Sharing my story in case it’s helpful to someone reading this. I’ve always been overweight but wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until my early 30s. My brain always craved junk, specifically foods made with sugar and/or flour. When I was first prescribed adderall, it changed my life. I no longer craved anything, rarely even thought about food, and was finally able to focus in a way I never could before. After a few months, I noticed the effects lessening so my doc titrated me up to the next dose. We did that over the course of 18 months. By then I had lost 50ish lbs and was in a healthy weight for the first time ever. But eventually the highest dose stopped working, my anxiety was through the roof, and food noise returned. I stopped taking it and gained all the weight back. I’ve gotten my prescription refilled a few times since, but the magic was gone. I wasn’t able to lose weight on it anymore, the amount of focus I had wasn’t worth all the anxiety it gave me, and the amount of hoops I had to go through during the shortage were too ridiculous to deal with every month.
Started taking Wellbutrin (a non-controlled antidepressant that works on dopamine receptors) a while ago. It barely did anything for food noise, but it did give me a little focus, prevented depression, didn’t give me anxiety, and it’s easy to get bc it’s not a controlled substance- so I’ve been taking it regularly since.
I still craved junk food and went to my new doc for a Wegovy script. She was on board, but my insurance company (who has Wegovy listed as a covered medication!) would not cover it. And like Adderall before it, it was also now in a shortage.
I had a big FUCK THIS moment, and decided I wasn’t going to trust my physical and mental health with the medical industry anymore. I was going to figure out how to do this myself, bc I felt I couldn’t rely on others to take care of me (which SUCKS bc we live in a society and SHOULD have trust that systems will take care of us).
I cared primarily about stopping the food noise and secondarily about losing weight. The food noise stopped for me by replacing what I was craving with a higher protein, lower sugar, and lower calorie version. And then filling the rest of my daily food intake with more protein, fruits, and veggies (shoutout to r/volumeeating ). The advice to “eat fruit when you’re craving sugar” never worked for me. The secret to killing food noise is eating more protein. When I crave ice cream I make protein ice cream (look up recipes on YouTube), Quest cookies satisfy my cookie cravings, Legendary Foods makes protein versions of pastries. Whenever I crave something, I eat it -just the high protein version of it- and the craving GOES AWAY.
Losing weight is all CICO (calories in, calories out) so I bought a Cronometer subscription and paired it with my Apple Watch to make sure every day I was eating about 500 calories less than I burned.
By eating at least a third of my daily calories as protein, it has not been difficult to eat in a calorie deficit this way. I’ve steadily been losing about 2lbs a week since the summer.
I have a fantasy version of myself that is an “intuitive eater” who naturally craves only whole foods and instinctively keeps at a healthy weight without trying. But I’ve never been this person! My brain makes me crave high calorie junk food, so I have to do something to deal with it instead of just wishing I wasn’t this way.
I’ve had a few slip ups during my weight loss journey where I had a bite of junk food outside the house (a wedding, a sleepover at a friend’s house) and I was back to square one with cravings. Once I start eating junk food, and I don’t have a high protein food ready to eat immediately after, my brain goes full addiction food and screams at me to keep eating. So I end up eating more. This NEVER happens on a regular day when I’m eating my normal high protein diet with high protein treats.
The bodybuilder community calls these “anabolic recipes” and eating this way has truly changed my life. I recommend anyone with food noise to give it a try!
