nutrition & mental health

  • Our diet has been linked to symptoms of depression (Ekinci & Sanlier, 2023).

    When we feel depressed, we may:

    • struggle with meal preparation

    • skip meals and snacks

    • eat alone

    • eat comfort foods to feel better but that are limited in nutrient value

    • feel bad about ourselves for our food choices

    When we feel depressed, it can be a challenge to cook, clean, or eat foods that might help us feel well.

    To support our mental health, we may benefit from making eating well easier by exploring topics like:

    • where to eat when eating out

    • what to eat when eating out

    • easy meal and snack ideas

  • People with ADHD often have symptoms of impulsivity, hyperactivity (restlessness), and difficulty with executive function (e.g., focusing, planning, and finishing tasks; Ptacek et al., 2016) along with difficulties in emotion regulation, rejection sensitivity, and sensory processing disorder.

    Sensory processing disorder is a heightened or reduced sensitivity to sound, smell, taste, texture, touch, and body signals (e.g., hunger, fullness, or emotional pain; Bayoumi et al., 2025).

    ‍The symptoms of ADHD can have a big impact on a person’s diet and meal pattern. As a result, people with ADHD are at greater risk of experiencing:

    • food sensitivities (e.g., food aversions; Pinto et al., 2022)

    • unstructured meal patterns

    • eating disorders (e.g., binge eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, and anorexia nervosa; Pinto et al., 2022)

    • obesity, hypertension, and Type 2 diabetes (Leppert et al., 2021)

    People with ADHD are also at a higher risk of several physical and mental health disorders that can have an impact on their quality of life, such as:

    • chronic pain (Battison et al., 2023)

    • gut issues (e.g., reflux, hernia, and IBS; Kedem et al., 2020)

    • autoimmune disorders (e.g., psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis; Leppert et al., 2021)

    • anxiety disorders (Saccaro et al., 2021)

    • mood disorders

    • sleep disorders

    For a more exhaustive list, check out ADDitude Magazine

    • additudemag.com

    If you have ADHD, you may need a different approach to your diet - one that is neuroaffirming and strengths-based.

  • Eating well is a big part of managing pain, but in the midst of pain, it can be difficult to eat well.

    Much like when we are depressed, if we are in pain, we might struggle with:

    • meal preparation

    • skipping meals and snacks

    • eating for comfort or joy

    When dealing with chronic pain, there’s a long list of recommendations for ‘what to do’ and ‘what not to do.’ These lists can be exhaustive. They can even impose limits on the parts of your life that give you joy (e.g., eating out, eating with friends). When chronic pain is lifelong, these lists can be difficult to maintain on a continuous basis.

    In painful moments, it’s normal to seek comfort, to want to sit or lie down, stay still, and eat foods that make you feel good.

    Then come the automatic negative thoughts (e.g., jumping to worst case scenario, all or nothing thinking) that make you feel like a failure for not being able to stick to your diet or movement goals 100% of the time.

    Chronic pain is such a long and hard journey that it can be difficult to maintain hope and a willingness to keep trying.

    If you are navigating chronic pain, it’s important that you are surrounded by healthcare professionals that want to work with you to find small and realistic changes to your diet AND mindset that would support your quality of life in the midst of pain.

food, weight, & body image

  • Food has a variety of purposes. It provides us with fuel, nourishment, and joy, and brings people together to celebrate special occasions and honour our cultural roots.

    Food has also become laden with judgement, morality (good versus bad), and rules for how we ‘should’ eat (Brown et al., 2012). Some foods carry more nutritional value than others, but all foods can fit in a well-balanced diet.

    Likewise, our weight and body image are burdened with attitudes and rules that put our bodies, the foods we eat, and the number on the scale into categories of ‘good’ (e.g., clean, healthy, desirable) and ‘bad’ (e.g., unhealthy or undesirable).

    The way our bodies look, our food intake, and our weight are affected by a variety of factors, only a few of which are personal choice. Our bodies are impacted by:

    • our environment (e.g., the walkability of a neighbourhood, Wang et al., 2023; access and affordability of healthy food in an environment, Atanasova et al., 2022)

    • our childhood (e.g., childhood food environment, Kininmonth et al., 2022; childhood adverse life experiences, Thapa et al., 2025)

    • personal factors (e.g., stress, inflammation, hormones, genetics, sensory preferences, and gut microbiome, Noor et al., 2023)

    • personal choices (e.g., food and movement choices)

  • As humans, we make many food choices in a day. It’s not realistic to only have positive choices.

    Likewise, over the course of a day, we will have many emotions (e.g., joy, sadness, pride, grief, disgust).

    Emotions are burdened with judgement based in morality (Elliot et al., 2025; Greenberg, 2006, 2024).

    Supposed ‘good emotions’: joy, surprise, curiosity.

    Supposed ‘bad emotions’: disgust, sadness, emotional pain, grief, anger, or pride.

    Our emotions are our emotional compass, and when adaptive, they are directly connected to our essential universal human needs.

    Example:

    • Anger can be energizing and empowering, helping you protect yourself by setting boundaries.

    • Emotional pain can help you disengage to prevent further injury and withdraw into self to heal.

    The problem is that when we’ve learned that feeling sadness, anger, or emotional pain is ‘bad,’ ‘weak,’ or ‘self-indulgent,’ these emotions will trigger shame that makes us feel bad about ourselves.

    Shame is the feeling that I am bad or that something is fundamentally wrong with me (Brown, 2006). Feeling shame is this awful, sinking feeling. It’s this complex web of feeling trapped, powerless, and isolated. It’s unbearable for most people and often beyond our awareness.

    Say in the midst of this intense emotional pain, we reach for comfort food that gives us some of those good feelings we desire but also gives us more shame (e.g., I am bad, broken, flawed).

    Our shame may trigger a secondary feeling of anger that causes us to react and explode at those around us, or we might hide and withdraw, self-soothing with food, substances, or distraction and numbing (e.g., social media).

    Emotional eating is hard. To start, we need to become aware and accepting of our distressing emotions and our universal human imperfections. We need to find a way of understanding and integrating the various parts of us to reduce shame and self-soothe in the midst of distress.

  • How we feel about our weight and body image are affected by:

    • social comparison (Brown et al., 2012)

    • beauty ideals set by the media, fashion industry, and social media

    • weight bias of society (unconscious attitudes about weight)

    • internalized shame (e.g., feeling of being flawed, broken, bad, unloveable, or unworthy)

    Navigating the internalized shame you feel about your body is hard, even when you know intellectually that your body is acceptable as it is. Often, the goal in the media is body positivity, but that’s not always realistic and may be dismissive of your experiences.

    To navigate these concerns from an EFT perspective, we bring our harsh inner critic to life to make the unconscious conscious so that we can understand the impacts and get in touch with our adaptive feelings and needs (Elliott et al., 2025).