By Claire Rifkin, MS, RDN, LDN
Living with ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) can shape far more than your focus or productivity.[1] It can influence how you eat, how you plan, how you remember to feed yourself, and how you feel in your body on the days when your brain is rabbit-hole-ing in a hundred directions at once.[2] It’s not that women who live with ADHD are “bad at eating.” Feeding yourself requires executive function, and that’s a skill that can be much harder to access when your brain works this way.[3]
Feeding yourself while living with ADHD can feel like trying to drink from a faucet using your hands. You’re thirsty, the water is right there, and you can technically get a few sips. But most of it slips through your fingers long before you swallow, so you keep cupping your hands, going back again and again, hoping the next try will somehow hold more than the last.
I’m a registered dietitian who also lives with ADHD, and I work with women whose nutrition challenges often mirror my own lived experience. Many of the women I work with spend years feeling frustrated that “basic” routines like eating regularly throughout the day or meal prepping seem harder for them than for everyone else. What I see clinically is not a lack of discipline. It’s that ADHD changes how the brain manages self-regulatory processes like executive function, interoception, and routine tasks, all of which can shape how someone feeds themselves.[3] My patients often tell me that understanding these mechanisms feels clarifying. I feel the same way. Once you see what the brain is actually doing, the framework shifts, and your nutrition approach can finally match the structure of how your brain functions day-to-day.
Why ADHD Makes Eating Feel Like a Task
ADHD changes how the brain handles motivation, reward, and self-regulation, which are three systems that show up consistently around food.[4] The dopamine pathways that make long-term tasks feel “worth it” don’t activate as easily in the ADHD brain, which means you get less internal reward from slow or routine behaviors.[4] And unfortunately, eating well is built almost entirely on slow, routine behaviors: meal planning, grocery shopping, prepping ingredients, packing lunches, remembering to eat before you get too hungry. None of these offer immediate payoff, so they feel disproportionately hard for an ADHD brain to initiate or sustain.[4]
What This Looks Like in Real Life
Take my client Kara for example (identifying details have been changed for privacy). Kara was a 28-year-old woman working an office job. Most mornings looked the same, she’d wake up, rush to get ready for work, grab a bodega coffee, take her stimulant medication on an empty stomach, and arrive at the office. It wasn’t that she was avoiding eating breakfast, but it didn’t register as something urgent enough to accomplish before work. Plus, once her stimulant medication kicked in, the idea of eating fell completely out of sight.
By early afternoon, the combination of no food, caffeine, and the tail end of her medication would hit all at once. By this point in the day, Kara reasonably did not have the mental bandwidth to think through food options, let alone assemble an actual meal. This led her to grab whatever was easiest, often a left over office pastry or a vending machine charcuterie board of sorts. And just to clarify, there is nothing inherently “bad” with these food options, but relying on ultra-processed food as a primary fuel source can make it more difficult to meet protein, fiber, and micronutrient needs, which usually contributes to, in layman’s terms, not feeling great.
It’s not that Kara didn’t care about her nutrition. In fact, she sought out the care of an RD and indeed, cared a lot. What she didn’t have were the internal cues and cognitive bandwidth to carry out the things she knew she “should” do. And so reasonably, she felt the impacts of irregular nutrition; she’d feel drained, bloated, irritable, and be winding down in her cubicle wondering if everyone’s stomach growles this loud at 4:55 p.m.
Like so many women living with ADHD, Kara felt uncomfortable with how her body reacted to irregular eating and would promise herself she’d “do better tomorrow” in an effort to fix it. But her tomorrow looked exactly like today, because nothing about her environmental structure had changed. And that’s the thing, the ADHD brain doesn’t magically reorganize itself overnight, it needs change in external structure and environmental support to do what other people’s brains can do automatically.
What Helped Kara (and Might Help You Too)
These are the shifts Kara and I made together. The ones that finally gave her a structure her brain could work with. Pieces of Kara’s treatment plan might resonate for you too, and if you’re trying to untangle your own eating patterns, working with an ADHD-informed dietitian can make the process feel more manageable.
Nutrition Strategy One: Created a breakfast she didn’t have to think about
Kara was not interested in waking up earlier to make breakfast, so we came up with a few options she could take with her on the go. Her favorite was a homemade oatmeal bake she bulk-prepped ahead of time and froze in individual baggies. At the start of each week, she’d move a week’s worth from the freezer to the fridge and grab one on her way out the door.
I love one-and-done meals like oatmeal bakes because the nutrition is already built or in this case, baked in. You’ve already added the protein, carbs, fats, and fiber, so you don’t need to do any of the mental work of “assembling” a balanced meal. This can be especially helpful during time-sensitive periods like in the morning before work.
Nutrition Strategy Two: Made a lunch plan that matched when her hunger actually showed up
As much as I’d love for my ADHD clients to eat earlier in the day, sometimes that’s a more advanced goal. For Kara, her hunger consistently kicked in around 2 p.m., so that’s where we started. We created a “2 p.m. plan” using office-friendly items she could keep at her desk or in the office fridge and restock weekly or bi-weekly instead of daily.
Her list included:
Microwavable rice cups, seasoned bean packets, frozen steamable veggies, string cheese, multigrain crackers, pre-cooked shredded chicken, whole grain wraps, frozen blueberries, greek yogurt cups, pumpkin seeds, walnuts, frozen steamable edamame, and dried chickpeas.
At 2 p.m., she could grab any combination of these to give herself a mid-day meal without needing to think, prep, or decide.
Nutrition Strategy Three: Made themed dinner nights
Instead of asking her to plan dinner from scratch every night, we set up themed dinner categories to lessen the decision demand. We came up with:
Monday: Pasta night
Tuesday: Taco night (duh)
Wednesday: Freezer-meal night
Thursday: Stir-fry night.
Friday: Order-in night
Saturday: Left-over night
Sunday: “Kid-dinner” night (high-protein mac and cheese + steamed frozen broccoli. A comfort meal for Kara.)
Even though she was still cooking, the category made the first part of the decision for her. From there, we came up with a few easy go-to meals within each theme using mostly shelf-stable, frozen, or long-lasting ingredients. That way, even if grocery shopping fell off her radar that week, she still had food in the house and a plan she could realistically carry out.
The Take Away
What we can learn from Kara is that nutrition doesn’t fall apart because someone “isn’t trying hard enough.” It falls apart when the structures they’re using mismatch with the way their brain functions. And once you understand that, the entire conversation around food shifts.
If you found yourself in Kara’s patterns, you’re not “bad at eating.” You’re navigating a world that assumes everyone can remember to eat, plan ahead, and make three decisions before breakfast. Most of us can’t. And once you let go of framing this as a personal failure, you can finally build the structure your brain has needed all along. Because it’s not that you aren’t “trying hard enough”, it’s that you were trying to drink from the faucet with your hands, when what you really needed was a cup.
References:
- French, B., Nalbant, G., Wright, H., Sayal, K., Daley, D., Groom, M., Cassidy, S., & Hall, C. (2024). The impacts associated with having ADHD: an umbrella review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1343314.
- Hershko, S., Cortese, S., Ert, E., Aronis, A., Maeir, A., & Pollak, Y. (2022). Food Perceptions in Adults with and without ADHD. Psychopathology, 55, 292 – 300. https://doi.org/10.1159/000524315.
- Dohle, S., Diel, K., & Hofmann, W. (2017). Executive functions and the self-regulation of eating behavior: A review. Appetite, 124, 4-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2017.05.041.
- Weinstein, A. (2023). Reward, motivation and brain imaging in human healthy participants – A narrative review. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2023.1123733.
About the author:
Claire Rifkin, MS, RDN, LDN, is a women’s health dietitian, writer, and founder of Claire Rifkin Nutrition, a virtual private practice that blends evidence-based care with lived ADHD experience. She works with women who feel like they’ve been “trying harder” their whole lives and are ready for nutrition that feels supportive rather than punishing. Claire writes about burnout, executive function, hormone health, ADHD eating patterns, and the hidden labor of feeding yourself when structure doesn’t come naturally.
You can find her work, resources, and 1:1 support at clairerifkinnutrition.com or on Instagram @clairerifkinnutrition.
