In this engaging conversation, Jackie Silver, a Registered Dietitian specializing in wellness for neurodivergent individuals, shares her insights on accessible nutrition. She discusses the unique challenges ADHD and autism present when it comes to eating and meal planning. Jackie emphasizes simplified and tailored strategies, such as mindful eating and recognizing hunger cues. She critiques diet culture's negative impacts on mental health and advocates for self-compassion in making gradual changes to eating habits, making wellness attainable for all.
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Scheduling Meals
Schedule meals and block time for eating.
Set alarms, place food visibly, or use other reminders.
insights INSIGHT
Combining Eating Strategies
Following body cues is difficult with poor interoception.
Combining scheduled eating with intuitive eating can be helpful.
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Meal Planning and Prep
Create cheat sheets with simple meal and snack ideas to reduce decision fatigue.
Minimize cooking barriers by using pre-cut, frozen, or easy-to-prepare ingredients.
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This week I'm talking with Jackie Silver about nutrition and wellness. Jackie is a Registered Dietitian with a Master of Health Science (MHSc) in Nutrition Communications. She has a firm belief that neurodivergent and disabled people deserve to live a healthy lifestyle but found the opportunities for these communities lacking, so she decided to start her own practice, Accessible Wellness. Her area of expertise is in working with kids, teens, and adults with autism, ADHD, and those with intellectual or developmental disabilities.
In our conversation today, we discuss strategies for making nutrition and wellness more accessible. We talk about some of the common challenges we can face while trying to feed ourselves with ADHD, like irregular eating, difficulty with meal planning/prep, and poor interoceptive skills. We look at how we want simplified, tailored strategies to help people where they're at, rather than simply overwhelming them. We also go into some of the dangers of diet culture and the need to have compassion for ourselves when trying out new strategies. The Hunger-Fullness ScaleNeurodivergent-Friendly 30-Minute Meals Be sure to check out Accessible Wellness
Common challenges we can face when dealing with ADHD and food are irregular eating, difficulty with meal planning/prep, and poor interoceptive skills - that is recognizing when we are hungry or full or somewhere in between. To help combat this we can use strategies like eating schedules, snack cheat sheets, batch cooking, and using hunger/fullness scales to help build up that interoception.
We can work on practicing mindful eating by paying attention to tastes, textures, and fullness cues even when we have distractions around. Remember that we want to focus on meeting ourselves where we're at and doing things that work with our brains.
It's important to be compassionate with ourselves and focus on small, sustainable changes rather than demanding perfection.
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