Losing Weight with ADHD

In today's episode, I talk about something that I know you probably will understand, self-compassion. Sometimes things feel hard and you might not be very kind to yourself. I needed this reminder for myself, and I'm sharing it with you. 

I discuss what self-compassion means, what it is not, and why it matters in weight loss: 

• Stephen Hickman defines compassion as "the awareness of suffering coupled with a desire to relive that suffering."
• Self-compassion is the act of noticing when you're struggling, recognizing that's actually part of being human, and then being kind to yourself rather than beating yourself up. 
• Kristin Neff says that there are three elements that have to be present for self-compassion: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness.
• Self-compassion is NOT complacency or not showing yourself tough love, being overly permissive, self-pity and feeling sorry for yourself, or selfish and looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. 
• Why it matters with weight loss: 
  • Practicing self-compassion increases your mindfulness, so you're more aware of your actions, feelings, and thoughts. Mindfulness leads to change! 
  • This also leads to changing your perception of yourself (your mind, your body, your whole self) and this can lead to you wanting to care for yourself more. 
  • A study showed that having self-compassion can help engage in healthier weight loss behavior by helping them become less demoralized by setbacks. 
  • From Shahroo Izadi's book, she says "it is those who struggle to be kind to themselves who have the hardest time when they try to make lasting, meaningful changes to their eating habits." 
• Find a way to be more self-compassionate that works for you. If it feels weird to you, try something a bit different! 
• You've got this! 

Kristin Neff's book: Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself 
Shahroo Izadi's book: The Last Diet: Discover the Secret to Losing Weight - for Good

I'd love to hear from you! You can connect with me in the following ways:

Instagram: @thejennwatts
Email: [email protected]

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue to create content that supports you on your journey.

I'd love to know if there's something you want to hear more about or if you want to let me know about your own experiences with ADHD and weight loss.

Today I talk about your environment and how it can affect your ADHD. How are your surroundings impacting you? Is that affecting your weight loss? Find out in today's episode! Some things I discuss are: 

• If you are a person who is naturally more attuned to your environment, it can be exhausting, and it can impact your mood.
• More clutter can impact your mood and take up your mental energy, which can lead to overwhelm and being stressed out, which can lead to relief, perhaps with food. It's a chain reaction. 
• A study by the Royal Australian College of General Practicioners found that people with extremely cluttered homes are 77% more likely to be overweight and that tidy homes have been found to be a predictor of physical health. 
• When we have ADHD,  we are often blind to how clutter gets started. Clutter consciousness is a thing! 

What to do about the clutter: 

• Start small! 
• Picture your future self living the way you would love to live, what does that look like in terms of your environment? Work backwards in small steps to get there! 
• Functionality - what does functionality look like for you in your environment? 
• Developing your awareness around what makes you feel good and being aware of what's happening around you can lead to you making little changes here and there that lead you to your goals. 

There's a total connection between your environment, ADHD, and your weight loss goals! 

I'd love to hear from you! You can connect with me in the following ways:

Instagram: @thejennwatts
Email: [email protected]

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue to create content that supports you on your journey.

I'd love to know if there's something you want to hear more about or if you want to let me know about your own experiences with ADHD and weight loss.

This week I talk about autonomy and ADHD. I don't have a list for you this week, but here are some of the items I discuss:

• Autonomy is the experience of acting from choice rather than feeling pressured to act.  I kind of think of it as having input, having a say. 
• It's not just you reacting and following a set of rules or something. It's you having a choice or a say in whatever you're doing. 
• As people with ADHD, we know that we don't like being told what to do and it can feel super restrictive.
• We need to be able to make our own choices in ways that make sense to us and our lives. 
• There are three needs that need to be met for people with ADHD: autonomy, relatedness, and competence.
• Even though autonomy is super important, we still need guidance and structure around meeting goals (think about using the bumpers when bowling).
• A cookie-cutter approach to things like weight loss, will likely be difficult for you because it limits your autonomy to make decisions and figure out what works for you. 

I'm developing a group program for people with ADHD who are pursuing weight loss! We're going to work on this together to help you develop ways for you to reach your goals. And we'll have connectedness through the community aspect. Make sure to sign up to be on the waitlist so you get more details about it! 

I'd love to hear from you! You can connect with me in the following ways:

Instagram: @thejennwatts
Email: [email protected]

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue to create content that supports you on your journey.

I'd love to know if there's something you want to hear more about or if you want to let me know about your own experiences with ADHD and weight loss.

This week I'm so excited to share this interview I did with Karrie Lemansky. Karrie is a self-described neurospicy friend and Chief Weirdo of Karrie Out Loud! She has always lived with ADHD (but was misdiagnosed with anxiety and depression until age 49). She helps out-of-the-box thinkers and ADHD women build better businesses so they can have better lives because of it and to be able to use their outside-of-the-box brains. She's also a life coach! 

We talk about so much in this episode, and it's all so good! Here are a few things we talk about:

• What it's like to work with a coach who has ADHD
• Misdiagnosis of ADHD in women
• Self-judgement and wondering what's wrong with me
• Being in the moment 
• Intuition and ADHD
• Connection and finding your people 

Connect with Karrie: 

• On her website: https://www.karrieoutloud.com/
• Listen to The ADHD Entrepreneu(Her) podcast
• Follow Karrie on IG @karrieoutloud
• Follow the Neurospicy Collective on IG @theneurospicycollective
• How Karrie can help you
• Example cube timer

I'd love to hear from you! You can connect with me in the following ways:

Instagram: @thejennwatts
Email: [email protected]

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue to create content that supports you on your journey.

I'd love to know if there's something you want to hear more about or if you want to let me know about your own experiences with ADHD and weight loss.

I think we all know that walking is good for you, but this week, I talk about walking in the context of weight loss and how weight loss,  ADHD, and the interconnection between all of them.

This week, I talk about 11 ways that walking can be beneficial for you: 

1. Increases your energy
2. Stress reduction
3. Amazing for your overall health
4. Better sleep 
5. Lower your blood sugar
6. Improves your mood
7. Burns calories
8. Beneficial for your nervous system
9. Better brain function
10. Helps with digestion
11. A good way to set and meet your goals for yourself 

• I recognize that walking is not for everyone due disabilities, chronic pain, or mental health attributes. 
• I acknowledge that walking is not necessarily for everybody and that there are other things you can do that would give you benefits like walking that might be more accessible to you. 

I'd love to hear from you! You can connect with me in the following ways:

Instagram: @thejennwatts
Email: [email protected]

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue to create content that supports you on your journey.

I'd love to know if there's something you want to hear more about or if you want to let me know about your own experiences with ADHD and weight loss.

Today's episode is all about motivation and how it affects us people with ADHD and how it ties into when you have a weight loss goal. You might know the feeling of wanting to get started on something, but you just aren't able to get going or get any kind of forward progress. 

Today I talk about six ways that motivation may or may not show up for you and the kind of struggles that you might have with ADHD and nine things you can do to help it. 

Six ways that motivation may show up for you: 

1. Overwhelm - becoming overwhelmed with information and being in state of paralysis to get started
2. Boredom - finding it hard to pay attention to or become interested in any task because you are reactive to boredom 
3. Anxiety - being unable to concentrate on anything or start anything because of anxiety 
4. Shame and Discomfort - feeling these feelings deeply and being triggered by unhelpful comments and/or ideas about how you should be able to lose weight
5. Task Urgency Reliance - relying on a sense of urgency or a deadline because our brains want novelty and excitement. With urgency it's easier to do things, but without the sense of urgency it can be difficult and unhealthy to become motivated
6. Energy drain - monotony of daily tasks can seem draining and exhausting, making it hard to be motivated

Nine things to help with motivation: 

1. Break things into smaller tasks
2. Recognize and celebrate completing those smaller tasks
3. Assign a small amount of time to work on the tasks (like doing a five-minute fitness video you find on YouTube) 
4. Change things up and keep it interesting
5. Redefine the reason you want to do something in the first place 
6. Tap into your strengths and your likes 
7. Ask for help (or accountability) 
8. Find ways to make it fun! 
9. Have a plan or to-do list

The key is to remember what works for you and play to your own strengths. 

What resonated with you on this episode? 

I'd love to hear from you! You can connect with me in the following ways:

Instagram: @thejennwatts
Email: [email protected]

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue to create content that supports you on your journey.

I'd love to know if there's something you want to hear more about or if you want to let me know about your own experiences with ADHD and weight loss.

This week I talk about impulsivity and how it relates to losing weight with ADHD. I've touched on this briefly in other episodes, but this episode is all about impulsivity specifically. In this episode, I discuss the six ways that impulsivity might show up for you and six ways that you can combat impulsivity. 

Six ways that impulsivity might show up for you: 

1. Disrupted eating patterns- waiting too long to eat and then being super ravenous 
2. Disordered eating- binge eating 
3. Boredom or procrastination or overwhelm - are you looking for food out of boredom, for example? 
4. Seeing food and wanting it because it's available - see it and eat it 
5. Thinking about food - and then wanting food just because you're thinking about it 
6. Emotional dysregulation- does your emotional state contribute to your eating? 

Six ways to combat impulsivity: 

1. Find a way to become aware of what you do and when you do it (notice patterns). 
2. Dont expect that impulsivity will just go away
3. Find other things to do that stimulate your brain 
4. Portion out your food
5. Plan out what and when to eat
6. Exercise 

I had several people reach out to me about this topic. If there's something you'd like for me to talk more about, please reach out to let me know! 

I'd love to hear from you! You can connect with me in the following ways:

Instagram: @thejennwatts
Email: [email protected]

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue to create content that supports you on your journey.

I'd love to know if there's something you want to hear more about or if you want to let me know about your own experiences with ADHD and weight loss.

This week's episode is a little bit different than I expected. I had a tough family situation come up and I wanted to talk about when things get hard. 

• This is the time when you really get a good view of where you stand with your emotions, with your drive, with your habits, all of that kind of stuff.
•  When things have happened that kind of throw you off course or become challenging it's so easy to just throw away anything that you've been focused on or working towards.
• I share some thoughts about how in this situation,  I wasn't expecting perfection from myself. I wasn't expecting myself to just stick with these arbitrary rules, arbitrary rules and ways of being that are just like super regimented around food. 
• Awareness and understanding yourself, how you handle things and what works for you can make such a big difference in being able to weather the storm or whatever difficult circumstances come your way. 
• Being compassionate and not expecting perfection are so important. You can still work towards your goals. You've got this!

I'd love to hear from you! You can connect with me in the following ways:

Instagram: @thejennwatts
Email: [email protected]

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue to create content that supports you on your journey.

I'd love to know if there's something you want to hear more about or if you want to let me know about your own experiences with ADHD and weight loss.

This week I talk about meal planning for weight loss with ADHD. You know how I love a list, so here are three different lists to help you: 

• Five reasons why meal planning might be harder for us:
  1. Executive functioning can affect our ability to think ahead, make a list, prepping food
  2. Time management and time perception might be incorrect or can be a struggle
  3. Overwhelm with food choices can lead to decision paralysis
  4. Impulsivity or novelty-seeking might make sticking to a plan seem boring and too structured
  5. Completion of the plan doesn't get done or we forget parts of it which leads to frustration
• Five reasons why meal planning matters when it comes to weight loss:
  1. You want to make sure to cover your bases when it comes to nutrients and balanced meals
  2. Having a strategy means you'll be less likely to choose things on the fly which will derail your goals
  3. Having a plan allows you to add in ways to treat yourself at a specific time
  4. Less decision-making means you'll be less mentally exhausted and less likely to do emotionally driven eating
  5. Save time and money, and prevent food waste
• Five things you can do to make meal planning easier:
  1. Start small! Don't overdo it with how much you decide to take on.
  2. Make the process enjoyable.
  3. Don't follow a prescriptive method. It has to work for you and your lifestyle and your preferences. 
  4. Keep it simple! 
  5. Add reminders and visual cues to your life around meal planning so you're reminded about your plan. 

I can't wait for you to listen to this episode. Please remember that ADHD can make things more of a challenge, but it's never a personality flaw!

Don't forget to check out my Mastering Meal Planning with ADHD course and the CALM Method for Weight Loss with ADHD. 

I'd love to hear from you! You can connect with me in the following ways:

Instagram: @thejennwatts
Email: [email protected]

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue to create content that supports you on your journey.

I'd love to know if there's something you want to hear more about or if you want to let me know about your own experiences with ADHD and weight loss.

This week I am so excited to share this conversation that I had with Dr. Patty Shutt, founder of Scared Treehouse, a meditation and education center in Boca Raton Florida. 

• We talk about mindfulness in general, as a branch of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy mixed with Eastern practices like Buddhism. 
• Dr. Patty shares her own story of ADHD and how she has surrounded herself with her own tribe of people who understand and support her in her daily life.
• Dr. Patty shares what tacos and taco nights have to do with mindfulness through her own story. 
• She shares how she helps clients to practice mindfulness and also be compassionate with themselves on their journies. 

Dr. Patty has over 20 years of experience working with individuals and groups to improve mental and emotional functioning. She's deeply compassionate. She's genuine. She's an active therapist who helps individuals with a range of difficulties, such as depression, anxiety, addiction, trauma-related difficulties, stress management, and lifespan adjustment issues. She works in collaboration with her clients to create desired changes and reach important goals for lifelong mental wellness, and she believes everyone should live a life filled with love, health, peace, and personal fulfillment. The best part about her bio is that at the end it says that she lives to end suffering.

Learn more about the work that Dr. Patty does and how she can help you at the Sacred Treehouse and Therapeutic Oasis. 

I'd love to hear from you! You can connect with me in the following ways:

Instagram: @thejennwatts
Email: [email protected]

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps me continue to create content that supports you on your journey.

I'd love to know if there's something you want to hear more about or if you want to let me know about your own experiences with ADHD and weight loss.