If you want to start a war on the internet, just ask what is the best diet for optimal health. 

Everyone has their own opinion based on personal experience, observations, education, and the content they watch on social media (unfortunately). A piece of advice can work for one person but not for another because of genetic differences, family history, general health conditions, lifestyle choices, and the person's environment.

Finding the right nutritional advice for your needs can feel like a hopeless quest, bound to end in failure and headaches. 

However, the connection between optimal nutrition and improving your ADHD symptoms is far too important to be abandoned just because the task is frustrating, confusing, and overwhelming. 

This article will summarize the current scientific consensus on nutritional advice for people with ADHD and give you a clear answer on what you need from a healthy diet. 

How To Think About Nutrition

There are two extremes you ought to avoid. 

First, the belief that dieting and supplementation are capable of curing ADHD. 

While a healthy and balanced diet and some supplements can alleviate symptoms of executive dysfunction, there is no way to reverse, remove, or cure ADHD. The condition is permanent and here to stay, and any rhetoric claiming otherwise is not based on science and is likely a disguise to sell you a product.

Second, avoid black-and-white thinking: If I already have ADHD symptoms, then what I eat won't matter too much since it can never be fixed. 

Even if optimal nutrition is not a cure for ADHD symptoms, getting all the essential nutrients your body needs can still significantly reduce the intensity of your symptoms. ADHD stems from issues in the function and communication between brain circuits, so improving your brain's nutrient intake will naturally increase its performance. 

Data Is King

We naturally have intuitions and hunches about how foods make us feel and how they affect our ability to get work done. 

For example, you reduce your sugar intake if it makes you jittery and impulsive, avoid certain foods that cause stomachaches and discomfort, and don't eat after 8 pm because it causes heartburn and reduces sleep quality.

However, there is a limit to how much you can learn just by observing your body's responses to the various foods, herbs, and supplements you shove in your mouth. This is why it is crucial to get tested in a medical facility. 

You don't have to do every single assessment on Earth, but checking for common food allergies, like intolerance for gluten, should be done as soon as possible. The same goes for your vitamin and mineral levels, general blood work, cardiovascular health markers, and other health metrics. You need to check them at least once a year and once every six months when you get older. 

Going to the doctor, waiting, getting your skin pierced with needles, going back to have the results analyzed, and any other step in the process is an absolute pain in the ass. It will cost you money as well. However, the information you get is priceless. 

The most obvious benefit is that it will allow you to adjust your diet and supplement (if necessary) to improve your overall health and longevity. Dying is not a good thing, so let's avoid it for as long as possible. 

More specifically, there are many relatively quick fixes you can do that can lead to noticeable improvements in your ADHD symptoms. 

For example, many people with ADHD suffer from deficiencies in iron, magnesium, vitamin B12, and vitamin D that can all exacerbate symptoms of ADHD. You never know what could be missing. 

I know it is not a cure, but I'd take more servings of veggies and two supplement pills a day for a noticeable improvement in my symptoms instantly. It can be the difference between having your life feel unbearable and manageable.

Seven Rules for Optimal Nutrition Based on Science

1. Eat a balanced diet - This includes fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, fish and seafood, beans, whole grains, nuts and seeds, etc. The more variety, the higher the chance to get a sufficient amount of all key nutrients. Balanced eating helps you to avoid deficiencies, which could exacerbate ADHD symptoms. Some common deficiencies come from iron, zinc, magnesium, vitamin D, and all twelve Vitamin Bs (1)

2. Reduce ultra-processed foods - Some studies have shown a connection between diets high on artificial food dyes, additives, and sweeteners (aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame, etc.) and worsened ADHD symptoms. You can't fully cut them out unless you go and live in a forest, but you can still try to cut down on processed foods (cereal, cakes, cookies, microwave meals, etc). A simple way to keep balance is the 80:20 rule, where 80% is healthy options, and the rest is favorite junk food (2).

3. Get enough protein - Having ADHD means your brain is not producing enough neurotransmitters. You want to make the job easier by giving it the fuel it needs. Optimal neurotransmitter production requires a high amount of protein. More specifically, the minimum recommended is 0.8g per kg, and the maximum is 1.6g per kg. You need to take more if you are very active. If you want to be safe, have a higher intake (3)

4. Replace simple carbs with complex carbs - Carbs are your brain's primary fuel source and the most convenient for the body. For many people, cutting them entirely by going keto or carnivore is not affordable or sustainable. То avoid blood sugar spikes, which worsen ADHD symptoms, you can replace quick carbs (anything with sugar, syrup, sweeteners, juice, etc.) with complex versions (vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains, sweet potatoes, quinoa, etc.), because they contain much more fiber and get absorbed more slowly (4)

5. Increase omega-3 fatty acid consumption - For healthy function, your body needs to have a healthy 1:1 to 2:1 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids. The average for Western diets is between 10:1 and 20:1. The most common ways of adding them are by eating more seafood (sardines, tuna, salmon, and other fatty fish) or by getting a high-quality omega-3 supplement. Multiple studies have shown improvements in ADHD symptoms after consistent intake (5)

6. Avoid excessive calorie deficits and restrictive eating - Your body seeks balance, and it will get it one way or another. Caloric deficits of more than 350 calories and restrictive eating (keto, carnivore, etc.) will eventually create a yo-yo effect where you gain the weight back with binge eating. Eating in moderation is more sustainable and much less stressful, expensive, and time-consuming (6)

7. Work on improving your gut biome - Eating a wide variety of foods, with an emphasis on high-fiber (green veggies, whole grains, beans, legumes, fruits) and fermented foods (pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, yogurt, kefir) will slowly improve your gut biome. You will also get very quick results if you reduce smoking and alcohol consumption, foods with preservatives and antibiotics whenever possible, and work on cutting sources of high stress. Having a healthy gut is one surprisingly beneficial way to improve your mood and even boost the bioavailable dopamine you have because many brain chemicals are produced in the gut.

How To Consistently Feed Yourself And Make Meals

Knowing what is the optimal way of eating to manage your ADHD symptoms doesn't mean that you can get all those foods regularly enough into your meals. 

Cooking is an executive function nightmare because it has dozens of steps for many recipes and requires additional effort to get the ingredients, preserve the leftovers, and clean the kitchen and the dishes after you are done. You can very easily get overwhelmed, and even if you technically can go through the process once, it can be very challenging to have three proper meals each day while balancing other tasks and responsibilities. 

If you are doing financially well enough, you can throw enough money at the problem to make it go away with healthy pre-made meals under a cooking service, pre-clean and chopped fruits and veggies, eating out with your family and friends, meals and snacks readily available at work, and a host of other solutions. But what can the rest of us do to get better?

1. Increase your base stimulation while cooking - Listening to music, podcasts, favorite YouTube channels, or even talking with someone are all excellent ways to feel more stimulated while cooking. Combining those activities makes it more bearable since it gives you stimulation instantly instead of waiting to finish cooking and sit down before you can get your reward. This strategy is more suitable for recipes you are already familiar with since trying out new meal combinations requires you to pay much more attention.

2. Come up with recipes that are as easy as possible - My favorite two-minute recipe is a bowl of oatmeal, cornflakes, chia seeds, flax seeds, pumpkin seeds, some dark chocolate, and whatever nuts I can find and pour into the concoction. You can do many recipes in minutes: protein shakes, smoothies, frozen veggies, and other meals you toss in the slow cooker, sandwiches, drained canned beans with some herbs and spices, air frying whatever you find in the fridge, etc. If you are not passionate about cooking, most of the time, you will have no energy to cook, so having easy-to-make options makes it less likely for you to skip a meal entirely.

3. Take advantage of time gaps and opportunities to cook - Once in a blue moon, you are likely to get a day where you finish with everything early, have nothing pressing to do, or feel a surprising amount of energy. You can take advantage of meal prepping for the next few days by preparing ingredients (cleaning and sorting fruits and veggies) or cooking whole meals to microwave and reheat in the upcoming days. Just make sure not to make a huge amount of the same food if you don't enjoy repeating the same meals over and over again.

4. Repetition may be your savior - Repeating the same meals over and over can range from boring to unbearable, but if you have a set of 8-12 meals that you rotate, it shouldn't be a huge problem. If you do a recipe long enough over a few months, it becomes much easier to repeat it. The more automatic the cooking process becomes, the less likely you are to skip cooking altogether. 

5. Embrace your raccoon self - Sometimes, you will have a meal consisting of carrots dipped in hummus, pretzels, apples, hardboiled eggs, and whatever else you find in the fridge. Sometimes, you will have only one meal during the day and snack on nuts, seeds, fruits, veggies, or whatever else you can quickly devour throughout the day. You don't have to eat in a particular hour or eat cooked and fancy-looking meals. Grabbing a dozen ingredients from the fridge containing some healthy fats and protein is a good enough meal. You are not a chef, so your meals don't have to be perfect as long as they keep you from starving. 

6. Make cooking your next special interest and hyper-fixation - You can make cooking more fun if you do it with other people, enter cooking classes, use a cooking app with pre-made recipes and detailed instructions, try to recreate attractive meals from YouTubers and social media pages, and find other ways to enjoy it. The truth is that you won't skip a lot of meals if cooking makes you feel good, even if you are tired. So, if you have a period with fewer tasks from work, or your other hobbies and interests dry out, you can consider picking up cooking by trying out recipes with instructions or improvising and coming up with your own ideas.

How To Lose Weight When You Have ADHD

Losing weight is one of the hardest lifestyle changes when you have ADHD because it can feel like every single ADHD symptom is working against you. 

We will first cover some basic strategies that should be useful no matter your circumstances. Then, we will dive deeper into specific interventions that can help you address ADHD-related challenges, like inconsistency in dieting, snacking, etc.

Key rules to follow when trying to lose weight:

1. Take it slow - Your dietary habits are deeply engraved in who you are as a person. Sudden changes, like going on a very restrictive diet, will likely lead to a yo-yo effect, you eventually relapse and eat back all the calories you missed while starving yourself. The optimal strategy is making small changes that become instinctive habits over time. For example, going for a 10-minute walk after every meal, reducing your portion size at lunch and eventually at dinner, making it mandatory to eat one small portion of a fruit and a vegetable with every meal, etc. Small changes accumulate over time and are the most sustainable. 

2. Use an app to track your calories - To lose weight, you need to be in a modest caloric deficit over a long enough time period. You can’t know how many calories you need daily to lose weight without calculating, and you can’t know how your deficit is going without counting the calories in everything you eat. Although you can do it manually, I would highly recommend subscribing to a high-quality weight loss app that will automate the process for you, like MacroFactor or anything else that fits your needs. You don’t have to track your calories forever since, over time, you will develop a better intuition, BUT in the beginning, you need to track because your intuition can be wildly different from how much you actually consume. 

3. Focus on fiber and protein-packed foods as much as possible - Eating a steak, or a cup of legumes and beans will fill you up much more than devouring a whole plate with fruits simply because one is much more nutrient-dense than the other. You should try to incorporate some form of protein in every single meal to make sure you feel full and satiated. It may not seem like much, but saving yourself 200-300 calories per meal because you feel stuffed after eating a chicken breast or a can of sardines will add up over time. For even better results, avoid protein-rich sources that are ultra-processed, like fast food options, unless you have no alternative because they are packed with much more calories than you’d get from natural protein sources.

4. Taking breaks is completely okay as long as you get back on track - Restricting your dietary patterns to focus on weight loss can be mentally exhausting and repetitive if you have limited food choices. It’s okay to have “cheat meals” once or twice per week and even to take breaks from your efforts and increase your calories to be maintained instead of losing weight. As long as it helps you keep your sanity, everything works. After all, weight loss is a long-term game, so taking a break is a strategic decision, not a setback or a sign of failure. 

The first common challenge ADHD’ers face when losing weight is snacking and binge eating, which happens for multiple reasons. 

First, snacking helps you numb stress and reduce boredom since you are getting a dopamine spike while eating. Second, snacking can be very physically soothing and sensory-pleasing because you keep your hands and mouth occupied. Even if the pleasure is only temporary and there is a lot of guilt and shame afterward, your ADHD brain tends to care a lot more for immediate rewards rather than for what matters long-term, especially if you are not feeling well.

Eliminating your entire habit of snacking is unlikely to happen overnight, but you can try to replace your current snacking options with healthier alternatives. 

Find low-calorie replacements that still make you feel good but don’t have such a substantial effect on your weight, like the chewing pick, drinking sparkling water and other low-calorie drinks (diet soda, kombucha, tea, etc.), or preparing in advance boxes with veggies (peppers, carrots, celery, etc). Snacking on seeds and dried fruits also works occasionally, but they are very calorie-dense, so don’t make it your default option.

Furthermore, you can try some form of fasting, like intermittent fasting, where you don’t eat anything for 16 to 18 hours and have all your meals in the remaining 6-8 hours time frame, or a whole day of fasting for 24 hours once a week.

I think fasting is one of the most underrated ways to avoid snacking and lose weight in general because your ADHD brain is already predisposed to an “all-or-nothing” approach where you are either binging or skipping 2 meals in a row. If starvation is bound to happen occasionally, we might as well make it strategic instead of an accident. 

The second major struggle with weight loss is the huge challenge of maintaining an exercise routine. It’s true that the calories you burn from exercise will not make or break your weight loss goals, but losing 300-400 calories more every day because you are physically active will add up over time. 

Furthermore, strength/hypertrophy training, where you work specifically to build muscle, has a couple of unique benefits for weight loss.

First, the more muscle you pack, the more calories you burn passively (without doing anything) because maintaining muscle mass requires a bigger energy expenditure. You speed up your metabolism and have a bigger energy demand all day, no matter what you do. So, you lose weight without doing anything! Second, intense strength workouts lead to muscle damage that requires nutrients to repair the broken muscle tissues, increasing your hunger. 

While you may eat slightly more calories than you would otherwise, it’s much easier to eat healthy foods, like beans, legumes, green leafy vegetables, nuts, seeds, and others, because your body is literally starving and desperate for nutrients. Those foods are packed with nutrients, making you less likely to snack and easily get hungry soon after your meal. If you don’t trust me, do three sets of squats to absolute failure (you can’t perform another repetition) before a meal, and suddenly, spinach and broccoli will feel appealing. 

I have a whole article written on how to build habits, like working out, with a case study on strength training, so you can check it out. 

However, something you can immediately do is find ways to get small amounts of exercise throughout the day that don’t require much energy or commitment.

For example, getting a standing desk for work makes it easier to pace around, arranging your furniture to make it easy to walk around so you can get closer to your daily steps goal while playing video games or browsing social media on your phone, etc. Even if you don’t change anything else, increasing your daily steps to 10,000-15,000 by finding small opportunities to walk while doing something else will absolutely transform your physique.

Treating ADHD and Eating Disorders 

ADHD has a strong correlation with many eating disorders (7).

Malnourishment and even anorexia can happen due to having ADHD. 

You struggle to catch up at work and don't find the time to eat properly, get lost in a project and hyper-focus without caring for food, or simply forget and don't pay enough attention to your body's internal cues. In extreme cases where ADHD contributes to low self-worth, starving yourself can offer a false sense of control and a way to get external validation by being skinny and conforming to society's toxic body image standards. 

Emotional and stress-related eating and binging are also very common with ADHD. 

If you feel bored, desperate for stimulation, highly stressed, and in need of a distraction, food becomes an irresistible escapism tool and dopamine jackpot. These cravings don't necessarily have to lead to binging, but ADHD also comes with impulsivity and impaired self-control, so resisting is substantially more challenging.

Those extremes don't have to happen in isolation. Malnourishment and starvation can combine with binge eating, creating a vicious and destructive cycle.  

You fall down a rabbit hole online, have a busy day at work, or get sucked into a personal project and remember you've barely eaten the whole day. The sharp hunger pulls you towards the fridge, and your mental exhaustion wears down any resistance and self-control, so you end up binging.

Ashamed, you purge and fast the next day, leaving you extremely hungry and malnourished. This leads to more binging, followed by excessive snacking, and the cycle continues. 

Falling into the rabbit hole of unhealthy eating patterns becomes more likely if you also have a perfectionist mindset and often think in black-and-white terms. 

If balanced eating and being on a diet is seen as the perfect and only right way, then falling short of this high standard even a tiny bit can create an overreaction. Rationalizing binging and unhealthy snacking by saying, "I already fell short of my expectations for the diet, so I might as well take a break now, and I will try again tomorrow." is very common.

Such self-talk seems innocent enough until you realize that eating two small cookies did not have to turn into a midnight feast where you devoured every snack and sugary treat you could spot and reach nearby. As we have previously discussed, your perception of an event and the way you react massively changes the outcome of what has happened. 

Official diagnosis and treatment for ADHD require reaching out to medical professionals and going to therapy. Eating disorders are no different. To comprehensively address them, you will need to talk with a qualified specialist and dedicate time to therapy to discuss and develop strategies for the problem.

That's great, but what if you don't have the financial means, access, and privilege for professional help? 

How To Heal From Unhealthy Eating Habits & Eating Disorders

If you don't have access to professional help, you can still make progress on your own by using preventative and planned strategies. 

Those strategies focus on optimizing your life to minimize the triggers for unhealthy eating patterns. 

For example, if you eat too much because you are stressed and bored, you should preemptively make a list of activities you can do to occupy and immerse yourself. They should be readily accessible, like going out to walk the dog, calling friends to play video games, or going to the gym. 

Similarly, you can design systems to prevent or cope with unhealthy eating patterns. If you often forget to take care of yourself and eat enough, you can set yourself alarms and reminders for when to take a break and eat something.

Preventative measures work by creating distance and barriers from opportunities for unhealthy eating and by increasing accessibility to healthier options so you have something to eat regularly. 

Setting reminders to eat isn't enough if you fear creating an ever bigger mess at home or don't want to bother. Instead, you will take a few hours during the weekend, put on a favorite album, and clean the kitchen as much as possible. The less clutter and more clean utensils, the easier it is to bother cooking something. 

You can increase access to better options even further by having a list of quick and easily preparable recipes - quick meals you only need to microwave, oatmeal, greek yogurt with fruits, sandwiches, smoothies, protein shakes, etc. 

You can also think of ways to put more distance between you and opportunities for binging. Ordering online to avoid impulsive purchases and reducing how many snacks you keep at home are two great options. If you have a sweet tooth or any specific cravings, you can think of creating or buying healthier alternatives to satisfy your cravings. 

One final option would be to have a budget for rainy days when you can't be bothered to cook but spend more to order online. Purchasing online can also be a way to avoid temptations because you avoid impulsive purchases by not seeing your favorite cheat meals on the shelves. 

How To React When Nothing Else Works

You can reduce unhealthy eating patterns and reduce how severe the damage is by taking care of your mental health, creating systems in place to keep unhealthy habits away, and designing an environment that encourages healthy eating. All those practices lessen the effort, energy, and time commitment required to eat something healthy and nutritious. 

However, sometimes, prevention and planning isn't enough. 

You get fired from work, go through a breakup, have a massive fight with a close friend, make a humiliating mistake in front of others, get the flu or other sickness, or just feel utterly miserable and under the weather. 

I haven't given any strategies you can use at the moment because very often they don't work. Being mindful of each bite, deep breathing, plunging your face with cold water, and calling a friend all sound good in theory, but in reality, they just don't work in many cases. When you go through a binging episode, you are in a completely different headspace, and rational responses are out of the picture.

Sometimes life happens. I think very often, it is not the episode of relapse that is so unhealthy but the way we react after making a mistake. 

Being engulfed in shame, disappointment, and rage with yourself is a natural reaction, but natural doesn't mean useful. Precisely, being stressed after a relapse episode and hyperfocusing on the negative makes you more impulsive and more likely to think you have failed, therefore making you believe that there is no point in trying. You end up giving up all the progress you have made thus far.

This couldn't be further from the truth. 

You can fight to prevent unhealthy eating habits to the best of your abilities, but that doesn't mean you will always succeed. Accepting this doesn't make you a loser with a defeatist mindset. Just a realist who understands that life happens and you can't do much about it at the moment.

However, even if you can't stop every single episode, you can still influence the response and effort you put in to get on the right track again. 

Accepting what just happened doesn't have to mean accepting the future as set in stone. The less time you spend beating yourself up, the more energy you have to make sure this is just an accident and not the beginning of a larger relapse episode and a new unhealthy pattern of eating. 

This can feel unnatural. How can you forgive yourself if you hate yourself after an episode? Think about what would be useful to think for long-term results when your emotions ground you in the present. I know it is hard and can even feel impossible. 

If you've had the same reaction countless times, it can feel bizarre to imagine thinking about it differently. Even if you realize that there are better ways to respond, this may not be enough to change how you actually respond at the moment.

The mind may be resistant and very slow to change how it responds because it is frantic and restless, but you can calm it down by using breathing techniques. One of the easiest to do is the physiological sigh, which only requires you to do a large inhale, then another smaller inhale until your lungs are absolutely full, and then exhale very slowly while making sure you exhale for more time than you inhaled. 

You don't have to do breathing techniques to ground yourself if you don't see results. Experiment and see what works for you. I know people who reset their senses by:

• Going through a "five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste" exercise. 

• Doing a HIIT workout for 5 minutes of non-stop cycling on their bike.

• Submerging their face in ice-cold water for at least a minute. 

• Putting on a favorite song, comforting scent, or movie. 

• Squeezing the life out of fidget toys and stress balls.

Looking at it from a distance, I know it can all seem absurd. Imagine going through half of your fridge's contents only to start crying on the ground once shame begins to consume you, BUT then you do a five-minute breathing exercise and drown your sorrow in a bucket of icy cold water. 

It is absurd only if you think those techniques will somehow magically fix your mood. They won’t. All they can help with is resetting and stabilizing your stress response, slightly calming your emotions down, and making it easier to react with some rationale instead of being entirely engulfed with feelings. 

The point isn't to kill your intense and painful emotions with obscure physical exercises but to positively influence your body to get your brain to calm down so you can ride through the emotional episode more smoothly. 

Key Takeaways

It's easy to forget about and neglect the importance of food and the need to change your eating habits for the better when you have so much else to worry about. It can seem impossible if you are worried about rent raises, anxious about upcoming budget cuts in the company, and overwhelmed by family drama, assignments in university, and everything else on your mind. 

Just because you don't beat yourself up when your schedule is fully packed with urgent tasks doesn't mean you should not care about how you are eating if you have two hours a day to spare. 

This is not only because you want to live a long life and reduce the chance of chronic illnesses. Healthy eating is not just an insurance package against the frightening risks in the very far future. A balanced diet, meeting all your nutrient needs, has massive impacts on your mood, motivation, and performance in the present because it is the fuel your body needs to work optimally.