Donae Cannon
- Aug 29, 2021
- 17 min read

E3. Eating and ADHD

Today we're going to tackle a complicated subject, but a really important one: how ADHD impacts our relationship with food and eating. Now, this ends up being a topic that comes up all of the time. It comes up in the ADHD forums that I'm a part of, it comes up with my clients, and it's come up for me personally. This is something that people don't really seem to be talking about, but it's absolutely an issue for people with ADHD. Oftentimes, people with ADHD struggle with their relationship with food.

ADHD increases the risk of disordered eating...signficantly

There's a Harvard study that indicated that people with ADHD were four times more likely than the non ADHD group to have an eating disorder. There was another study that looked at a group of women and 11% of the women who were diagnosed with ADHD, had a diagnosis of bulimia (compared to only 1% of the group that did not). There's some information out there, measurable studies, that's showing us this link.

But even without that, when you speak to a large enough group of people with ADHD, this is clearly a common theme. What is it about the ADHD brain that might make us more vulnerable to having a less peaceful relationship with food? I think that gets to the heart of it and includes people that may not think of themselves as included in an eating disorder group. I think all of us want to have ease and peace with how we take care of ourselves and that definitely includes food. That comes up daily for most of us.

What ADHD challenges impact our relationship with food?

I have a few thoughts. I'm not citing studies in the rest of this talk, so the information that I'm going to present is more information that I've seen working with clients, in my own life, and knowing what I know about the ADHD brain. I don't know as much as I would like to know and hopefully I'm just going to keep learning more about this. But this that I'm bringing today- this is what I've gathered so far.

I've kind of classified these factors as body-based and thought based/cognitive factors (that affect our relationship with food). In this first part, I'm going to talk about our body sense. There are three different things impact the way our bodies are experiencing the world and our relationship with eating.

Emotional Regulation: The first one is emotional regulation. I've spoken about this before, but I can't speak about this enough. This is a huge issue for people with ADHD. What is emotional regulation? It's our ability to experience our emotions without being overwhelmed by them. It's being able to process emotions, respond to emotions, tolerate emotions, without getting to the place where it's just too much to function. And I know for me, this has always been a huge factor of how ADHD shows up in my life.

My sister (who has always been very generous, sweet person) once described me as someone who "burned bright". I think was her sweet way of saying I was really intense. And the thing about emotional regulation is that it's not just I have really huge emotions in terms of what we might classify as a negative emotion like sadness or anger, even joy or excitement can just be overwhelming for someone with ADHD that's dealing with emotional regulation. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder, this is showing up in childhood. Kids don't tend to have an arsenal of tools to draw from to help them regulate. We get more of this, have more access to this as we get older .

One self regulation tool that is out out there for all of us, especially when you're young and you don't have access to a lot, is often food. Food can be a huge regulator. It's comforting and it also gives us a lot of sensory input. Later on, I'm gonna be talking about sensory information and how our bodies deal with sensory information, which is also often impacted with ADHD.

The whole process of eating can be calming, this is this is some rudimentary stuff. This goes back to infancy and it's doesn't make us abnormal to find comfort in that, but obviously, if that is the only tool or the main tool for self regulation for somebody who's often dysregulated, then that makes relationship with food kind of complicated. It's probably not meant to be a primary tool for regukation. So (the ADHD/ emotional eating link) makes total sense to me. Number one, emotional regulation.

Interoception/ body attunement: Another factor for those of us with ADHD is interoception and body attunement. Interoception is impacted with ADHD, what is that? It's your body's registration and interpretation of internal states. Things like your heart rate, temperature, or hunger/satiety. This feedback isn't always reliable for people with ADHD, so this is an area that can be impacted.Body attunement is something a little bit different, similar but different.

Body attunement involves interoception. It involves these signals from our body, but it's also how (and if) Mwe're paying attention or tuning in to those signals. For a lot of people with ADHD, these signals are already a little bit faulty or unreliable. Am I paying attention to the signals that my body is giving me? There are a few factors with ADHD brains that can put this in jeopardy. Impulsivity, is one do we get this information and tune into it? Or do we follow the pull elsewhere?

Are we actually paying attention to these signals, which might sound strange to someone who doesn't have a brain like this. If you're somebody with ADHD, and you're hyper focused and your attention is super focused on something it's not uncommon forus to forget to use the restroom, forget to drink, forget to eat, and then suddenly our body signal gets so extreme,that we can't possibly ignore them.

We feel sick, we might and we may have really low energy. Whether we missed the information in the first place beause of poor interoception, or whether we didn't tune into our bodies, the results are the same. We didn't respond to our body's signals and there are some consequences from that.

That has a pretty big impact on how we relate to food and how we relate to hunger.I'm a big believer in intuitive eating, but this is an extra layer for people with ADHD who are trying to use this way of eating. We have to adpat inuitive eating for our brains and that's a whole process that I do with some of my clients. We're not necessarily starting at the same starting place as a lot of people who are practicing intuitive eating. We need some little tweaks for the things that are true with our brains.

Sensory Processing: Number three (number one was emotional regulation number two is the interoception/body attunement combo) is sensory processing. For those of you who don't know, I have an occupational therapy background. I have a lot of background in how different bodies deal with sensory information, (working with) people that can be extremely sensitive and over reactive to sensory information and those who can be under reactive and under registering sensory information. Both of these things impact our relationship with food.

Obviously, if you are super defensive and sensory information is coming into your body like an assault, then that's going to limit what you take in for food and what you're able to tolerate. What does that look like? Well, it depends. You know, for a lot of people, it means there are not a lot of textures and tastes and smells that they tolerate well, and so that impacts their peace with food.What it looks like specifically, in terms of what they're consuming depends, but it definitely complicates their relationship with food.

Then you have those who are unresponsive. When you're unresponsive to sensory information, this complicates your relationship with eating in a different way. Of course, you satisfy physical hunger when you eat, but you also have sensory input that you're receiving and processing that's a part of satisfaction with food like chewing, textures, swallowing and the feeling of fullness.

There's this idea that ( I think the dietitians out there and people who are pros in this subject could talk about this a lot more in depth than than I can), there's a "sensory specific satiety", a sensory specific satisfaction with eating. So you get less satisfaction, a declining sense of satisfaction, the more you consume a certain type of food. If you're not getting all of that sensory information, it makes sense that you wouldn't really reach that point of satisfaction from that standpoint, as early or even be tuned into it.

We don't just eat with the sense of taste; you see, hear, smell, and touch food. Things that impact how that's experienced in our body complicates our relationship with food. What that looks like is as varied as people are varied, but I do think it's something to consider when you're looking at ADHDand peace/ease with food.

What can we do to have more ease with food? I've just talked about three different areas of our body experience that impact our relationship with food. If you have ADHD and you know, that this is true for you, you'r probably like, "Well, so what? How am I supposed to change or help help myself with this?" and there are several different techniques (that help).

I'm not going to go into everything because I don't have room in this podcast, but I am going to mention one that some of us with ADHD really kind of shy away from, which is mindfulness practices. I do feel like there's a collective cringe because if you have ADHD, you (probably like me) might have this impression that you're not good at mindfulness. I've always said, that I might be the least "in the moment" person that I know. Truly, I'm almost always operating three, four or five steps ahead.

The thought of just sitting there on a meditation cushion and being focused in the moment always just sounded like pure torture to me. I knew I'd be bad at it, right? It was not natural for me. A lot of the things that I do for myself and with my clients it's mindfulness adjusted for our brains.

You do not need to be still to be mindful. You do not need to be technically meditating to be focusing on the moment and focusing on your body. I don't really have time today, but I will probably do an episode that's just about mindfulness and kind of ADHD.

One of the things that can be helpful in connecting us with our bodies is this whole idea of mindfulness practices that's adapted for our brains, we can actually learn to do this, I promise. If I can do this, you can definitely do it. and we can do it in a way that fits us. We can experience more connection (with our bodies).

This might still be an area that's impacted for you and is not typical, maybe it doesn't look like a typical brain and that's okay. We can improve, we can get more connection and more feedback about what's going on in our body and learn how to tolerate and be aware of some of this. So I'm going to move away now from these body experiences. I'm going to go to number four.

Sleep deprivation can impact our hunger and fullness.Number four reason that ADHD brains experience a complicated relationship with food is sleep. Guys, nobody wants to hear this. I think a lot of us deal with impacted sleep related to ADHD. We have difficulties going to sleep, we have difficulties falling asleep, and a lot of times our sleep cycles are really different than the norm. So sleep is a tricky area for us. I'm not going to go into all of that.

But,what I will say is sleep deprivation, which a lot of us deal with, impacts your relationship with food. There's the obvious fact that if you'e tired/ exhausted, you don't have the kind of bandwidth for making decisions that are intentional that you would have if you were well rested. So there's that.

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But there's also hormonal differences that happen when we are sleep deprived. There are a few hormones that regulate your satisfaction and your hunger, and those go awry. When you're not sleeping well your body produces more ghrelin, (I had to look that up, because there's actually an H between the G and the ER for some reason, but it's ghrelin). It produces more of that hormone, which actually increases your appetite.

Your body produces less leptin, which is a hormone that suppresses your appetite when you've had enough to eat. Your body also produces more cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and that also increases your appetite. This is no good. This is no good for us when we're trying yo get in sync with what our body actually needs. If we always have disrupted sleep, this kind of hijacks our hunger and satisfaction feelings. So what's the answer? Well, we control what we can control. We can't necessarily control all the ways ADHD impacts our sleep, but we can prioritize sleep. We can decide that it's important and do what's within our control.

One of the things that I'm going to mention today (I'm also going to give a complete disclaimer to say this is one of the hardest things for me that I'm frequently having to return to) is signing off from screens. If you can do it an hour, 45 minutes before you're trying to gear down, it's is a great idea for a couple reasons.

1) It helps us shift into a more passive gear than this really high stimulation of whatever we're doing on a phone computer, before bed. 2)The other factor is that the blue light that we're getting disrupts melatonin production and this impacts our sleep cycles. I think blue light glasses can also help with that.For me, I've found that there's a difference in the kind of sleep that I'm going to get if I'm totally off devices for an hour or so before bed versus no. Like I said, this is super hard for me to do probably one of the hardest things out of all of the sleep stuff for me to do.

Another thing that people have success with is certain supplements that help with sleep. For me, magnesium is really important,and a lot of us are deficient in magnesium and I've always found helpful to supplement for sleep. Some people take melatonin because that can support your sleep cycles. Obviously, if you're taking things like supplements, I'm not the person to give you advice and you need to work with a doctor/professional because only a professional working with you knows what else is going on with your body, what medicines you're taking, and how those all interact together.