What's your chosen diet as someone with ADHD/Autism
I’ve tried a lot of diets, and I have a lot of trouble committing and maintaining structure. I eat out every day. I don’t exercise much. I’m having trouble with willpower fasting. Still I think the most “ADHD friendly” way of dieting is likely fasting. It requires little practical restructuring of ones life, just commitment and willpower. Do you all have anything better? Any advice?
I’m pescatarian, mostly vegetarian, and I love to cook but only have the focus to do it a few times a week. My preferred meal plan is to make a giant pot of something once a week, freeze a few servings, and eat the rest. Then I also eat other things I’ve frozen in the past or have on hand. My favored meals are simple things like an apple and peanut butter, tuna salad, oatmeal, rice with vegetables and scrambled eggs, that kind of stuff. I only eat out once a week and do intermittant fasting as well.
I drink a lot of Soylent, 3 bottles on a typical day. I will usually have a solid meal for dinner and a solid breakfast or snack. Before this I used to eat pretty terribly. When I got my first desk job I was eating half of a pizza every day for lunch. I just didn’t have the mental energy to commit to making myself good meals each day.
When I travel I always bring enough Soylent powder to give me at least breakfast and lunch each day. I actually enjoy trying new foods and I will eat pretty much anything that’s a vegetable or grain. But when I’m traveling I’m usually meeting new people or working or at a convention. I frequently don’t have the energy to research new restaurants around me.
This is good practice for anyone really. Using an app or notebook to become conscious of what you eat and some exercise are a fairly surefire way lose weight than just trying to find a food hack of some kind. The all X, or eat only Y, or do Z diets tend to all fail after a while when you start wanting to eat like normal food again. With calorie counting and exercise you can just eat normally while being conscious of your portions.
This of course comes with caveats like try to have a general balanced diet and eat healthy. Its not advisable to like at nothing but junk food and make your numbers. That said you can still eat desserts, and munch on chips, and eat pizza and stuff. Counting just helps keep you from over indulging.
Also as with any diets it’s a slow and steady process so it’s ok if you have a cheat day every week, or slip up every once in a while. You arent a failure and havent ruined all your progress just because you over indulge during a holiday or at a wedding. You just gotta be aware and get back on track as soon as you can.
Also also with any diets where you restrict your eating its good to try to keep a healthy outlook on weight and nutrition as in some cases being overly conscious of consumption can lead to potentially gaining an eating disorder along the way. Calorie counting goes both ways. You dont just limit your intake but you make sure you eat enough every day!
I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for about a year now. Eating only between 12.00 and 20.00.
It’s been working so far, but I really need to fight the urge to have an oversized lunch when noon comes around.
Together with trying to walk or cycle wherever I go, and a weekly gym visit (pilates mostly), I have been slowly losing weight. I thankfully was only several kg overweight to begin with, but it was getting worse.
I could still do with cutting down on snacks though, but that has been a challenge. I subconsciously reach for things around the house that I shouldn’t be eating.
You might benefit from one of my "graceful degradation" tactics. I order too much delivery food too, but I keep a stock of frozen vegetables and canned beans/tomato to boost it with. Most of them only need 3 mins in a microwave, which is less time than it takes for the delivery.
You would be surprised how much frozen spinach can be put on a pizza without changing the flavors. Peas and broccoli can go in almost anything with a decent sauce, especially curries. Those are my top 3 stocks, mostly because leafy greens tend to expire the fastest when fresh.
Also, for non-frozen stuff, a pound of potatoes takes 7mins in my microwave. And when I do cook something like lentils or rice (where i can put it on the stove, set a timer and walk away), I make a double batch and freeze the rest to bulk out and diversify other foods.
Tinned tomatoes or passata can be dumped in a bunch of things without much thought beyond "make it hot and less wet". Dried seaweed and shiitake mushrooms too for Asian foods.
I also lean on raw carrots and almonds for snacks.
I hope they can help, I know your problem well. It allowed me to go from a "oh God I have to cook an entire meal" mindset to a "oh I just have to microwave something and then dump it into a bowl when the meal arrives" mindset. When it's about the same amount of trouble as instant noodles but you can also fix your nutritional deficiency(s) at the same time, the task seems a lot more manageable.
It also eliminates discovering your ingredients have expired when you finally can make yourself really cook.
It’s not perfect but here’s what I’ve been doing lately. It’s my favorite method so far because, like you, I find cooking to be too much work most of the time.
From the store I’ll get:
protein: usually ground beef, ground turkey, or boneless chicken
premade sauce: not just spaghetti sauce but also teriyaki, sweet and sour, curry, pesto, whatever catches my eye
whole potatoes or sweet potatoes
frozen vegetables
cheese
rice or pasta if I’m running low
Once or twice a week I’ll throw the veggies in the oven to roast, bake a couple of potatoes (or sweet potatoes), and cook the meat with basic seasoning (salt, pepper, onion and garlic). When everything’s cooked it goes in separate containers in my fridge. If rice sounds good I’ll make a batch of it too. Just make sure you make enough for 3-4 meals.
When it’s time to eat, I just throw it all together with a sauce and heat it in the microwave. So maybe I’ll do protein + veggies + rice + teriyaki sauce. Or protein + veggies + cheese stuffed in a baked potato. Or protein + veggies over pasta with spaghetti sauce.
It does take a chunk of energy and executive function to cook the foods, but if you can get yourself to do it then for the next several days you can be eating in 5 minutes with minimal effort. Since my family insists on eating Every. Damn. Day. this makes it a little more tolerable.
I would like to be able to eat more veggies and unprocessed food, but in practice I eat what I'm able to get fixed quickly.
I've gotten good at finding frozen veg mixes that I can combine with nut butter or fresh cheese to make a sort of sauce by heating it in the microwave for a few minutes. But availability of these is very sporadic, and stores will frequently stop carrying them for no particular reason.
So if all I can manage for a given meal is a packet of ramen, that's what I'm gonna shovel into my mouth to keep me going another few hours.
Quit soda is a pretty basic easy one. Don’t drink anything except juices, water, and milk and make sure the juices are 0 sugar. You may get withdrawals depending on how often you regularly drink sugary drinks. Carbonated water works too, just make sure to read the label to see if it’s actually 0 sugar. It’ll take a lot of willpower in the first few weeks but after that it’s smooth sailing. I’m 6 weeks right now without soda and already dropped 10 pounds of weight. All I’ve had is water, carbonated water, and lemonade on occasion.
Calorie counting can also help depending on the availability. You don’t have to be meticulous. Just make sure you aren’t eating as much empty calories and that you don’t go over the recommended daily amount too much.
I mean for me it was bad at first but once I began memorizing calories of my favorite snacks it led to me eating less of them. Ymmv though. Sugary drinks is the number one imo. Even candy is sometimes better than a single can of soda.
Okay then I agree with what the other person said. Go healthier. Don’t overwhelm yourself though. You don’t need to suddenly go vegan. Just shop healthier. It also helps to eat out less simply because restaurants like to give big servings. It just starts with strawberry pop tarts instead of cookies and cream. That sort of thing.
Have noticed a lot of people get addicted to diet soda relative to soda generally. Maybe it is just the caffeine, but most sodas have a lot of that.
Could you try swapping out one soda a day for a fizzy water? Maybe one for a coffee or a tea as well?
Food is harder to acquire new habits with, especially if you have to travel. I think that noticing what textures & flavours you reach for can help to figure out what to have instead, and identifying the pattern of cravings can help suggest methods to get ahead of them.
Willpower tends not to work so great for anyone, and less so for those of us with ADHD, but discovering satisfying alternatives can be useful.
That said, am a bit all or nothing myself when it comes to changing habits, as if a stricter boundary requires less thinking?
I originally started with protein diet and casual gym goings. Gym forces you to eat more protein and use up a lot of excess calories. Also, you feel energised and mentally uplifted.
Once you’re few months into gym routine, you’ll read up more how to hit your macros, how to restructure constituents, how to manage appetite. For now, this all Will overwhelm you and you’ll have trouble sticking to any of it. I know I did.
Since you’re at the start I suggest simply start noticing healthier options. Do it intentionally for few weeks before even doing anything. When you put more effort into this, you’ll discover your own ways how to eat better without the need for fixed “diet”.
It’s almost impossible to consume unhealthy amounts of protein - you have to be supplementing protein pretty excessively or eating exclusively meat to get to the point that it’s damaging to you. Most Americans do not follow dietary recommendations or even hit the .8g/kg per day. From an ethical perspective, it can be good to reduce animal-based proteins, but the idea that Americans are eating too much protein is absurd and not based in fact. 12
Your links don’t say that excess protein in take doesn’t have an effect on people. Just that most people don’t get enough and getting enough is important. Also I literally linked my proof Which is baked my Harvard. This isn’t my opinion it’s fact that I’ve cited. If you want to call it absurd, email Harvard.
If you are curious on a proper source examining ideal protein intake, this link should give you plenty of reading.
Unfortunately there are a lot of incentives for various organizations and companies to put out literature in support of what makes them profit, not to mention many researchers who enter the field with a significant bias, conducting poorly controlled studies to provide evidence towards their biased opinion. Any summary articles on the internet, including ones from prestigious universities, should not be taken at face value when they do not cite their sources. Even when they do cite their sources, there’s endless conflicting evidence out there because there are so many biased studies conducted by companies attempting to push their product (dairy industry is a good example of this), endless poorly controlled studies, endless studies based in science twenty years old and not accounting for more a more modern view of human health/biology and endless studies with other problems. A thorough review of the cited literature is often necessary to parse whether the source is tainted.
I think you have to cook kinda kills it for a lot of people. The second I establish a cooking habit it is killed by travel. Also it’s a lot of work I don’t have time or mental energy for.
The thing is, everything I cook for myself taste like dog vomit. So I end up wasting more food than if I went out to a place and got exactly what I want, in a single portion.
It takes practice! The dog vomit will improve in flavor after each iteration! After a year or two you will develop habits and raw muscle memory as well, its hard.
Get good at doing one dish with one mode of prep and slowly enlarge your repertoir. Like start with potatoes, or rice and chicken. Then get good at salads. Its fine if you arent a chef immediatly, for real!
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