How Mainstream Diets Are Keeping ADHD Women Overweight.

Do you feel like all the effort you’ve put into losing weight in your life has been a complete waste because you always end up back at square one?

The problem with the most well known ways of losing weight – like Slimming World & Weight Watchers is they require a huge amount of executive function. Not exactly a strength of those of us living with ADHD. It’s no wonder you feel like you have no control & are left wondering how something as seemingly simple as eating less and exercising has eluded you.

In today’s blog post I’m breaking down why losing weight when you have ADHD is harder and how mainstream diets are actually keeping you overweight.

Problem 1: Grocery shopping, cooking & meal prep.

Diet & meal plans often require you to cook recipes from scratch every night, plan out your snacks and meals &/or count points or calories. This can feel overwhelming when you have ADHD, making it far more likely you will “fall off the wagon” by eating “off plan” or falling back on a takeaway and throwing the towel in completely.

Want to know the truth? Making home cooked meals every night after you come home from work or giving your Sunday up to meal prep is overwhelming for people without ADHD let alone those with it.

Not to mention these diets require you to change your whole way of eating overnight, your taste buds, your routines & habits all overnight. Something that is overwhelming to start let alone keep up long term. It’s one reason why 90% of those who start a diet fail.

A more helpful & ADHD friendly way to change your diet is by making small improvements over time. This may seem a slow way of doing it BUT when you get your results, you do get to keep them & it’s much more fun this way. And the more fun it is the more likely you are to stick with it.

Problem 2: Impulse eating and dopamine seeking.

Having ADHD can mean you are more impulsive. So strict rules and rigid diet plans leave no room for real life. Say you are invited out to dinner with friends, you really want to go, but your meal plan says it’s stir fry night.

Does that mean you can’t go?

By sticking to rigid plans you are fighting against your brain and not allowing yourself to have fun. Who is really going to stick to months on end of never being able to go out and enjoy yourself, constantly obsessing about calories and points and overthinking everything you put in your mouth. 

If you are going to lose weight for good you need to ditch the inflexible diets and learn better eating habits. That way you can go out & enjoy dinner with your friends because you know which food options will serve you best & make you feel good without having to worry.

Give yourself the space to be spontaneous. Otherwise it will be a very long uphill battle to your goal.

Food has an emotional component that diet plans just do not take into consideration. Chocolate can actually boost your serotonin levels, which is why many women find themselves craving chocolate at that time of the month when serotonin levels are lower. Certain foods give a hit of dopamine that ADHD brains crave. Unfortunately they aren’t always healthy ones. Which is why people with ADHD have difficulty controlling food intake because they are lower in dopamine and their brain is always looking for the next hit.

This then leads to binge eating or overeating sugary and fatty foods even when you are not hungry. Leading you to feel out of control and frustrated with yourself.

By understanding this connection you can start to become aware of how you feel before you start eating chocolate/  sugar or other unhealthy foods and find other ways to boost your dopamine without food.

Problem 3: ADHD Hyperfocus (not lack of willpower)

When you have ADHD you may find you go from 0-100mph very fast! You go all in at the beginning, get super excited about your new health & wellness plan, diet or exercise programme. You start off strong cooking all your meals, meal prepping, ordering food prep containers from Amazon & spending a small fortune on new workout gear, only to find yourself losing interest a few weeks or months down the line & stopping all together as a new interest takes over.

This is known as ADHD hyperfocus. When you become so focused on something to the exclusion of everything else. There are times when this can be a strength & other times when it can be a pain in the backside (like when you know you should go to bed rather than keep binge watching that new Netflix series!) When it comes to ADHD hyperfocus and losing weight it creates what I call the “boom & bust cycle”. You start off great, lose weight, lose interest, stop altogether, gain the weight back & then start the cycle all over again.

Diet plans like Slimming World don’t take this into consideration. There is no one there to work with you 1:1 to hold you back or teach you to recognise when you are slipping into hyper focus and all or nothing thinking. 

By working with a health coach then you can learn to identify these behaviours and find ways to become consistent with your weight loss and most importantly keep it off.

Problem 4: Forgetting to eat & binge eating.

Ever find you are so focused on a task that you forget to eat? Or you find yourself procrastinating on eating lunch or dinner?

This comes up a lot for people with ADHD. The problem is when you go for too long between meals your blood sugar levels drop, you then find you are starving, eat anything you can get your hands on (usually unhealthy/ sugary foods because when has anyone ever binge eaten a salad!) & then feel guilty. 

Then because your blood sugar has just had a huge spike it then crashes and you end up feeling hungry again a few hours later, craving caffeine or sugar. This is what I call the blood sugar rollercoaster & is why so many people struggle to quit sugar.

Even worse, unbalanced blood sugar can make ADHD symptoms worse in some people.

By being aware of how forgetting to eat & procrastinating on eating a meal has an effect on you, making you feel worse, then you can start to break the cycle. Because the majority of people don’t have ADHD these types of issues are never addressed in mainstream diets.

Overall, the problem with diets is they don’t take into account the unique struggles people with  ADHD face. And unfortunately women with ADHD are constantly being told they just “lack willpower” or need techniques to “increase your willpower”

You do not need to increase your willpower. I will scream if I hear one more marketing message that says this because they are trying to capitalise on the increased awareness of ADHD without understanding a damn thing about it!

What you need instead are methods that will accept that your brain works in a unique way & needs an approach to losing weight that accommodates to that.

Hopefully this has given you a better understanding on how ADHD impacts your weight and how you lose it.

Any questions feel free to email [email protected] or if you would like to know more about Health Coaching & how it can help you lose weight with ADHD then check out my blog post “Can a Health Coach Really Help You Lose Weight”