The things that get in the way for me are: getting instantly bored with any weight loss strategy, an inability to do things if I’m told I have to, forgetting that I need to lose weight, needing the sensory input of food, inability to recognise when I’m full, hyper-focusing on weight loss for a month and losing a ton of weight and then putting it all back on the next month because I celebrated the weight loss with cake…
I just wonder if there are any ADHD behaviour hacks where I could use my neurospicyness to actually help me lose weight consistently.
For me it’s about planning. If I know what’s for dinner I can handle it even if I’m not in the mood for whatever I’ve got planned for dinner. If I’m hungry and then start looking for food I’m far more likely to fail.
Use the focus sessions to meal prep and work on portion control. That’s all i got. I’m a wreck as far as a routine or schedule goes lol
I’m about to try Nutrisystem. Here’s hoping.
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.
This may not be an option for you, but for me it’s mildly easier if I make a pickup order. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
Going to (generally) one meal a day had me drop weight like crazy. And you can eat pretty much whatever you want when you’re only eating once per day. You get used to fasting fast especially if you’re medicated for ADHD.
Yeah - I can’t really meal prep in the traditional sense. But I have found that if I can bulk cook some meats and freeze them, and then have a few ~15 minute meals that I can portion, combine and cook the ingredients- that it works for me.
Beat saber VR is great cardio. Ring fit has a nice variety of workouts too.
beat saber is absolutely amazing, i wish my VR didn’t break. i can stick to normal exercise for maybe a week, beat saber filled my brain with so much dopamine each time i played it regularly for months, Rum & Bass in 360 mode my beloved
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 😂
Have a calorie tracking app and track everything. You will start to learn how somethings are more calorie dense than others. Don’t have junk food. You will want to snack. Have veggies like carrots or fresh fruit on hand. Drink water first. So many times I “feel” hungry but I am actually thirsty. Load up on broccoli. If you over eat, then have lots of broccoli. It’s filling and not calorie dense. When possible plan your meals ahead of time. It’s brutally hard to make the better diet choice when your hungry. It’s easier to just follow through with a decision you already made.
As a fellow ADHD person, this is a really hard one to maintain, but the really important thing here is just being conscious of the difference in calories between different food groups, then learning for each ~100 calories you eat, you have to walk a mile just to burn it off.
Yeah, you can’t outrun your fork.
I have definitely used my difficulty starting tasks to help myself lose weight. I find its way easier to just be hungry than to make food. Most of the time.
I still have to make sure I’m not eating snacks without thinking about it. A good option for me has been keeping easy, small, healthy foods, that can get me through hunger pang. My favorite is a pot of Greek yogurt. They’re like 80¢ at Aldi where I live. Fresh fruit works great as well! And for late night treats, I eat frozen fruit. It fills the ice cream niche, without being packed with calories and extra sugar
Fruit all the way. Two big ass kiwis are like 100 calories. I’m in love with them and blueberries (and every berry). Super good for you nutritionally as well.
Every gram of fiber in a food allows you to essentially “erase” a gram of sugar so fruits with fiber (not bananas or many melons) are essentially free foods calorically speaking and they do have plenty of nutrients on top of it
My wife tried to tell me the same thing but with fiber and carbohydrates in general. She still believes it, it sounds like nonsense to me. Do you have a source?
fibre reduces the absorption of nutrition in the gut, but it doesn’t erase bad nutrition.
This is very easy to test at home, get a glucose meter and eat your favorite fibre and sugar together and see what your blood sugar will do… it will still spike.
I can’t back up the GP’s “1 gram 1 gram” claim, but the effects of dietary fibre on regulating blood sugar and other benefits for health are well studied.
If you have very ripe bananas, you can freeze them and then they make a nice ice cream substitute blended.
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.
It’s easy if you can hyperfocus on something all day and neglect eating.
Wait can other ADHDudes just turn it on like a faucet? For me it’s like an hourly lottery.
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’ll back this up. That’s what started my weight loss journey. I felt like crap after having eaten way too much on Christmas. I stumbled upon a conduit called Eat Stop Eat, which is basically a 24 hour water fast. It’s a lot easier to get into than a longer fast, since if you’ve just eaten lunch, you only have to wait until lunch the next day.
take all this with a grain of salt
if you don’t need to lose weight immediately for health reasons, focus less on weight loss and more on making healthy habits feel natural
regarding eating, i’d say the following are essential:
- avoid getting hungry
- food should be as tasty as possible. you have to actually like what you’re eating
- no forbidden food. do not try to take anything away from your diet
- absolutely NO strict rules in general. they’re bad enough for neurotypicals, so they’re fatal to us
- introduce healthy food you like. if you can, start with fruits, lots of fruits. fruits are the easiest kind of tasty healthy food
- try to eat on time as much as possible. kind of a corollary of “avoid getting hungry”
- have go-to foods you can eat at each meal/whenever you get hungry without thinking. one of mine is strawberry smoothie
- don’t eat anything you don’t like. it doesn’t matter how healthy it is, if you hate it, it’s bad for you. there’s plenty of healthy food out there
- give a chance to foods you don’t like too much once in a while. maybe you’ll end up liking them eventually, maybe not. just try and you’ll find out
- above all else, make any of these changes incrementally. the point is building solid habits, not having a solid diet from the get go
any of these follow from: eating is one of the most important things in our life; never make yourself feel bad while trying to get healthy.
good luck
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.
Do you mind sharing the app you used?
I used Noom, got a pretty good trial price and then extended it.
Thanks. Noom didn’t work for me 🫤
Vyvanse is an ADHD drug, but also is prescribed and approved as a weight loss drug, too. I lost a bunch of weight on it.
Just make sure you drink lots of water. It also suppresses your thirst response in your brain, so you can get dehydrated easily.
I eat less during the day, but will stuff my face in the evening when it has worn off.
Yeah I’ve had late night cravings with it. Usually mine wears off around bed time, though, so I just go to sleep. Lol
