Best of You Consultancy

24/08/2026

When Hunger Doesn’t Shout: ADHD, Interoception and Our Relationship With Food

For many people, eating seems fairly straightforward.

You get hungry. You notice you’re hungry. You decide what you want. You make something. You eat it.

But that apparently simple sequence actually requires quite a lot from the brain.

You have to detect an internal bodily signal, recognise what it means, shift your attention towards it, make a decision, initiate an action and follow that action through.

For some people with ADHD, difficulties can occur at almost every stage of that process.

And that may help explain some eating patterns which, viewed from the outside, can look inconsistent, impulsive or simply puzzling.

Interoception: hearing what the body is saying

Interoception is our ability to perceive and interpret signals originating inside the body.

Hunger and fullness are part of it, but so are thirst, temperature, heartbeat, nausea, pain, fatigue and the need to use the toilet.

Importantly, interoception isn’t simply a matter of whether the body produces a signal.

There is also the question of whether we notice it, correctly identify it and respond to it.

Someone might therefore go for hours without consciously experiencing hunger, only to suddenly realise that they feel shaky, irritable, nauseous, headachy or completely depleted.

The body may have been signalling for some time.

The signal simply didn’t win the competition for attention.

This is particularly interesting in ADHD because attention isn’t just about being unable to concentrate. It is also about the regulation and allocation of attention.

When someone is deeply absorbed in work, a project, gaming, caring for somebody else or simply getting through a busy day, relatively quiet internal signals can be remarkably easy to miss.

By the time hunger becomes impossible to ignore, gentle hunger may have become urgent hunger.

And urgent hunger changes behaviour.

“I forgot to eat… and now I want everything”

This can create a pattern that is easily mistaken for a simple lack of self-control.

Little food is eaten during the day.

Hunger signals are missed or postponed.

Energy falls.

Executive resources are already depleted.

Then, in the evening, the person suddenly becomes extremely hungry and reaches for foods that are immediate, rewarding and require little effort.

That might mean eating considerably more at night, grazing continuously, reaching for highly palatable foods or ordering a takeaway despite having food in the fridge.

The behaviour at 9pm makes much more sense when we look at what happened at 9am, 1pm and 5pm.

Sometimes the issue isn’t excessive appetite.

It is delayed response to appetite.

Knowing how to cook isn’t the same as being able to make dinner

This is where executive function enters the picture.

“Make something to eat” sounds like one task.

It isn’t.

You have to decide what to eat, check ingredients, sequence the steps, gather what you need, begin preparing it, monitor time, tolerate interruptions, complete the meal and often clean up afterwards.

Someone can be perfectly capable of cooking and still stand in front of a full fridge feeling completely unable to begin.

That’s an important distinction.

Knowledge is not initiation.

And when hunger, tiredness, decision fatigue and executive dysfunction converge at the end of a day, the threshold for starting can become even higher.

Hence the apparently ridiculous situation of ordering food while perfectly good groceries slowly expire six inches away.

From an executive-function perspective, it isn’t ridiculous at all.

The takeaway has removed most of the cognitive steps.

And then there are “food phases”

Another pattern many neurodivergent people recognise is finding a particular food and eating it repeatedly.

Same breakfast.

Same lunch.

Same snack.

Every day.

Until one morning you look at your formerly beloved food and would rather eat the plate.

There are several possible mechanisms here, and we should be careful not to reduce all of them to dopamine.

Familiar foods reduce decision-making. They are predictable. Their taste, texture, smell and preparation are known. For somebody dealing with sensory sensitivities or decision fatigue, that predictability can be extremely useful.

Novelty and reward may also play a part. Something initially interesting or highly rewarding can become less compelling through repetition.

So familiarity can initially make a food easier to choose, while habituation may eventually make it less appealing.

The resulting behaviour can look contradictory:

“I only want this.”

followed three weeks later by:

“I never want to see this again.”

But those two responses may arise from the same nervous system balancing predictability, effort, sensory experience and reward.

What about cravings?

Crunchy. Salty. Sweet. Cold. Fizzy. Strongly flavoured.

Food doesn’t only provide nutrition.

It provides sensory input and reward.

Texture, temperature, taste and the physical act of chewing can all contribute to the experience of regulation and stimulation.

That doesn’t mean every craving in someone with ADHD is caused by ADHD — far from it. Hunger, sleep, learned associations, restriction, stress, medication, hormones, metabolic factors and individual preference all matter.

But it does mean that asking “What is this person getting from this food?” may sometimes be more useful than simply asking why they haven’t chosen something supposedly healthier.

The missing link may be the sequence

Perhaps one of the most useful ways to understand food difficulties in ADHD is to stop looking at eating as a single behaviour.

Instead, consider the chain:

Body signal → awareness → interpretation → attention → decision → initiation → action → regulation

A difficulty anywhere along that chain can change what eventually happens on the plate.

That also explains why simply giving someone nutritional information may not solve the problem.

They may already know exactly what a balanced meal looks like.

The difficulty may be noticing hunger early enough.

Or disengaging from another activity.

Or choosing between twelve possible meals.

Or tolerating the sensory properties of available food.

Or initiating preparation.

Or having enough executive energy left at the end of the day to turn ingredients into dinner.

Those require different solutions.

Understanding the pattern changes the question

None of these behaviours is diagnostic of ADHD, and similar patterns can occur for many other reasons. Significant binge eating, restriction, unexplained appetite or weight changes, or symptoms such as recurrent shakiness also deserve proper assessment rather than automatically being attributed to neurodivergence.

But for people with ADHD who recognise these patterns, understanding the mechanisms can remove some of the moral judgement that so often surrounds eating.

Instead of:

“Why can’t I just eat properly?”

perhaps the more useful questions are:

When do I actually notice hunger?

What happens between noticing it and eating?

Where in that sequence does the process tend to fall apart?

Because sometimes the difficulty isn’t knowing what your body needs.

It’s noticing the message, switching attention to it, and getting the brain and body organised enough to respond.

23/08/2026

Sometimes relationship isolation doesn’t begin with:

“You can’t see them anymore.”

It begins with:

“Let me explain what you’re not seeing about them.”

There is a form of manipulation that can happen to anyone, but may be particularly difficult to recognise for some neurodivergent people.

A partner notices something about someone in your life.

Did you not notice how she spoke to you?

Why do you think he only calls when he wants something?

I can’t believe you don’t see what they’re doing.

Then comes the analysis.

Conversations are broken down. Motives are explained. Past events are reinterpreted. And because some of what they say may actually be true, the explanation can feel incredibly convincing.

For someone who has spent years being told they’ve missed social cues, misunderstood intentions or taken people too literally, there can be something compelling about a person who seems absolutely certain:

“You don’t see these things. I do.”

And gradually, the people around you begin to look different.

A friend is using you.

A sibling is controlling.

A colleague can’t be trusted.

Someone who questions the relationship is jealous or interfering.

One by one, your relationships are reinterpreted until almost everyone appears unsafe…

except the person doing the interpreting.

That is when we need to look beyond each individual argument and notice the pattern.

This isn’t about suggesting neurodivergent people are gullible, but it can feel like it when you realise what’s been happening. Nor is a partner abusive simply because they raise a genuine concern about somebody, without it then seemingly spreading to being about nearly everyone.

The important question is what happens to your autonomy within your relationship.

A healthy relationship can help you see something you have missed while leaving you free to think differently. It’s not one sided analysis.

Control teaches you that you cannot trust your own judgement and increasingly need somebody else’s judgment to keep you right because they are ‘looking out for you’.

So perhaps the question isn’t only:

“Are they right about this person?”

It’s also:

“Since this relationship began, has my world become bigger or smaller?”

Because sometimes isolation doesn’t look like someone locking the door.

Sometimes it looks like someone very convincingly explaining why there is nobody left outside it worth trusting.

21/08/2026

Maybe the flex is this?

We often talk about resilience as though it is something that sits inside an individual.

19/08/2026

I’ve been training my ADHD brain to find dopamine in surprisingly ordinary places.

One of the things we often hear about ADHD is that our brains are constantly seeking dopamine.

But something I’ve become increasingly interested in is whether we can become more deliberate about where we find it.

For me, self-care has become one of those places.

Take breakfast.

I could put some food on a plate and eat it. Instead, I take a little more care over preparing it. I add fruit. I make it colourful. I use a mug I love. I make the whole thing visually appealing.

The nutritional value matters, of course, but there is another layer to it.

The preparation itself is satisfying.

The presentation gives me pleasure.

The anticipation gives me something to look forward to.

And eating something I’ve deliberately prepared for myself reinforces the idea that looking after myself feels good.

I’ve started doing something similar with mundane jobs.

Washing up at night isn’t particularly exciting. But walking into a clean kitchen the following morning is.

So I’ve learned to connect the action tonight with the reward tomorrow morning.

In other words, I haven’t stopped having an ADHD brain that seeks reward.

I’ve just become much more intentional about where I teach it to look for one.

Movement. Music. Good food. Sunlight. Finishing a small job. Making my environment pleasant. Preparing something for future-me. Noticing when something feels good rather than racing straight onto the next thing.

Because medication isn’t the only way we can support an ADHD brain.

Sometimes part of ADHD self-management is learning how to make the ordinary rewarding.

And, rather wonderfully, tomorrow morning’s clean kitchen counts.

19/08/2026

Channel 4’s The Great ADHD Myth? has understandably created a lot of conversation.

There are important questions to ask about ADHD diagnosis, assessment and medication. We should be able to have those conversations.

But there is a difference between questioning how ADHD is diagnosed and questioning the experiences of people who live with it.

Many adults with ADHD spent years, sometimes decades, without a diagnosis.

They were the children who were told to try harder.

The teenagers who wondered why everyone else seemed to cope more easily.

The adults who developed countless strategies just to keep up.

A diagnosis didn’t create those experiences.

It gave them a name.

And while environment, stress, sleep, screens and life circumstances can all affect how we function, supporting someone to function better doesn’t mean their underlying difficulties weren’t real.

So if the current debate has left you questioning yourself, remember this:

A diagnostic label may help explain your story. It didn’t write it.

We can have better conversations about ADHD without invalidating the people who live with it.

17/08/2026

My latest article on Neurodivergence and body doubling

https://theabp.org.uk/projected-helplessness-and-body-doubling-reconsidering-the-relational-nature-of-human-capability/

16/08/2026

A GOOD ADHD SCREENER SHOULD ALSO SHOW: DEFINITELY NOT ADHD.

ADHD MORE LIKELY
Lifelong pattern
Present since childhood
Pervasive across life
Masking & compensation
Executive & emotional difficulties

ADHD LESS LIKELY
Difficulties are more recent
Linked to stress or burnout
No clear lifelong pattern

40 questions. 5 domains. A broader picture.

There’s a reason I developed the FAAS-40 ADHD screener for women.

Actually, there are two.

The first was to help find the women who had been missed.

Women whose ADHD wasn’t necessarily presenting in the stereotypical way we had learned to look for it.

Women who were functioning, but often at considerable cost.

They might be struggling with executive functioning and working memory, emotional regulation, disorganisation in everyday life, impulsivity or hyperfocus.

They might have become extremely good at masking.

They might rely heavily on lists, reminders, alarms, routines and other compensatory systems simply to keep everyday life running.

They might appear organised from the outside while knowing how much effort it takes to maintain that appearance.

Those are some of the experiences the FAAS-40 was designed to bring into view.

But there is another side to screening that I think is just as important: ruling people away from an unnecessary assessment.

Because ADHD awareness has grown enormously.

One woman is diagnosed and starts talking about her experiences, and quite understandably, her friends may begin recognising certain things in themselves.

“I’m forgetful too.”

“My concentration has also become terrible.”

“I’m also overwhelmed all the time.”

“I don’t feel as organised as I used to.”

And yes, some of those women may have previously unidentified ADHD.

But some won’t.

Life stress, burnout, poor sleep and the cognitive and emotional effects associated with perimenopause and menopause can create difficulties that overlap with individual ADHD-related experiences.

The difference becomes clearer when we stop looking at one or two familiar-sounding traits and start looking at the pattern.

That is one of the reasons screening matters.

The FAAS-40 isn’t designed to diagnose ADHD. It is a screening aid.

Sometimes a woman’s responses suggest a sufficiently strong pattern of ADHD-related traits that further clinical assessment would be appropriate.

But sometimes they don’t.

And I think that matters too.

Particularly in a system where someone may otherwise spend a considerable amount of money pursuing a private assessment they may not need.

A screening tool shouldn’t only be good at pointing people towards assessment. It should also be useful in identifying when further ADHD assessment may not be indicated.

For every woman who has spent decades wondering why nobody recognised what she was experiencing, there may be another who has quite reasonably wondered whether ADHD explains some recent changes in her life.

Both deserve a useful answer.

That, for me, is the point of screening

Helping kickstart new lifestyle choices through coaching, guided by a psychologist.

14/08/2026

The good life is not the perfect life.

In positive psychology, Martin Seligman wrote about The Good Life, moving us away from the idea that living well simply means feeling good.

A good life is not a life devoid of worry, strife, disappointment or pain.

Those things are part of being human.

I was thinking about this alongside Rumer Godden’s writing about the idea that we are each like a house of four rooms: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

Godden suggested that we need to go into each room every day, even if only to “keep it aired.”

I love that metaphor.

Because perhaps wellbeing isn’t about keeping every room immaculate.

Sometimes the emotional room is messy.
Sometimes the mental room is overcrowded.
Sometimes the physical room needs rest.
Sometimes the spiritual room needs its windows thrown wide open.

And sometimes we can spend so long in one room that we begin to believe the view from its window is the whole world.

It isn’t.

Perhaps part of living the good life is learning how to move around our own house.

To notice which room needs attention.
To open a window.
To sit there for a while.
To leave when we need to.
And to remember that there are other rooms and other views.

The good life isn’t the absence of difficult rooms.

It’s knowing how to visit them, air them and tend to them, without mistaking any one of them for the whole house.

13/08/2026

To all my A-Level clients getting their results today,

Whatever is written on that piece of paper, please remember that it is information about one moment in your life. It is not a verdict on your future.

Some of you will be celebrating today, and I hope you allow yourself to feel incredibly proud.

Some of you might be disappointed, confused, relieved, numb, or wondering what happens next. That’s okay too.

A-Level results measure how you performed in a particular system, under particular circumstances, at a particular point in your life. They cannot measure your creativity, kindness, humour, determination, emotional intelligence, practical ability, curiosity or the person you are still becoming.

And if you are neurodivergent, you may have reached today having worked enormously hard simply to navigate an educational system that doesn’t always allow you to show what you know in the way you know it.

So celebrate the grades that went brilliantly.

And for the ones that didn’t?

They are a change of route, not the end of the road.

There are clearing places, different courses, different pathways, apprenticeships, work, gap years, resits and opportunities you don’t even know exist yet.

You don’t have to have your whole life worked out today.

Take today one step at a time. Be gentle with yourself. And whatever those results say, please remember:

You are still you. Your potential hasn’t changed since yesterday.