Areas › Your body › Food, caffeine and fuel
When you find yourself reaching for something sweet again, try asking what the reaching is doing for you instead of telling yourself off. Comfort, a small rebellion, a way to stay awake: the answer usually points somewhere useful.
Talk about being good or bad closes the conversation down. Curiosity keeps it open, and it tends to surface the actual job the food is doing, which is often soothing something that has nowhere else to go. Once you know what it is for, you can look for a second way of meeting the same need rather than running on willpower alone. Slower, but it holds.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If anyone is forced to eat such things by hunger, rather than desire or excess, he commits no sin: God is most merciful and forgiving (Quran 2:173). Need is told apart from craving without the person in need being condemned, which is the tone to take with yourself here.
إِنَّمَا حَرَّمَ عَلَيۡكُمُ ٱلۡمَيۡتَةَ وَٱلدَّمَ وَلَحۡمَ ٱلۡخِنزِيرِ وَمَآ أُهِلَّ بِهِۦ لِغَيۡرِ ٱللَّهِۖ فَمَنِ ٱضۡطُرَّ غَيۡرَ بَاغࣲ وَلَا عَادࣲ فَلَآ إِثۡمَ عَلَيۡهِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ غَفُورࣱ رَّحِيمٌ
He has only forbidden you carrion, blood, pig’s meat, and animals over which any name other than God’s has been invoked. But if anyone is forced to eat such things by hunger, rather than desire or excess, he commits no sin: God is most merciful and forgiving
Qur’an 2:173read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Among 59 women, those under chronic stress showed a distinct pattern connecting comfort eating, abdominal fat and a blunted stress hormone response. It offers a physiological account of why stress steers people towards calorie dense food, so the pull is not simply a matter of resolve. The study was small and observational, so take it as a plausible mechanism rather than a rule about anyone in particular.
Tomiyama AJ, Dallman MF, Epel ES. (2011). Comfort food is comforting to those most stressed: evidence of the chronic stress response network in high stress women.. Psychoneuroendocrinology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A habit that is doing a job for you will keep coming back until the job gets done some other way.
When not to
If you are managing diabetes, this sits alongside your medical plan rather than in place of it.
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
Allergies turn up more often alongside ADHD than chance would predict. Worth mentioning your allergy history at an assessment even when nobody asks, since the two seem to travel together.
If your attention runs low on stimulation, salty and sweet food is the fastest legal source of a lift and it is available all day. Worth knowing about yourself, because it explains a pattern that willpower alone never seems to touch.
Where ADHD and disordered eating meet, the pattern is more often bingeing, or bingeing and purging, than strict restriction. Restriction tends to travel with over-control, while bingeing travels with impulse and reward seeking.