Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › What ADHD actually is
Eating and body image are part of this for more people than you would think. Forgetting meals all day and then eating without stopping in the evening is a very ordinary ADHD pattern rather than a separate failing.
The useful move is usually to eat by the clock rather than by hunger, since the signal arrives late or not at all when you are absorbed. Put one thing you like in the house that takes no preparation, for the evenings when nothing else is going to happen. If food, exercise or how you look has become something you think about most of the day, that is worth telling someone about rather than managing alone.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We create man in the finest state (Quran 95:4). That is said of the human being without conditions attached, which is worth holding onto when your own body has become something you argue with.
لَقَدۡ خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ فِيٓ أَحۡسَنِ تَقۡوِيمࣲ
We create man in the finest state
Qur’an 95:4read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis estimated the size of the association between ADHD and eating disorders, putting numbers to a link that had been suspected rather than measured. A separate systematic review describes mounting evidence of an association with obesity. Both are associations across groups, so they say the overlap is real without saying it will happen to any particular person.
Nazar BP, Bernardes C, Peachey G, Sergeant J, Mattos P, Treasure J. (2016). The risk of eating disorders comorbid with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis.. The International journal of eating disorders doi
Cortese S, Tessari L. (2017). Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Obesity: Update 2016.. Current psychiatry reports doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Meals depend on noticing a signal and acting on it in time, and both of those are unreliable here.
When not to
If eating has become secretive, or is followed by purging or long fasts to make up for it, that needs specialist help rather than self-management.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Ask yourself two questions: how did I actually do, and what do I think I could have done. The gap between those two answers is real, and it is usually where the grief sits.
Write out your real work history, every job, with why each one ended. In conversation people skip the short ones and the sackings, and that is precisely where the pattern lives.
Plenty of people with ADHD do far better in hands-on work than in another four years of sitting in a classroom. Wanting a trade is a reasonable read of your own mind, not giving up.