" when gorging themselves. They've blown past where their body should have said "you're full" before their body can send those signals to your brain. Eating slower and having a "full" stomach help to make sure you feel sated at the right time.
Get out of the habit of eating until you are really full. Have things to pull your attention after an appropriate amount of food. Start down that Google rabbit hole that just popped into your mind so you think about that rather than eating more. This can also help with eating slower if you're in a situation where using your phone while eating is acceptable.
Make small incremental changes. People that suddenly upend their entire eating habits for the new fad diet change too much too quickly. It can be hard to stay the course.
Understand this is a long road. You won't shed pounds overnight. That being said, don't get down on yourself for messing up. It is a full lifestyle change. The small things over time start to add up. If you don't stick to all of these religiously, that's OK. Just make a concerted effort to do them more frequently than you did last week or last month.
You can't out-exercise a bad diet. Unless you are doing olympic level training that requires more than normal calories, a bad diet will destroy your chances. It's much easier to have a quick extra snack or heavier dessert adding hundreds, if not, thousands of calories in a single day. Running 5 miles might burn 500 calories. A couple candy bars will be more than that.
That being said, finding the right exercise can drastically improve your chances. I took up Jiu-jitsu and muay Thai. Doing that 2-4 nights a week is great for now than just weight loss.
Key points: make small changes you can stick to, focus on "better than yesterday" even if it's not perfect, reshape how you think about certain activities (when to eat, how much to eat, what to eat), develop a routine that you don't need to think about.
Maybe martial arts or cross-fit? Afaik, martial arts aren't as repetitive as usual exercises, and cross-fit is pretty mixed up.
Also, though harder given ADHD itself, as you identified problematic points of your behavior, maybe focus also on changing them?
CrossFit is something that tickles my dopamine and also because it has given me enough general fitness I can take a break and do another activity without feeling like a moron. Which is one reason I didn’t get into activities when I was younger.
I’ve heard that martial arts are also sufficiently dopamine producing, which is good for us.
Find an exercise you like, and make sure to keep doing it until it's a habit (8 weeks is usually enough for me). It raises your baseline metabolic rate, so even if you slip a bit, you can usually recover. Personally, that's hiking or exercising while reading an audiobook which makes the time fly.
The other thing is to religiously count calories. Have an app on your phone, enter the calories every time something comes close to your mouth. Eventually, you'll reach to eat some snack, realize you don't know the calories, get up to figure it out from the container, and often forget about the snack while you're up and doing something.
I've been habitually excercizing for over a year, and then one day I just stopped going. And I'm not even diagnosed for ADHD, just a regular guy with some of the traits. So I don't think that first tip is going to work.
As always, everyone's experience varies, but having ADHD I've always found the best way to get yourself to do something long term is to make it a super ingrained habit. I usually say 8 weeks is a good minimum to get it ingrained, and while I've had breaks, I generally find it much easier to get back to the swing of the habit if I have to take a break from it (or forget one of my exercise days).
As others said, the best key to your diet is decision-making in the store, not in the home.
As for exercise, try to find something you actually like doing. These can sometimes be expensive :/. Cycling, rock climbing, swimming, hiking, whatever you enjoy so it doesn't feel like a chore.