In my new book, Odd One Out: The Maverick's Guide to Adult ADD, I talk about good nutrition being one of the basics of self-care for adults with ADD. Put simply, if you load up your body with simple carbs, sugar, caffeine (and even nicotine) then your mood and energy levels will roller coaster all day long, making it difficult to manage ADD.
That's the easy part. The hard part is knowing just what, exactly, good nutrition is.
In the 80s, when I grew up, low-fat/low-cal was all the rage. As a result, my generation was raised on nutritionally deficient foods low on fat but high in crap (like corn syrup.) No wonder there is a so-called 'obesity epidemic.' The food industry pushed a bunch of highly processed crap 'food' on us and called it healthy. We were highly misinformed.
Today there is still a lot of misinformation out there and the 'experts' disagree on everything from what is a good fat to how many servings of grains we should eat each day. It's hard for anyone to figure out how to eat healthy, let alone in such a way that will help keep personal energy levels in tact.
My nurse practitioner recently recommended a book called Real Food: What to Eat and Why by Nina Placnk. I couldn't put it down.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Nina proposes eating the way that our great, great grandparents did. Lots of fruits and veggies, whole grains, meat and eggs from pastured animals, and even full fat dairy - milk, butter, cheese and yogurt.
At first the book sounded too good to be true. Hang on, I don't have to buy skim milk or look for butter substitutes without trans fats? I don't have to become a vegetarian to be truly healthy?
Taking a closer look, however, Nina's book is really about eating natural, unrefined, unprocessed foods. And her arguments are good ones - our relatives ate like this for thousands of years. Heart disease and obesity problems only emerged in the last 100 years, when foods began to be regulated and processed.
So Erin and I have been making a shift towards eating more real food, and less processed crap.
We've been stopping at local farms for freshly picked fruits and vegetables (love those NY apples and peaches!) We're getting eggs from local farms, too. (What a difference. I dare you to buy just one dozen eggs from your local farm and see if you ever want store bought eggs again.) We've been spending a little extra to buy not just organic meat, but grass-fed and pastured meat, which I admit is not cheap. And we've even been buying from local dairy farmers, including raw milk. Yes, raw milk fresh from the cow. Full fat, unpastuerized and unhomogenized. It's amazing.
Now here's the best part: both Erin and I have never felt better.
We sleep better. We wake up refreshed. We have so much more energy on the weekends. And it doesn't take as much food for us to feel satisfied, either. We haven't even thought about fast food in weeks. While we used to look for quick dinner fixes on late working nights, we now make it a priority to take a break and make some real food.
Better yet, I don't have such a difficult time getting out of bed in the morning, and I don't need as much coffee to keep up my energy during the day. I also don't burnout as easily, which is a huge bonus. Basically, eating real food works towards keeping my stress levels down, which in turn keeps my ADD challenges at bay.
Interesting stuff, huh?
If you're interested in learning more about the real food movement, then I highly recommend picking up Real Food: What to Eat and Why.
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