Stop Fighting Your Body: What I’ve Learned About ADHD, Hormones, & Weight Loss

My Body Changed. My Brain Changed. So I Had to Change With Them.

My relationship with weight loss has changed a lot over the years.

I’ve lost weight before. I’ve gained it back. I’ve strength trained. I’ve counted calories. I’ve done Weight Watchers. I’ve used a GLP-1. I’ve eaten incredibly “clean.” I’ve tracked macros. I’ve watched the scale go down and I’ve watched it refuse to move while I was working my ass off in the gym.

And somewhere along the way, this stopped being just a weight-loss journey for me.

It became a lesson in the connection between my mind, my hormones, my nervous system, and my body.

As a therapist, I talk all the time about understanding the why behind our behaviors. But going through my own health journey has forced me to apply that same curiosity to myself.

The first thing I learned: food affected more than my weight.

During one phase of my weight-loss journey, I started noticing a pattern with my anxiety.

When I was eating a lot of processed sugar, I didn’t just notice changes in my appetite or weight. I noticed how I felt.

For me, periods of heavier processed-sugar intake seemed to coincide with feeling more physically anxious—more jittery, uncomfortable in my body, and dysregulated. When I dramatically reduced processed sugar and started eating mostly whole foods, fruit and naturally occurring sugars, I felt significantly better.

That experience made me start paying attention differently.

Not:

“Is this food good or bad?”

But:

“How does my body respond when I eat this way?”

That’s a very different question.

And now, as I’m in a different phase of my health journey—trying to lose fat while building and preserving muscle—I’m learning something else:

I don’t necessarily need restriction. I need balance.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life believing that I can never have chocolate, pizza or dessert.

But I also know myself.

There are certain foods where my brain can very quickly turn into the old Pringles slogan:

Once you pop, the fun don’t stop.

And understanding why that happens has become just as important as having the discipline to stop.

Then came my ADHD diagnosis.

Being diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30s caused me to reinterpret SO many things about myself.

ADHD isn’t simply being distracted or forgetting where you put your keys.

It can affect executive functioning, impulse control, motivation, reward processing and the way we seek stimulation.

And suddenly some of my relationship with food made more sense.

Highly rewarding foods are…well, highly rewarding.

For someone whose brain already tends to seek stimulation and immediate reward, sometimes the issue isn’t simply:

“Why don’t I have more willpower?”

Sometimes I need to recognize:

“Oh. My brain is looking for something right now.”

That doesn’t remove my responsibility for what I do next.

It actually gives me MORE power over it.

Because understanding something isn’t the same thing as excusing it.

If I know my ADHD makes certain behaviors harder for me to regulate, then I can create systems around myself that make the behavior I want easier.

Maybe that’s portioning something instead of eating directly from the package.

Maybe it’s making sure I’ve actually eaten enough protein before deciding I’m desperately craving something.

Maybe it’s asking myself whether I’m hungry, stressed, bored, overstimulated or looking for dopamine.

And sometimes?

Maybe I genuinely want the damn cookie.

So I eat the cookie.

The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is awareness.

And then there’s the conversation women aren’t having enough: our hormones change.

This one has become increasingly important to me as I’ve gotten older.

Women are constantly told:

Eat less. Exercise more. Be disciplined. Stop making excuses.

And yes—our choices matter.

Energy balance still matters. Nutrition matters. Movement matters. Sleep matters. Consistency matters.

But I think we do women a huge disservice when we pretend that the biological environment in which they’re trying to make those choices doesn’t matter.

As women approach perimenopause and eventually menopause, hormonal changes can affect things like sleep, mood, body composition, energy, insulin sensitivity and appetite regulation.

And if you’re still menstruating, you may also notice changes across your cycle.

I know I do.

There are times during my cycle when my appetite feels completely manageable.

And then there are times when apparently my body believes we are preparing to survive a famine.

That doesn’t mean:

“My hormones made me eat it, so I have no responsibility.”

It means:

“My body is giving me different signals right now. How do I work WITH those signals instead of pretending they aren’t happening?”

That distinction matters.

Explanation is not excuse.

I keep coming back to this.

Because I think women are often forced into one of two camps.

Either:

“It’s my hormones/ADHD/thyroid, so there’s nothing I can do.”

Or:

“None of that matters. You just need discipline.”

I don’t believe either extreme is particularly helpful.

I also live with a thyroid condition. I know that thyroid function can affect metabolism, energy and weight regulation. But I’ve also successfully lost significant weight after being diagnosed with it.

So I don’t look at my thyroid and say, “Well, that’s it. I can’t lose weight.”

I look at it as another piece of information about the body I’m working with.

Same with ADHD.

Same with hormones.

Same with aging.

Same with stress.

These things aren’t excuses. They’re variables.

And when we understand the variables, we can make better decisions.

I’m also learning that smaller doesn’t automatically mean healthier.

This has probably been one of the hardest lessons for me.

I’ve had periods where the scale dropped dramatically.

And I loved seeing that number.

But looking back, there were times I wasn’t eating nearly enough protein. My appetite was heavily suppressed. I was strength training, but I wasn’t training the way I do now with intentional progressive overload.

Now I’m asking a different question.

Not just:

“How much do I weigh?”

But:

“What am I actually made of?”

How much muscle am I preserving?

How much body fat am I carrying?

Am I getting stronger?

Am I adequately fueling my body?

How do my clothes fit?

How do I feel?

Am I sleeping?

Do I have energy?

Can I maintain this?

Because losing 20 pounds while sacrificing a significant amount of muscle isn’t necessarily the victory the scale makes it look like.

And gaining strength while never losing the body fat I actually want to lose isn’t automatically the result I’m looking for either.

Both things matter to me.

This phase is teaching me to stop fighting myself.

I’m still learning this one.

I can be incredibly hard on myself.

If the scale doesn’t move after I’ve worked hard all week, my immediate reaction can still be:

WHAT THE FUCK.

I’m human.

But I’m learning to collect information instead of immediately turning information into judgment.

Maybe my body needs more recovery.

Maybe I’m not eating enough protein.

Maybe I’m eating more calorie-dense foods than I realize.

Maybe my hormones are affecting my appetite or water retention.

Maybe my medication is suppressing my appetite so much that I’m under-fueling.

Maybe stress and poor sleep have thrown everything off.

Maybe I’m building muscle.

Maybe I need to change something.

None of those answers mean I failed.

They mean I have more information.

Women deserve more than “have more discipline.”

Discipline matters.

I actually believe that strongly.

But discipline without self-awareness can become punishment.

I don’t want to punish my body into becoming smaller.

I want to understand it well enough to take care of it while still pursuing the goals that matter to me.

For me, that means prioritizing protein because I’m trying to preserve muscle.

It means strength training because I want to be strong—not simply light.

It means choosing whole, nutrient-dense foods most of the time because I know how much better my body and nervous system feel when I do.

It means being mindful of processed sugar because I’ve personally noticed a relationship between heavier sugar intake and how physically anxious I feel—while also remembering that correlation in my own experience isn’t proof that sugar universally causes anxiety.

It means understanding my ADHD brain and creating structure around foods that are particularly rewarding for me.

It means respecting what my hormones are doing instead of pretending I’m living in the same body I had ten years ago.

And it means sometimes eating the pizza.

Because I am trying to build a life I can actually maintain.

Maybe the goal isn’t to control our bodies harder.

Maybe it’s to finally start listening to them.

There is something incredibly freeing about moving away from:

“What is wrong with me?”

and toward:

“What is my body trying to tell me, and what can I do with that information?”

For women entering a new hormonal stage of life, women with ADHD, women managing thyroid conditions, women whose bodies suddenly don’t respond exactly the way they used to—I want you to know that struggling doesn’t automatically mean you’re lazy or undisciplined.

And understanding the biological and psychological factors influencing you doesn’t mean surrendering your agency either.

We can have compassion AND accountability.

We can understand our hormones AND make intentional food choices.

We can understand our ADHD AND build boundaries around dopamine-seeking behaviors.

We can acknowledge medical conditions AND continue working toward our goals.

We can want to change our bodies without hating the bodies we’re currently living in.

That’s where I am right now.

Still learning.

Still adjusting.

Still getting frustrated sometimes.

Still saying what the fuck when the scale does something I don’t understand.

But I’m learning that the answer isn’t always to restrict harder, exercise harder or criticize myself harder.

Sometimes the answer is:

Learn your body. Learn your brain. And build a plan that works with both.