Fancy Some Neurodivergent Rocket Fuel?

Regulate your eating, walk away from sugar & stop bingeing - on YOUR terms

Harriet Morris has been featured in:

Let's have a 20 minute chat about how I can help you

From working with ADHD clients, I have observed these factors as reasons that my approach could work for you.

Long before I realised I was neuro divergent, I coined the term Food Rebel to describe my experience of binge eating.

A Food Rebel is someone who - while having a sincere desire to eat better - is constantly hijacking their progress in this area with compulsive eating, sugar binges and so on. However, their behaviour differs from simple overeating in that it is fuelled by a rebellion against conformity, against shame, against deprivation and living a diminished life. Food rebellion has such a positive intent behind it…but, like a bullied teenager who sets fire to their high school, the expression of this positive intent is a disaster.

What's all this got to do with ADHD?

Just this: the way to deal with that rebel energy just so happens to be massively ADHD-friendly.

You see, I ended my binge eating not by squashing my rebel energy, but by taking away its triggers: conformity, shame, deprivation, and kowtowing to the neuro typical norm.

Here's the thing: ADHD makes it harder to focus. This indirect approach to managing the Inner Food Rebel sidesteps this need for head-on focus.

I calmed my Inner Food Rebel by giving her nothing to fight.

Sidenote: later on I gave her a much more useful job as part of my Living Directly philosophy (see below).

Relying on executive functions like focus is not enough. I am not ADHD, but I was far too compulsive, far too entrenched in the identity of sugar addict and binge eater for good intentions to be anything except a big joke.

Instead what I used, and still use with clients to get them to walk away from junk food are tools such as:

*Gamification
*Thought experiments
*Almost daily check ins with me
*Micro commitments
*Tapping into the brain’s Feelgood Factory
*Building confidence through the principle of Actions Change Beliefs
*Fork in the road questions
*Eating presence

Most diets and binge eating coaches try to leverage the well worn path of willpower, self discipline and flash-in-the-pan inspiration that fades faster than the fireworks you look at while making your new years resolutions.

This is a disaster for you. The malfunctioning of dopamine signalling in ADHD results in the impulsivity, difficulty making decisions and attention issues that can sabotage your best laid health plans.

My approach goes under the radar of executive function and I help you develop the skill of making the key behaviours automatic. The best thing about this is that this ability is something we are born with. If you've ever driven a familiar route home and forgotten the details of the drive, if you've ever done something by mistake (like distractedly put the wrong shoes on) and blamed ‘force of habit’, then you have huge potential just sitting there in your brain being wasted right now. Let's tap into it.

Millions of neurodiverse people are saddled with shame that doesn't belong to them.

This is well accepted.

What is more invisible is the fact that shame - and its ugly bedfellow, perfectionism - is also used as a motivator in the world of health and weight loss. This is the norm - and it shouldn't be.

My issues with food sprang from shame, (partly trauma and partly being neurodivergent). I have seen this (un)wellspring of shame over and over with clients in the last ten years coaching. It doesn't make sense that shame would be the vehicle to help you move on from those issues.

I now know two really exciting things about shame.

Firstly, health/weight loss/eating change can happen not just without shame-soaked strategies, but changing how you eat can be part of a bigger life project to neutralise that shame. When you put food out of the job of shaming, you require yourself to put shame itself out of a job (and yes, shame does do a job. Just like the Inner Food Rebel, it's not a job you need doing).

And secondly, you CAN put shame out of a job. I did. I processed and released my childhood trauma.

Book a 20 minute chat to explore how I can help you

Or email me info(at)theshiftinside.com