Feeding Your ADHD with Dusty Chipura

In this episode, I discuss the ADHD and Food connection with ADHD coach Dusty Chipura. Dusty is an ADHD coach who offers individual, group and pregnancy coaching as well as workshops on feeding your ADHD. Follow Dusty on Twitter or TikTok.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Why it’s so hard to feed yourself when you have ADHD

• The biggest challenge Dusty sees in her clients & what’s helping them best

• Dusty tells us about her Feed Your ADHD workshop

• Where listeners can keep up with Dusty

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Summary

Unlock the secrets to a more harmonious relationship with food for individuals with ADHD! Join us as we explore the complex interplay between ADHD and eating habits, shedding light on the unique challenges faced by those with this condition. Discover how executive dysfunction can lead to missed hunger cues and impulsive eating, and understand the role of dopamine in influencing food choices.

Next, we tackle the perfectionism and black-and-white thinking that often come hand-in-hand with ADHD. Learn how to set realistic goals, avoid the trap of drastic changes, and appreciate the beauty of incremental progress. By connecting the journey of skill-building to improving eating habits, we emphasize the importance of patience and gradual development.

Finally, we introduce the groundbreaking "Feed Your ADHD" program, designed to transform kitchen spaces into functional havens for organized eating. Through inspiring success stories, learn how decluttering and organization can be powerful allies in managing ADHD tendencies. Grace and I provide you with tools and strategies to create a kitchen environment that supports your needs, paving the way for a more structured and fulfilling relationship with food.

Highlights

(00:00) Understanding ADHD and Eating Habits

(12:26) Overcoming Perfectionism in ADHD Eating

(21:28) Kitchen Decluttering and Meal Prep Workshop

Transcript

01:30 - Sarah (None)

This episode contains content on food and eating that may be sensitive to some listeners. The Adulting with ADHD podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. Please see a medical professional if you think you have ADHD or have ADHD and need additional assistance. For podcast archives, please visit patreoncom. Slash. Adulting with ADHD. Why is it so hard for us to feed ourselves when we have ADHD?

02:01 - Dusty (None)

That's a big question. I'll do my best to answer it and not take up the. I could just use the rest of this podcast, right, I'll try to be. I'll try to be succinct as I can be. So part of it is I mean, there's a lot of different steps If you actually think about what's involved in feeding yourself right, and and at any of those stages executive dysfunction can get in the way, and at any of those stages executive dysfunction can get in the way. The most basic level is knowing when you're hungry not hungry right your interoceptive awareness, your awareness of your own body. And, as we know, adhd can mess with that, not just with, like, our hunger cues. But you know, it's not uncommon to hear people say that they got so into doing something that they, you know, or hyper-focused, they didn't even realize they need to go to the bathroom right.

02:49

Sometimes we can, you know, we can even tune out like discomfort. And then, on the flip side, sometimes we can't tune out discomfort Right Like I can. I can sometimes be sitting in one position for so long that my leg goes numb, but I don't want to change positions. Yeah, so that can impact how we feel, our hunger cues, and so what can happen is that we're not thinking about food until we're like really thinking about food, right, and in that moment we're like hangry, we're like ravenous, like I'm just eat whatever's in front of me. So in that moment you don't really have the option to be, you're not planning, you're not thinking about it, you're not, you know, intentionally choosing a meal you'd like. You're just going to eat whatever is quick and dirty and right in front of you and or whatever you can order fastest, right. So there's that.

03:29

There's the fact that, like, eating certain foods also seems to give us a bit of a dopamine boost. I don't want to say like, oh, eating these foods gives us dopamine. I'm not a scientist and I don't know that that's like happening on a chemical level, but I feel like I've read that. I'll go back and check the studies out again, but certainly there's, there's, you know, foods that are very satisfying for us and, like you know, sugary and fatty foods do definitely yeah, you know are really pleasing to our brain. So there's a, there's a component of eating like what people call eating for dopamine, right, so like eating for stimulation, you might also call it right and we're going to want to choose foods that are stimulating to us, like crunchy foods, sweet foods, you know, foods with textures that we like. Nobody is eating for dopamine here, munching on some like lettuce, on some arugula right, Arugula yeah, we're back to arugula yeah arugula.

04:18

So there's that. And then sometimes we have what's called reward deficiency syndrome, which is where, like, the dopamine kind of doesn't drop Right, so like the dopamine is not getting sent to our brains when it's supposed to, and so if you eat one donut you got a box of six donuts, eat one donut, but you don't get that sense of satisfaction. You may go on to eat the entire box of donuts. So there has been this I can tell you definitively there has been links between ADHD and binge eating disorder. There has been links between ADHD and binge eating disorder, right? So we are more likely to have disordered eating because we're not getting that satisfaction that we are wanting from the food that we're eating. And you know, I tend to think that part of that also has to do with interoceptive awareness and being able to be present, right, if I'm munching on a donut, but I'm thinking about the garden that I'm going to grow next year, I might not even notice that I've eaten that donut, right? And so I wanted to taste that donut, I wanted to savor it, but it's just, it was in my hand and now it's gone and I didn't get what I wanted. So I'm going to have another one, right.

05:12

As a child, I guess. I guess I must've found eating boring or something, and I I think this is probably true of a lot of people with ADT like sitting and eating is boring. We need a lot of stimulation and just eating isn't stimulating enough. So as a child I couldn't eat without reading, right. And now, and you know, as an adult, I was always eating while doing something. But the result was I would eat so fast. I would like people my whole life.

05:36

People come to you, inhale your food. You're like a Hoover, oh my God. You eat so fast, right. And what happens when you eat really fast? Again, your body doesn't have time to send you cues of satiety. So you overeat, right, I was like a chronic overeater. I had a big, big appetite and you do. You know, like your stomach kind of stretches, right, the more you eat, the more you kind of need to eat, right.

05:58

So like there's also something there about portion control and this is all just on the somatic, like body level. This doesn't even get into like the organizational aspects of what it means to eat. The other aspects here are like planning, making choices and then follow through, right. So I hear so much from clients that they go to their fridge and they know they're hungry, they know they want to eat something, but then they're just staring into the fridge. They can't figure out what they want to eat and nothing feels like what they want to eat, right, yeah, so they're doing what I call they're trying to decide and do at the same time. They're trying to make a decision about what to do and doing it. And I always tell people separate the deciding from the doing. Decide in advance, because in the moment when you have low executive function like, say, it's lunch and you had rock bottom right, like you're in, like executive dysfunctions though- because you've used your executive function and now you're trying to make a decision.

06:54

Of course you stand there staring into the fridge for like 20 minutes because you're out of gas, right? So making a decision about what to eat before eating, you know, not, not, not clad in stone, cause then also, we don't like to be told what to do Right, and then we get into like oh, I chose this thing but I don't want to do it.

07:09

But so so deciding when you're low on executive function is an issue Pre planning what you're going to eat and completing all those steps Grocery shopping, making sure you have all the items that you need, having the skills to cook, being able to cook, because cooking is also boring, right? So I was a chronic, like lifelong cook everything on high and just burn it because I can't be bothered to. To stand the oven for 20 minutes whisking the whatever in the pot, so cooking, and then, once the food has been, you know, even if you get to that step and you've, you've completed you know, choosing, planning, shopping, prepping, cooking, then there's like remembering to put the food away, not leaving it on the stove all night, and letting it go bad, yeah, and then yeah, and then like remembering to eat the leftovers.

07:53

So, like you know, it's pretty frustrating when you get yourself to the point of meal prepping a bunch of food which then rots in your fridge because you forget to eat it. Or maybe your fridge is crammed so full and it's really disorganized, or your kitchen is so cluttery that you can't use it, or you have no clean dishes or your food rotting in your fridge, right. So cleaning, also cleaning and kitchen maintenance it plays into this as well right, you can't do all of those things if your kitchen is totally cluttered and filthy or your fridge is crammed full of stuff, and then all of those steps are going to bring shame. So then shame is like the shame is the buttercream on this crab cake.

08:30 - Sarah (None)

I love it. I have to say right now you guys, she's, she's sharing all this information and she's not even looking at any notes or anything. Is this all off the top of your head?

08:41 - Dusty (None)

Oh yeah, because I mean we do, we do the feed your ADHD. You know class, we've done it, I think, three times now.

08:48 - Sarah (None)

So okay, we talk about all of this I'm so impressed that you're I mean, you really nailed it, at least for me. I. I really this. This resonates with me so much, especially like the cleaning the fridge thing. I mean, it's so huge, Like you get to a point where you finally can bring home food, but then you have to fit it into your damn fridge and fit it into your freezer and in order to do that you have to keep those things clean. So it's a whole thing.

09:18 - Dusty (None)

And for me as well. There's this weird thing.

09:21

Okay, you've probably seen right now like like fridge aesthetics is like a big thing on social media right now People are all about the like bins, the organized fridge, and I will say that at first I was watching those videos and I was like, oh my god, I'm like who are these people who take these things out of the bags just to put them into a box so that they look? At first I was very scornful. But let me tell you something, sarah. I have discovered a secret about my ADT is which is that, for whatever reason, it is hard and unpleasant for me to reach into a bag of something and and so I won't do it, and the whole bag of whatever's will rot like a bag of snap peas, a bag of oranges, a bag of string cheese, it doesn't matter what it is. If it's like a bag that I clipped a little hole, I hate getting in there. So now what I?

10:03

It's funny, but I actually do come home. I take anything that's in a small bag or box, I actually take it out and I do put it in like bins or jars, because when it's in a big, open bin and I can just reach in the fridge and I can grab whatever I need very easily, I will eat all of it. There is absolutely, for whatever weird reason, the worst is like those bags of oranges, right, they come in that netting. I rip a little hole and then I will see. I will literally see the bag of oranges in the netting and I'll be like, nope, seems too hard, it's too much work. But if I put, if I take the oranges out of the bag and I put them in like a fruit bowl or something where there's no small layer of plastic or cloth film between me and that piece of fruit, I will eat it.

10:47

It's the weirdest thing, but it involves extra work. And that's what's really confusing. Right, you got to come home and you got to like reorganize all the groceries and sort of process them. And you know, I've had the feedback people with ADHD tell me like, oh, but isn't that an extra step? I thought we can't do extra steps. And I'm like, no, that's the thing, right, everybody's ADHD is a different flavor. Sometimes I need things to have less steps, but sometimes I actually need to overcomplicate them and add extra steps.

11:16 - Sarah (None)

You know, yeah, or it needs to be enjoyable for you. You need to be happy when you open your refrigerator and that'll rev up your dopamine. And yeah, I too have become one of those bin people. I never understood it until I did it. And now I get it because I ordered this cereal and I take it out. I poured into like a canister so I can see it.

11:37 - Dusty (None)

And yes, it is so unpleasant. Let me tell you about the unpleasant sensory experience of a box of Cheerios that has a bag inside and then there's like stray Cheerios, like around the side, because you're trying to pour it out of the bag and then you're making a mess, and then there's extra Cheerios but the side, because you're trying to pour it out of the bag and then you're making a mess and then there's extra Cheerios but you don't want to clean it up, oh man. And like just being able to see all the things that are arranged like in a clear thing so you can see how much you have, but you can actually access them easily. Game changer game changer.

12:08

I'm gonna, I'm gonna grab a cup of coffee while we're talking to you.

12:10

So if you guys want a cup of coffee, let's fucking talk Funny story about how I was 10 minutes late to this podcast because I overslept, because I was up for three hours in the middle of the night watching YouTube videos about winter gardening, anyway. But yes, there's a lot. I think that goes into why people with ADHD struggle with food, not just on the planning and organizational ends of it, on the somatic level, and on top of that let's talk about perfectionism, right, black and white thinking. So when someone with ADHD wants to improve their relationship with food or their eating, they're usually coming at it from a very perfectionistic, unsustainable, super high standards place that they can't maintain. And then they fail. And then they waste $300 on groceries and end up eating McDonald's anyway, and then all the food rots and then they feel bad, lathered with feet, right yeah.

13:00 - Sarah (None)

It's a whole thing. Yeah, totally. I don't know if you've ever been put on a waiting list, but therapy is hard to come by these days. If you need therapy and you need someone to talk, to consider BetterHelp. I've been using BetterHelp on and off since the pandemic and it's honestly been really helpful when I can't reach my normal therapist. To save 10% off your first month visit betterhelpcom slash ADHD adulting. That's betterhelp H-E-L-P dot com slash ADHD adulting. So I was going to actually ask and I think you already answered some of the biggest challenges you're seeing in your clients, and I think you you pretty much just nailed it right there, and so it sounds to me like if you're listening to this and you want to, you know work in some next steps. It sounds like you really do have to think about what kind of flavor your ADHD is. Is that a good place to start?

13:56 - Dusty (None)

Yeah, well, you know it's interesting, like I'll see some people with some of those challenges. Like, sometimes people have some. There are definitely people who have all, but usually I think, like it's important to identify where you're going to struggle the most. Is it the deciding? Is it the pre deciding? Is it the prepping? Is it the messy kitchen that you can't work in? Is it, like you know, remembering to actually eat the leftovers? Is it like being too perfectionistic with your choices? Like, can you identify where the biggest challenges and where you're going to struggle the most?

14:26

But what I, what I will often advise people is the same thing that I advise them with almost anything else that they're trying, which is to like, take it down to like 10% of what they're trying to do. So, yes, I think I think Cam got might have given me this metaphor, like I think I might have stolen it from him. But like, imagine you wanted to learn karate and you had never done karate before. You wouldn't expect yourself to just be a black belt. You would know like, hey, I'm a novice, I don't know how to do kicks and punches, I can't crack a board in half, like you would expect that you would start with. You know a bunch of simple moves and then you would go from being a white belt to like I don't know whatever's next, a brown belt and a green belt, yellow, green, whatever.

15:12

And then slowly, slowly, you would increase the difficulty. And yet with so many things, with ADC, we expect ourselves to just like jump right into the deep end of the pool and be perfect. So we go from like eating flame and hot Cheetos morning, lunch and dinner to going, oh, I should be having you know five, three meals a day fully cooked from scratch, you know, healthy broccoli, chicken and kale salad. Like we expect ourselves to just be able to do that right. And then we're like all, we're all stressed out and surprised when it doesn't work. So you got to start small and you got to give yourself time to build the skills. But the problem with that is inherently unsatisfied. Right, if I tell you start small, start incrementally, I can almost feel your ADHD brain going like no, thank you.

15:54

Right, because big, big, sweeping change is interesting. It gets the brain hooked, it gets the motivation going, like we're motivated to completely overhaul our diet. But, like you know, letting yourself eat flame and hot Cheetos for lunch and dinner and swapping it out for a bagel in the morning doesn't feel like it's going to get us where we want to go fast enough. Because all of a sudden, whenever we tune into what we're having an issue with, there's urgency, there's this feeling of oh my God, this is a crisis, I have to fix this now. And so you know it feels like you don't have time. But of course, that's just the way that our our brain gets our attention right. So I'll give you a really good example. I once was working with a client long, long time ago, and you know he wanted to improve his diet and he's talking about how he didn't like to go to the grocery store too much. And I asked him you know, what do you do? You go to the grocery store with a list and he's like no, and you know I don't really know what to sort of do when I get there. And he you know, you want to spend. Stop spending so much money on. Take like so simple that you like can't fail.

17:03

And so he thought about it and he's like, okay, cereal and milk. And I'm like, okay, go look and see how much cereal you have. Do you have enough to last you the rest of the week? No, okay, put cereal on the list. Do you have enough milk to last you the rest of the week? No, okay, put milk on cereal milk. I'm like breakfast done. Could you eat cereal milk for a straight week? You could, okay, great, we're done, that's it. If you plan to eat a bowl of cereal milk for breakfast and you eat it, guess what? You've meal prep, like you've, that's it. It doesn't have to be a breakfast sandwich with tomato and egg from scratch and some fresh arugula on it, right, arugula, yeah, okay, so then. So then for lunch. I was like what's the easiest thing that you could eat for lunch? And he thought about it. I was like no brainer, like you could eat it, even if you were deep in executive dysfunction land and you didn't want to do anything.

17:48

He was like he thought about it and he was like, okay, peanut butter and jelly sandwich. So I was like, okay, there's five days in a week, so 10 slices of bread. I was like, do you? I'm like, okay, bread goes on the list. Do you have enough jam and do you have enough peanut butter? He was like, yes, so now we've got a list that's like cereal, milk, bread. I'm like, okay, here's the thing.

18:11

I was like you're gonna, if you've been eating out every night and this guy was, he was eating out like most meals, like single guy, right, young guy. And I was like you're not gonna night out of seven you're going to order out. So that leaves us with six nights. Let's pick four of those nights where you're going to eat something that is canned or frozen. So like, do you like macaroni and cheese, or a can of soup, or like a frozen pizza? And he's like yes. And I'm like, okay, I want you to pick four.

18:39

Like just, you know, pre packaged things that you can cook, that you don't have to put any effort into. So you know, he picked like two cans of soup, a frozen pizza and a frozen burrito. Okay, so that goes on the grocery list because he didn't have those things and I'm like, okay, now we've got two nights, I want you to pick one dish that you had no like cooking experience. So you know, he googled a recipe and he chose something that he wanted to make and we, you know, we put the ingredients on list. So now he's got a shopping list. It's like you know, cereal, milk, bread, two cans of soup, a frozen burrito, frozen pizza and whatever ingredients he didn't have for his one night of cooking. And he only had to cook one night that week because we're just, it's about. It's not about getting perfect, it's about practicing the habit, right, yeah? And so he was able to follow his meal plan. I think this was a long time ago now, but that that's the thing. Right, if you plan to eat a can of soup for lunch and you eat it, that counts as meal prepping and you're saving money and you're eating. You know you're feeding yourself, you're. You might feel you're eating relatively healthy.

19:40

I don't really like to categorize foods as good or bad, but if you can give yourself permission to start small like that and this is what we do and feed your ADHD all the time we talk to people about like, there was one guy he was an older guy. He came to feed your ADHD and like the concept of pre bagged salads was like a game changer for him because he wanted to eat more greens but he had such a hard time getting himself to like wash and prep the veggies. So he he. At first, you know, like many people, you feel, oh, it's wasteful, it costs more money, it creates environmental waste.

20:10

But he gave himself permission to start eating these pre-baked salads and next thing, you know like he's eating greens, right, and he's feeling good about himself and he's feeling better. And you know, from there it becomes easier to build up to. You know, if you want to be eating chicken and kale salad every night, you can get there, but start with just one night and get used to that and when that becomes easy then go up to two nights and then go up to three nights. But if you start with two nights of trying to cook chicken and kale salad and it's not easy you are not ready to cook chicken and kale salad seven nights a week. Right, you got to start where you are.

20:43 - Sarah (None)

Totally, god, I love this. So, yeah, let's talk a bit about feed your ADHD. I want to hear about are you doing it again? It's usually in the spring, right.

20:53 - Dusty (None)

Yeah, so Grace Lauren is the person I do it with. So Grace Lauren runs a food blog called grapeslaurencom. It's a great blog that people can check out and they've done an excellent job breaking down like meals into like effort level, and it's also all vegan, so it's super healthy for people who are concerned with that sort of thing. So we've traditionally we tried doing it twice a year, we tried doing once a year we always play around with the format. What we're going to be doing in 2023 is we are going to probably be releasing it as sort of like pre-recorded content, so sort of like something that people can download and get started on their own, then partnered with like a one day live workshop. Because there's there's two things I think that make Feed your ADHD work. One is the information and the approach that we take to helping people with ADHD change their relationship to food, but the other is body doubling right, yeah, the actual act of doing it together, because neither Grace nor I are nutritionists and we say that at the beginning. We're not there to advise people about the nutritional aspect of changing their diet. We are only there to help problem solve the executive dysfunction issues that present around food, and so, just like dealing with how does an ADHD or get themselves organized to eat as far as what they want to eat, we take a health at every size approach. I know Grace has talked about struggling with eating disorders in the past, so you know we just follow sort of the general dietary guidelines that anyone could find, as well as embracing the idea that foods should not be marked as good or bad. We don't talk about weight loss, we don't encourage people to have a goal of weight loss, and when people are getting really you know perfectionistic about healthy eating, we try to remind everyone that, like, just beating yourself is the important thing. You know, everyone has goals around what they'd ideally like to eat and everyone has different ideas about what healthy means. So we're not there to instruct as to what a healthy diet looks like, but just to guide people to figure out how to get themselves eating the way they want. We call it like I call it like organized eating, like eating in an organized fashion. And then, yeah so in 2023, we're gonna we're gonna send out some pre recorded content for people to do at their own pace, and then our primary focus is going to be on doing the actual work of prep and kitchen cleaning together, cause that's where it gets hard, right? Yeah, actually, getting yourself to the place where your kitchen is is clean enough to use, if that's something that you've historically struggled with and also like set up to use. So there's a different body doubling like workshop that I run called the ADHD bootcamp. It's like three weekends of eight hour days of body doubling. It's nuts but people love it. So we do like one weekend of Saturday, sunday, eight hours. Then the next weekend, saturday, sunday, eight hours, and then we take a two week break and we do like an eight hour day and a four hour day where people just like blitzkrieg their whole house.

23:38

And when the first year that I did that, there was a guy living alone and you know we were all on zoom so I can see what everyone's doing, and so he's in his kitchen and he's like he was kind of like dusty, I don't know what to do. So I'm like open your cupboard, show me. So he shows me all his cupboards they're packed full. This guy lives alone and he doesn't cook. So I said, okay, here's what I want you to do clear a floor space in your living room. So he did that. I said go get a big sheet like a flat sheet. So he went and got a sheet. I said lay the floor, the sheet out on your living room floor. And when he did that, I said I want you to empty every cupboard that's not food in your kitchen. Take all the like pots, pans, dishes, everything I'm like, go put them on that sheet. And the sheet is just to create a visual demarcation. So he did it. He completelyied his cupboards and then I basically had him, marie Kondo, his dishware.

24:23

I was like he had, like he had like eight you know, frying pans. I was like you don't even cook, you don't need eight frying pans. But also, when you have eight frying pans in your cupboard and you open it and it's so hard to get things in and out, so I asked him, I said go through all of this. I said pick what you actually think you'll use and you want to keep and get rid of everything. You just throw out, donate, sell, whatever.

24:44

So he went through and he chose, you know, like one frying pan, two or three pots, a strainer, a couple of things. And when he went and then I said now go put those back. And so imagine, if you will, a cupboard that's empty. You open it. There's one pot inside. How easy is it to open that cupboard and put that pot in and out? And how easy is it to wash two pots one pan and one strainer as opposed to, like you know, if you have eight frying pans, you're gonna make eight frying pans dirty right, and then you're gonna have eight frying pans to wash and 20 pots and it's gonna be overwhelming. So I had him go like super minimalist on his like pots and pans which actually made his kitchen feel accessible to him.

25:21

So what Grace and I are planning to do in 2023 is really focus on that part of it, with people on the kitchen, decluttering and set up, making sure that people actually have a kitchen that's functional for them, that and it's not just about cleanliness and what you have in your kitchen, but also where you keep things right. Setting up your kitchen in a way that makes sense for you and your ADHD brain if you can never find your knives because you keep them in a really weird spot changing the drawer right where you keep your knives and then just really putting the focus on doing the meal prep together so that people will actually give themselves the chance to follow through and do it Because, as you know, we always have the best of intentions, right? I'm going to meal prep every Sunday at 1pm and then Sunday at 1pm comes and you're at the comic book store and you're like whoops. So I think it just really helps to do it together in a group. So that will be how we do Feed your ADHD in 2023.

26:09 - Sarah (None)

That is so cool, so where should people be looking out for this information when it releases?

26:16 - Dusty (None)

Yeah, great question. So for Feed your ADHD, I'm actually just relaunching my website. It's VancouverADHDCoachingcom. That's a long name, so I'll spell that it's V-A-N-C-O-U-V-E-R-A-D-H-D-Coachingcom, and that's going to be getting relaunched next week and then when I have new courses, they'll be there. They'll just be all on my website.

26:43 - Sarah (None)

Awesome, great Dusty. Thank you so much.