Intuitive Eating for ADHD
In this blog post I start off by talking about what interoceptive awareness in intuitive eating is and how this impacts a person with ADHD’s ability to recognize and respond to their hunger signals.
I then go into how low blood sugar levels from not eating enough makes ADHD symptoms a lot harder to manage, and why this is a really common problem for people with ADHD.
Then I talk about how we can use interoceptive awareness to tune into and respond to our body’s hunger signals in ways that support our ADHD and why this is such a beneficial strategy for people with ADHD.
What is Intuitive Eating?
Intuitive eating is a framework originally developed by two dieticians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, in the 90s as a proactive response to all the harmful messaging that makes up diet culture.
Intuitive eating has always actively rejected diet culture, but has also adapted in significant and transformative ways since its creation.
Today, intuitive eating is used by millions of people as a non-diet guide for how to eat in a way that supports the body and all of its needs.
Interoceptive Awareness in Intuitive Eating and ADHD
Intuitive Eating is made up of 10 different principles, but in this post I’m going to focus on the concept of ‘interoceptive awareness’, aka what the ‘intuitive’ part of intuitive eating refers to.
Interoceptive awareness is the ability to perceive and understand signals from within one’s own body, such as heartbeat, breathing, emotional states, needing to go to the bathroom, hunger and fullness.
The practice of intuitive eating provides tools for improving interoceptive awareness, as well as tools for responding to these signals from the body.
Due to differences in brain functioning and processing, people with ADHD generally have lower interoceptive awareness than neurotypical individuals(1).
This could be because ADHD is associated with difficulty in attention, executive function and self-regulation, which can all affect the ability to perceive and interpret internal signals from the body accurately (or at all).
ADHD and Hunger Signals
One struggle of having ADHD and eating in general is recognizing when we are hungry and responding by eating something.
Since we have more difficulty interpreting the signals our body sends us about what it needs, people with ADHD often go several hours without eating because we simply aren’t aware of the reality that we’re hungry and our body needs food in order to continue to function.
This pattern is often made worse in people with ADHD because stimulant medications can act as appetite suppressants, making it even more difficult to recognize hunger. Our ability to (hyper) focus on the things we are interested in can also keep us from being present and aware of when we experience hunger signals.
Hunger and Blood Sugar
When the brain has energy (both neurodivergent and neurotypical brains), which it gets directly from food, it has a much easier time staying on task and sustaining a steadier mood. When we go for more than 4 hours without eating, we begin to run out of energy that fuels our brain and our blood sugar levels drop in response to this.
Lower blood sugar levels means that there’s less fuel circulating around our body to feed all our cells, including our brain cells.
Glucose from carbohydrates directly restores our blood sugar levels, and amino acids from protein, healthy fats and vitamins and minerals from foods all help distribute this glucose to our body and brain.
Blood Sugar Levels and ADHD
When our blood sugar levels drop and are not restored quickly enough, our brain doesn’t have the energy it needs and the quality of our cognition can end up suffering, along with our executive function - aka our ability to focus, initiate and accomplish tasks, manage time and regulate our behaviour.
Low blood sugar levels from going too long without eating can also increase the severity of other ADHD symptoms and comorbidities like irritability, anxiety, brain fog and impulsivity.
This is ultimately because the brain requires a significant amount of energy to keep us alive. Processes like keeping our heart beating, our lungs breathing, organs digesting, metabolising and detoxing all require steady and constant levels of glucose, so part of the brain works with the liver to ensure our vital organs are able to do their jobs 24/7.
When we go multiple hours without eating, our brain recognizes that we might not have enough energy to fuel our vital organs like the heart, lungs, liver and brain itself.
In response to this potential threat, energy is directed away from our executive functions and saved for the body processes that are more directly involved in keeping us alive - making our ADHD symptoms much harder to manage.
Recognizing Hunger through Interoceptive Awareness
Lower interoceptive awareness and so many other factors of ADHD can make recognizing hunger signals more difficult, but improving our ability to recognize how hunger signals present in our body through improving our interoceptive awareness is a key part of intuitive eating that can be game changing for anyone with ADHD.
Hunger Signals may be experienced as:
Mild gurgling or gnawing in the stomach
Growling noises
Dizzy, lightheadedness
Difficulty concentrating, brain fog
Uncomfortable stomach pain
Irritability, anger
Headaches
Nausea
Feeling faint
Thinking about food
Honouring Hunger
The Intuitive Eating framework includes 9 different principles that offer guidance for how to eat in ways that support our long-term health and quality of life.
Honouring hunger is one of these principles - which states the importance of giving yourself permission to eat what you like, when you like/need so your food choices leave you feeling satisfied, satiated and give your body and brain the nutrients they need to function.
As a practice, developing this skill of honouring your hunger with foods you like and make you feel good takes time, but once cultivated it can provide sustainable, lifelong healthy eating habits that support our bodies and our ADHD brains.
More Benefits of Improved Interoceptive Awareness for ADHD
Techniques that improve our interoceptive awareness also help create more mindfulness in our lives.
As a self-regulation disorder, adults with ADHD can significantly benefit from more practices that provide self-awareness and self-regulation training, aka techniques that improve mindfulness (2).
The benefits of being able to tune into our body’s needs in the present moment through using our interoceptive awareness can be a key part of our intuitive eating strategy for nourishing ourselves as well as how we manage our ADHD and take care of ourselves.
Improving our interoceptive awareness gives us direct insight into what we are experiencing in the moment and self-regulating behaviours for how to best support our needs in relation to our ADHD.
Work with Me
In my 1:1 three month program, I work with clients to help them improve their nutrition and cultivate their ability to eat intuitively in ways that support ADHD.
If you’re interested in learning more about working with me, a neurodivergent certified nutritionist and intuitive eating counsellor to better support yourself and manage your ADHD, I’d love to connect with you!
Book a free 20 minute intro call where we can talk more about what working together could look like.
Thanks for reading! :) Let me know what resonates or what you are curious to learn more about in the comments.
