Any tips on loosing weight when you've got ADHD?

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

CrossFit is something that tickles my dopamine and also because it has given me enough general fitness I can take a break and do another activity without feeling like a moron. Which is one reason I didn’t get into activities when I was younger.

I’ve heard that martial arts are also sufficiently dopamine producing, which is good for us.

[email protected]

As others said, the best key to your diet is decision-making in the store, not in the home.

As for exercise, try to find something you actually like doing. These can sometimes be expensive :/. Cycling, rock climbing, swimming, hiking, whatever you enjoy so it doesn't feel like a chore.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

Take your meds regularly. One of the side effects is losing your appetite.

[email protected]

Oh oh I can tell you my secret to that! Inherit hypoglycemia from your family. The headache will prevent you from forgetting

[email protected]

As always, everyone's experience varies, but having ADHD I've always found the best way to get yourself to do something long term is to make it a super ingrained habit. I usually say 8 weeks is a good minimum to get it ingrained, and while I've had breaks, I generally find it much easier to get back to the swing of the habit if I have to take a break from it (or forget one of my exercise days).

[email protected]

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

[email protected]

Beat saber VR is great cardio. Ring fit has a nice variety of workouts too.

[email protected]

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

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

my meds stop me from feeling hubger, its not healthy, so i have to force myself to eat my daily nutritional intake. its mostly the protein content thats hard due to the dense nature of it and how long if takes to digest.

go for walks, listen to music, have healthy snacks only. fruit, vegetables, nuts, dried chickpeas with seasoning for crunch. works for me.

[email protected]

My ADHD had me writing a cooking blog intro about how I discovered this but I'll spare you:

The catch-all answer is water. But for ADHDers with oral fixations (both of us, apparently), the real answer is powdered drink mixed.

You'll stop wanting a snack if your 0 calorie drink tastes good.

I didn't buy it for weight loss but my water bottle has electrolyte powder every day. I use half the recommended amount (don't wanna overdose) and it completely replaced food as my go-to when I'm not sure if I'm bored or hungry.

[email protected]

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

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

It's easy if you can hyperfocus on something all day and neglect eating.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

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

[email protected]

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?

agnos.is Forums

Any tips on loosing weight when you've got ADHD?