ADHD food struggles aren’t about motivation… they’re about THIS.

My Story With Food

Annika: Let me start off with a story. I have so many memories about food. Food is actually one of the few things I have memories about with my childhood. And one of the largest memories is sitting at the table and wanting to escape. I don’t know if anyone else out there has also experienced this huge, visceral need to leave the table because it doesn’t feel like I want to be there. I wanted to leave because I didn’t know it at the time, but food felt unsafe for me. And why did it feel unsafe? Again, I didn’t know this until truly almost a month ago. This was at the end of 2025, at the end of my whole very large food journey that I’m going to share with you throughout this episode.

What I realized at the end of it is that food is one of the few things that you can’t escape from. It is one of the few things that you have to be in your body for. You can’t think of eating — you have to experience eating. And it is one of the few things you can’t escape. No matter what you try, you have to do it. And therefore, if you don’t feel safe in your body, it’s not going to feel safe for you, because it forces you to be in your body. I want you to take that idea and that concept and think about it throughout this whole episode. And I will tell you more about my story, and hopefully at the end you’ll also understand how you can apply it to your own life — how you can make sure that your body starts to feel more safe around food.

Living in Your Head Instead of Your Body

So if you’re like me, you’ve probably spent most of your life trying to think your way into feeling okay. You’ve probably done a lot of intellectualization. You likely go into therapy, and if you do therapy and you rationalize your feelings, you will talk your feelings, you will tell your therapist what you’re feeling — and even though it feels like you know what you’re feeling, you’re not actually experiencing the feeling, because you’re still in your head and you’re not feeling. This is very common for a lot of people, especially a lot of people with trauma histories. It’s easier to live in our brains than it is to live in our bodies. And for me, this is something I’ve struggled with my entire life, because it’s always been safer for me to imagine my future than to exist in the present. It’s not something I really understood until this year. I knew about this — I’d say at least five years ago is when I really started to understand the depth of how little I exist in my body. But it’s this last year where I realized how much it permeates my entire life. The largest aspect of this is with food.

When Food Stopped Feeling Safe

Back in May, it came to a very crushing point. I was having a hard time swallowing. I was having a hard time eating anything, even smoothies, which was my level one food. If you’ve never heard me talk about level one foods, level one foods are the ones that you eat when you feel the least safe in your body. They’re the foods you eat when you have the least amount of energy. So level one foods are smoothies, any foods you liked as a kid, and finger foods. These are the types of foods that will essentially help you feel safe enough to eat, because they are low pressure. They are also ones that may have brought you more joy, especially when you were younger. They also might be a little bit more novel for you.

But I was reverting to level one foods so much, and I didn’t even realize it at the time — I was in a lot of stress, which sounds weird to say because I run my own business. I am doing everything. I’m the one giving myself the stress. No one’s making me do these deadlines. No one’s making me create the content. No one’s making me talk to people. I’m doing it on my own and I’m choosing to do it. I mean, yes, I still have to do this if I want to get money, for example. However, I was the one putting all this pressure on myself. But that’s part of it, right? Logic and thinking and planning is protection. It’s something that helps us feel in control when a lot of our life doesn’t feel in control. And it is a really, really great coping mechanism and skill. It keeps you functional, keeps you successful, and it keeps you safe enough. And I want to emphasize that — it keeps you safe enough, not just safe fully. It’s safe enough for you to keep functioning.

However, if you’re in this state for too long, eventually your body is going to rebel. And if you have ADHD, you know this feeling a lot. All of a sudden, you feel like you need to completely change your entire life. You need to quit everything, quit your job, go move to a different country even. You just want to escape. And I want to challenge that. Whenever you feel that need to escape, is it truly because you need to escape? Is it truly because you have lost the dopamine, or is it because you have been forced into a state where you have to acknowledge your body, and you are afraid of acknowledging your body? Therefore, you completely change everything, which actually causes you more stress, but it is novel enough to make you feel like you’re okay.

At this point in May, I had to make a choice. I had to choose whether or not to continue doing what I’m doing — sharing all this research, talking with all of you, generally having a business so I don’t have to work for another person. And I wanted that, because it makes me feel like I’m more of a stable person in general. If you have ever been an entrepreneur — a lot of people with ADHD are entrepreneurs, and there’s a reason for that. It’s because it allows us to have that novelty and it allows us to have that time flexibility that so many of us need, because we exist in kind of a different spectrum than a lot of people. We need to have a lot of flexibility, otherwise we can feel stuck and stagnant, and that stagnancy can be almost a trigger for us in our bodies. That’s at least something I’ve noticed. I don’t know if there’s any true research saying that’s true — it’s just something I’ve noticed myself, and it’s honestly true.

The reason I think it feels so safe is because it’s something that keeps us thinking about the future. And what does the future do? The future lets us escape our bodies, because our bodies feel unsafe — because we can’t trust our bodies. Because every single time we’ve tried to trust our bodies, we were late. Every time we tried to trust our bodies, we said something that we maybe messed up on and it caused the end of a relationship. Every time we’ve trusted our bodies, we did something that was embarrassing. Every time we trusted our bodies, it felt like it backfired on us. And so we’ve learned we can’t trust our bodies, because if we do, we can’t operate in the world. And first off, super normal, right? Because we live in a neurotypical world. However, you’re not neurotypical. And that is a stress in itself, because being a neurodivergent ADHD person in a neurotypical world, it almost — in my opinion — forces us to live in our brains. Because if we live in our bodies, nothing’s going to get done. Literally nothing’s going to get done, because who has the ability to follow through with anything when you have ADHD? I mean, some people do, right? Like — I hardly have that ability, and it’s really frustrating. And I’m sure you feel that frustration too.

ADHD and Interoception: Why We Ignore Our Body’s Signals

And so we’ve learned to escape our bodies in favor of our brains, and we’ve learned how to try to train and create our systems. In doing so, we’ve lost our connection to our bodies. And this is where we have those interoception issues — where we forget to eat food, or you overeat your food. There’s also the aspects of having difficulty sleeping, because for some reason it’s hard to get to sleep, and that’s another place where we can’t trust our bodies — or we oversleep and we miss things. We also have difficulties within interoception with needing to use the bathroom. Did y’all know that people with ADHD have a significantly higher UTI rate? It’s really interesting, actually. There was a study that could predict ADHD with — I think it was over 80% accuracy. It was crazy. And that’s connected to your interoception.

If you’ve never heard of interoception, it is that connection we have with our body in understanding what our body is asking for. And a lot of the time we use our brains and override that. We’ll say, “Oh, I know I need to use the bathroom, but I have to finish this project first. Otherwise, if I don’t finish the project first and I go to the bathroom, I’m not going to finish the project, because I don’t trust myself and I don’t trust my body to finish the project.” Instead of challenging ourselves and trusting our body and trusting that we can do this, we worsen our interoception by pushing those signals away. And the more we push those signals away, the more we say, “Oh, I know I’m thirsty, but I just — I can’t do it right now, I need to finish this up first.” Or every time we say, “I know I’m hungry, but I need to do this first,” or “I know that I need to use the bathroom” — I think the bathroom is probably the most common experience for most of us. For me, I’ve pushed away these feelings and these signals that my body is sending so much that I don’t usually get hunger signals anymore. I don’t usually get those signals that I need to use the bathroom anymore. Instead, it’s a headache. If I get a headache, I’ll know, like, oh, I probably need to use the bathroom, or I can start to feel very, very anxious as well. And it’s hard, because now we have to learn these new signals instead of the neurotypical signals, which adds a huge other layer to this entire very difficult experience. It’s very difficult, and I want you to accept that it’s difficult.

Why Food Feels Unsafe: It Forces You Into Your Body

Now getting into the next part — reason fails us, and reason fails us because food demands embodiment. Food demands that we exist in the present. Food demands that we are alive and that we feel our body and that we exist in our body. It forces us into our bodies, and that can be very hard on us if we don’t live in our bodies. We try to think our way into peace with food, and that’s something I was doing for the last two years, essentially — talking to all of you about how to best help your ADHD with food. Get all that magnesium, make sure your ratios on your plate are a certain way, and it’s going to help your ADHD the best. Trying to reason and think through it so that we can help our ADHD. And in the process, we’re actually losing out on helping our ADHD, because we are not connecting to the one thing that is creating our ADHD in the first place, and that is our bodies. Because our bodies are ourselves, and we are our bodies, and our bodies are ADHD. Our metabolism is ADHD. Our brains are ADHD. Every part of us is ADHD. The way that we react to our hormones is ADHD. And when we separate these, of course it’s going to make ADHD harder, because we aren’t connected.

Think about it — when you have, say, a train, right? You have those coupling links. If there is a coupling link that has a loose bolt, what’s going to happen to that train? The train is going to be a little wishy-washy. It might go off the tracks. That’s called burnout. But what happens when you actually connect the links very well together? What happens when you have that bolt connecting them and it’s a very secure connection? It’s going to go on the tracks, it’s going to make the stops that it needs to make, and it’s not going to be so shaky. You’re not going to go from zero to a hundred and a hundred to zero, because you’re actually connected. And I’m not there yet. I wish I was — I truly, truly wish I was — but this is a lifelong project. It’s a lifelong experience, and I have not lived enough of this knowledge that I have of connecting the brain to the body. It’s going to take a long time.

So getting back into the whole rationalizing and experiencing your body through your brain — it works, right? It only works though to a certain extent, and then you’re going to fall off the tracks. You’re going to hit burnout. The truth is that if your body doesn’t feel safe, if you don’t feel like your body is a safe space, eating won’t feel safe either. You might experience anxiety at the table, like I did as a kid. You might experience a lot of dissociation. You might experience needing to watch something while you are eating. Maybe you’re watching something while you’re eating right now, just so that you can actually eat the food, because eating the food is too hard on your brain — it’s connecting you too much to your body, and so you need to dissociate. You need to make sure that there’s something else capturing your attention, because if you focus on the food, that attention on the food is going to create something that feels unsafe, because you’ve never trained yourself to feel safe in your body. You might feel like you want to leave. You might feel like you have rage impulses. I felt like I wanted to throw my food all the time. Thankfully, I don’t feel like I need to throw my food all the time anymore, but back in May, that’s when it came to its zenith. I would have food on my plate and I just wanted to throw it. I wanted to throw my plate on the ground. It was really hard to eat because it didn’t feel safe. And I didn’t even realize back then that’s what was going on — I just thought maybe I’m just a little stressed right now. No — I was being forced into a state of embodiment, and at that point, my body was very unsafe.

And so I want to give you this: you can’t think your way into reality. No matter how hard we try to imagine the future, no matter how hard we try to reason through things, no matter how hard we try to exist up here in our brains — you can’t exist in your brain and exist in reality. You have to exist in both your brain and your body to exist in reality. And this is something that is very, very hard to do if you have lived your entire life not in your body, if you’ve only experienced a little bit of your body at a time. Peace doesn’t come from explaining things. It does a little bit — it makes us feel a little safe because we’re explaining things. Or when you make your list, it might feel a little bit better. But have you ever experienced making that list and then never completing it? Or making the list and then adding to it, and it becomes a never-ending list, and it still is making you feel unsafe because it’s constantly running in your head.

Talking to Your Body Instead of Reasoning With It

Nowadays, I try not to reason myself into food. Instead, when I feel those urges that make me feel unsafe, what I do is I talk to my body. In the future, I hope to get to a point where I feel like my brain and my body are fully integrated, but right now it’s not that way. So I just talk to my body like it’s a second part of me. I’ll ask it, “Hey, what’s going on? Why do you feel like you need to escape from this? Why are we wanting to run? Why do you want to throw your food?” Just being gentle with it — gentle parenting your inner child — because that is the way that we’re going to be able to connect our brains to our bodies. And that’s the large point I want to make: you are the safest person for your body, because you are your body. However, we can also be one of the most unsafe people for our body if we never learn how to talk to ourselves. A lot of us have learned how to talk to ourselves very negatively, especially with ADHD. We have this running list in our head about how we’re a failure, how we haven’t done things correctly, how we’re not moving through the world fast enough, how we aren’t accomplishing what we feel like we’re supposed to be accomplishing, how we keep getting into these situations that we feel we can’t avoid, how it feels like our house is never going to be clean, how everything is so hard for us, and how we can’t do this or we can’t do that because “that’s just who I am.”

Three Steps to Reconnect: Change Self-Talk, Create Safe Spaces, Practice Regulation

And that’s the first challenge I want you to do for yourself. Besides talking to yourself, the first challenge really is listening to yourself — listening to that self-talk that you do about yourself. See if we can make it more neutral or more positive. Neutrality is usually the easier way of doing it. And if it’s negative — there’s also that sort of limiting-belief type of talk we do a lot too, of “I can’t do it because that’s who I am, that’s because I have ADHD.” I did this so much. The thing is, yes, ADHD makes it harder — but it makes it harder for us, it doesn’t make it impossible. It just means that it’s going to take some more time, it’s going to take some more patience, but we can still do it. The moment you believe you can’t do it is when you can’t do it. The moment we keep telling ourselves that we can’t is when we can’t.

And that goes into the second aspect that I want you to do: connect your brain to your body. First, through changing your self-talk from self-limiting beliefs into neutral, positive self-talk. And then, after you keep working on that, I want you to listen to your body. This is the hard part, because we’re really good at listening to our brains — we can catch ourselves when we talk to ourselves, at least some of us can, it takes practice at first — but a lot of us exist in our brains and we talk to ourselves a lot, but it’s hard to listen to our bodies. And so to listen to your body, you have to create a safe space for your body.

Nervous System Regulation in Practice

How I create a safe space for my body is being in a physical space that feels safe for my body. That’s where I can talk to my body. So if I’m starting to feel very anxious, especially around food, right, because that’s what we’re talking mostly about — if I start to feel anxious, I will go sit on a couch, or I will grab a blanket and hug myself with a blanket, or I will make sure I feel nice and warm, or maybe I’ll light a candle. Creating a spot that makes your body feel safe and relaxed. And then I try to do some nervous system regulation exercises. If you are in the Discord server, you’ve been following along with the January mental health reset I’ve been doing with all y’all — in there, there were 30 different types of nervous system regulation exercises that you can choose from. One favorite of mine is the safety signals check. That’s where you look for something that is red and you name it. Then you look for something that’s blue, and then you look for something that is sparkly or shiny. And then the next thing you do is look for an entrance. For me, right here in this room, it could be my bedroom door entrance, because this is my closet — that’s where I’m recording from. And then the next place you’re going to look for is a place to hide. I could hide under my desk. Is it going to be realistic that it would be helpful if I hid under my desk? No. But it’s just the knowledge that that’s something you could do. And then the last thing — and this is what really gets me — is looking for a place to exit. When I find that exit, it’s like my whole nervous system just relaxes. I feel like I can think clearer after that. And it doesn’t even have to be realistic — like I mentioned, usually when I do my safety check in my bedroom, it’s my windows, that’s my exit. How realistic would it be to smash a window and try to jump out of it? Not realistic. However, when I notice that that is an exit, I relax so much.

So truly, that’s the second point — making sure that you do nervous system regulation exercises when you start to feel those things. But the third aspect is actually doing the nervous system regulation exercises throughout your day, practicing that, because that is what’s going to allow you to create a system and a groundwork of safety with your body. When you start to truly do these skills every single day, as often as you remember it, it’s going to allow you to feel safer in your body, because there are simple, safe ways to get into your body. If you did that exercise with me just now, you might have felt it — that relaxation, that relief that comes with it. That is the embodiment that is safe, because it’s not a forced embodiment. Whereas food is a forced embodiment, and it can make you feel unsafe. And the goal with all of this is helping you communicate with your brain better, and helping you communicate with your body through your brain better. That’s where listening to your body comes into play, because it is sending us signals all the time. It’s sending us these signals and we can’t hear them, because we’ve trained ourselves not to hear them.

It’s hard. I’m not going to lie — all of this is hard, and it is hard work. However, it’s so worth it, because when you connect yourself with your body, you’re able to experience yourself in a different way, because it no longer feels as unsafe as it was before. And so I just want to invite you into this phrase: if food has never felt peaceful, if it’s never felt like something you can control, that’s not because you’re doing it wrong. That’s not because you haven’t tried hard enough. That’s not because you don’t have enough tools. Maybe it’s because you’re trying to force your body into a state of connection when it hasn’t felt safe enough. And it’s going to take a lot of time to feel safe in your body — it’s going to probably take your entire life. I’m fully prepared to know it’s going to take my entire life.

There’s some things you can do to help. I wrote a whole ebook on how to develop interoception with ADHD. I wrote a whole ebook about what nervous system skills are, how to understand what the system is in general, and how to connect different types of skills with different states in your body. Those you can all go find in my store — I’ll link it below and it will help you. It’s a nice stepping stool into connecting with your body. You absolutely don’t need it, though. What you need are just those three steps that I talked about before. Challenge your brain whenever you notice those negative thoughts or whenever you notice those limiting beliefs. The second one is to now start to notice when you feel unsafe and take yourself into a physically safe space. And then the third is practicing those nervous system regulation skills throughout your entire day, as often as you can — whether that’s doing some nice box breathing, or doing the five senses skill, or maybe just taking a good deep breath. For example, let’s do this one together — this is one of my favorites. We’re going to take a breath through our stomach. Fill up your stomach as much as you can, until you can’t. Now focus on your chest, still holding that breath — fill up your chest, you’ll notice you can feel more in there, right? Still holding it — breathe through your neck. Then let it all out. That is another way to connect to your body, by getting some deep, full breaths in. A lot of us don’t get full breaths in, and that’s a great way to reset your system.

It’s Okay That It’s Hard

Now, of course, I don’t have all the answers. This is just something that came out of the last couple of years and really came to that crushing point this whole last 2025, and it is something I’m still working through. However, it’s something I think not enough people understand, because we’re not thinking about this. Who thinks that food is making you become into your body? I mean, I just had the thought in December, right? It’s not something that’s very conventional to think about. However, when you think about it, it makes sense, right? And now I want you to challenge yourself and stop thinking about it — instead, let’s feel that. How does that knowledge feel in your body? Just sit with it for a second. Does it feel hard to hold? Does it feel heavy, or does it feel light? Do you feel anything? Do you actually feel anything? Because if you don’t feel anything, maybe that’s a sign that you’re very disconnected from your body. Because honestly, when I said this, I did not feel anything. I struggle a lot with truly feeling in my body.

If that’s something that you also experience — again, I cannot recommend somatics more than I can. Somatic experiencing is one of the best therapies I’ve ever had, and it truly was one of the few things that connected myself to my body, and I still need it to this day. My husband does a great job asking me, when he notices I’m doing something, like, “Hey Annika, where do you feel that in your body?” And I know that’s such a weird question to ask yourself, especially if you have ADHD and you haven’t connected to your body — it feels weird to do. I really, really encourage you to try, though. Even if it doesn’t feel real, just make it up. Go with what your intuition says. It’s also been a journey in understanding my intuition, understanding that I can trust my intuition.

And that’s what I hope for with 2026. I hope that I can continue to use this muscle — this muscle of connection — because it is a muscle. It’s something that we have to practice, because it’s part of our bodies. Our brain is part of our bodies. We have to connect both of them and practice, and only by practicing are we able to truly connect. And again, it’s going to take so long, so much of our time, but I believe it’s possible. And I’m hopeful for how it brings me closer to myself and closer to enjoying food. I’m still not there yet. I do love food, but a lot of the time it’s still really hard. It’s hard to want to eat something. It’s hard to find the energy to cook something. It’s hard to want to go to the grocery store. It’s hard to choose what to eat. Everything about food can be really hard. And it’s okay that it’s hard.

I want you to take that and hold it in your heart, or wherever you feel things, and let yourself know, let your body know, that it’s okay that it’s hard, that you don’t have to be perfect about it. I think a lot of us hold on to the idea that we need to be perfect, that we have to do everything the way that it’s supposed to be. And that holds us back from a lot. That holds us back from actual improvement, because we don’t believe that we are worthy of improvement unless it is perfect. So I want you to take that with yourself throughout the rest of your day, or whenever you listen to this again. Take that and allow yourself to be okay with the fact that it’s hard, because you also know that you can do the things that are hard. And the more that you do it, the more that you practice, the more that you connect yourself with your body, the easier it’s going to be.

You might burn out if you don’t do the things that help you not burn out — such as practicing stress resilience, practicing getting rid of extra stress and chronic stress, but also reducing the expectations that we have on ourselves. Do what you can do to reduce the expectations while still building yourself up.

That’s what I want to leave you with today. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen through this entire last year of mine, and I hope that it resonates with you as well. If it does, leave a comment, let me know what you think. If it doesn’t, leave a comment, let me know what you think. I love hearing all of your thoughts. I try to respond to all of them, especially the ones on YouTube and the podcast — they’re way easier to keep up with than the ones on Instagram. If you want to talk more about this, I also have the monthly membership, which is the Patreon — you get one-on-one DM access to me, and we actually talk about how you can help your ADHD using food, making different plans together. I think it’s a great time because it’s accountability as well as just a way to connect, because I love connecting with you, but I can’t connect with every single person — I don’t have that ability, I am one person. Unfortunately, I cannot clone myself. Maybe that’s not unfortunate — I think that would be a little freaky.

However, that’s usually the best place to get to me. And I genuinely hope for a wonderful 2026 for every single one of you. I know it’s a little late — we are going on, I think it’s the 20th, when I’m going to try to post this. So, yeah. All right. As always, take care. I’m really proud of you for getting through this entire episode, and I will see you in the next one.

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