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Areas › Your body › Food, caffeine and fuel
Rates of overweight and type 2 diabetes are higher in people with ADHD, and the reasons are not moral ones. A reward system that is under stimulated goes looking, and food answers quickly. Add difficulty noticing when you are full and the pattern more or less builds itself. Knowing its shape lets you change the setup instead of fighting each individual moment: what is in the cupboard, when meals actually happen, what else in the day gives you a genuine lift.
Do not be extravagant: God does not like extravagant people (Quran 7:31). The same verse permits eating and drinking, so what is warned against is going past the limit, not the food.
الأعراف
۞يَٰبَنِيٓ ءَادَمَ خُذُواْ زِينَتَكُمۡ عِندَ كُلِّ مَسۡجِدࣲ وَكُلُواْ وَٱشۡرَبُواْ وَلَا تُسۡرِفُوٓاْۚ إِنَّهُۥ لَا يُحِبُّ ٱلۡمُسۡرِفِينَ
Children of Adam, dress well whenever you are at worship, and eat and drink [as We have permitted] but do not be extravagant: God does not like extravagant people
Qur’an 7:31read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Structure can do some of the work that attention finds hard. In a randomised trial of 90 adults with obesity, eating within an early eight hour window produced modestly greater weight and fat loss than a window of twelve hours or more, with counselling matched between the groups. Modest is the word. It is one trial, the difference was small, and a fixed window suits some lives and not others.
Jamshed H, Steger FL, Bryan DR, Richman JS, Warriner AH, Hanick CJ, Martin CK, Salvy SJ, Peterson CM. (2022). Effectiveness of Early Time-Restricted Eating for Weight Loss, Fat Loss, and Cardiometabolic Health in Adults With Obesity: A Randomized Clinical Trial.. JAMA internal medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Highly palatable food gives a fast reward to a system that is short of one, so it keeps winning against slower options.
Herbal products are rarely covered by insurance and they add up quickly. That cost belongs in the decision, particularly when you cannot be sure the capsule holds what it says.
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.
St John's wort can cut the effectiveness of the contraceptive pill by around a third. If you take both, that is worth knowing today rather than finding out later.