I’ve never had an easy relationship with food. Looking back, I don’t think I’ve ever had an easy relationship with regulation either. I just didn’t know that’s what it was.
For years, I believed I simply lacked willpower. I thought I should have been able to eat, drink and spend differently and somehow develop the self-control that seemed to come so naturally to everyone else. Now, I see things rather differently.
As I’ve come to understand my own ADHD and autism, I’ve also started to understand that many of the behaviours I’d spent years judging myself for may have been serving a purpose. Not a conscious purpose, but an unconscious one. They were helping me to cope, soothe, stimulate, distract, comfort or simply get through the day.
Looking back, I can see these patterns have been with me for as long as I can remember.
- Food
- Shopping
- Alcohol
They weren’t separate chapters of my life. They often existed alongside one another, sometimes becoming louder and sometimes fading quietly into the background, depending on what was happening in my life.
Alcohol was the one I chose to remove completely in 2017, and becoming sober remains one of the achievements I’m most proud of.
Food, of course, is different. We can’t simply stop eating. We have to build a relationship with food that nourishes us physically and emotionally, and that’s a much more complicated journey.
Shopping has always been there too. I still enjoy it, and I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with buying something that brings joy if I can afford it. What has fascinated me, though, is understanding why shopping feels rewarding. The anticipation. The novelty. The excitement of something arriving. Once I understood my ADHD, those experiences began to make much more sense.
For a long time, I looked at each of these behaviours in isolation. Now I wonder whether they were all pointing towards the same underlying question. What need was I trying to meet?
Looking beyond willpower
One of the things I value most about understanding neurodivergence is that it invites curiosity. Instead of asking ourselves, “What’s wrong with me?”, we can begin asking a much kinder question. “What need has this behaviour been meeting?” That single question has transformed the way I think about myself.
Rather than seeing food as the problem, I started wondering what role it had been playing in my life. Sometimes it offered comfort. At other times it was a distraction or something enjoyable to focus on when life felt overwhelming. There were times when it seemed to help me switch off, and others when it gave my busy brain the stimulation it appeared to be craving. The more curious I became, the more I realised there wasn’t one simple answer. My relationship with food had changed over the years because my life had changed too.
Perhaps that’s why I’m cautious whenever we try to explain complex human behaviour with one simple theory.
Is it all about dopamine?
If you’ve read anything about ADHD, you’ve almost certainly come across dopamine, and with good reason. Dopamine plays an important role in attention, motivation, reward and learning, and differences in dopamine signalling are thought to contribute to many of the traits associated with ADHD.
But I sometimes wonder whether dopamine has become the ADHD equivalent of oestrogen in menopause conversations.
For years, menopause was often explained almost entirely through the lens of declining oestrogen. We now recognise that’s only part of the picture. Progesterone, testosterone, melatonin, cortisol, sleep quality, stress, genetics and our wider health all influence how we experience this stage of life. Human biology is wonderfully complex, and rarely can one hormone explain everything.
I can’t help wondering whether we sometimes do something similar with ADHD.
Dopamine is undoubtedly an important part of the story, but our brains don’t exist in isolation from the rest of our bodies. They respond continuously to our environment, our experiences and the demands placed upon us. Whether we’ve slept well, whether we’re feeling emotionally safe, whether we’re overwhelmed by sensory input, how much stress we’re carrying, the hormonal changes we’re experiencing, our past experiences and even the environment we’re trying to function in all influence how regulated we feel from one moment to the next.
Looking back, I don’t think I was simply seeking dopamine. I think I was trying to find whatever helped my nervous system feel a little safer, calmer or more alive, depending on what I needed in that moment.
When food becomes more than food
One of the biggest shifts in my own understanding came when I stopped looking at food purely through the lens of nutrition.
As a personal trainer and women’s wellbeing coach, I already understood what a balanced diet looked like. I knew how weight loss worked. I knew the importance of protein, fibre and movement. None of that information was new to me. What was new was recognising that my relationship with food had never really been about knowledge.
Food could be comforting after a difficult day. It could provide a welcome distraction when I was overwhelmed or exhausted. Sometimes it gave me something enjoyable to focus on when my brain was craving stimulation, and at other times it simply offered a brief pause from the constant demands of everyday life.
When I look back now, I can see that hunger wasn’t always what was driving me to eat. Sometimes I was emotionally drained. Other times I was bored. Sometimes I was avoiding something that felt difficult, or my brain simply seemed to be searching for something that would help me feel more settled.
Of course, that doesn’t mean every person with ADHD experiences food in the same way, and it certainly doesn’t mean everyone who struggles with binge eating has ADHD. Human behaviour is rarely that straightforward.
What we do know is that there appears to be a greater overlap between ADHD and binge eating disorder than we see in the general population, and researchers are continuing to explore why that might be. Is it impulsivity? Emotional regulation? Executive functioning? Differences in reward processing? Nervous system regulation? Or, more likely, a combination of all of these factors interacting with our individual life experiences?
Personally, I suspect it’s rarely one thing. The older I get, the less interested I become in finding a single explanation for human behaviour. I’m much more interested in understanding the unique combination of biology, psychology, hormones, lived experience and environment that makes each of us who we are.
The role of menopause
For me, perimenopause wasn’t the beginning of these patterns. It was the point at which I could no longer ignore them.
The strategies I’d unknowingly relied upon for decades simply stopped working in the same way. My attention became more scattered, my emotions felt harder to regulate, my executive functioning declined and I found myself searching for answers.
Those answers eventually led me to a diagnosis of ADHD, followed later by autism. It wasn’t that menopause caused either of those conditions. They had always been there. Menopause simply removed many of the ways I’d been compensating for them throughout my life. Understanding that has allowed me to look back with much more compassion than criticism.
When the food noise became quieter
More recently, I made the personal decision to start a GLP-1 medication. Like many people, I expected it might reduce my appetite. What I wasn’t expecting was the quiet. For as long as I can remember, food occupied an extraordinary amount of mental space. I was often thinking about what I would eat next, what I shouldn’t eat, what I wished I hadn’t eaten or promising myself that tomorrow would somehow be different.
I hadn’t realised how much energy that constant internal dialogue consumed until it became quieter. That experience has made me incredibly curious. Not because I think GLP-1 medications are the answer for everyone; they clearly aren’t. Nor do I think we yet have all the answers about why some people experience such a dramatic reduction in food noise. The research is still evolving, particularly in relation to ADHD and neurodivergence more broadly, and I think it’s important that we remain curious rather than jumping to conclusions.
Lived experience matters. Scientific evidence matters too. Sometimes the questions people are asking in their everyday lives are the very questions researchers begin exploring years later.
Curiosity instead of shame
One of the greatest gifts my ADHD diagnosis has given me hasn’t been an explanation. It’s been compassion. Today, when I look back at the woman who spent years believing she simply lacked willpower, I don’t see someone who failed. I see someone who was doing her very best to regulate a nervous system she didn’t yet understand.
That doesn’t mean every coping strategy was healthy. It doesn’t mean change isn’t possible. What it does mean is that I no longer believe shame is the place from which lasting change begins. Curiosity is.
So, if you’ve spent years wondering why your relationship with food has felt so complicated, perhaps I’d leave you with the same question that changed everything for me.
What need has this behaviour been meeting?
You may not find the answer straight away. But I have a feeling you’ll find far more understanding there than you ever will through self-criticism.