A New ADHD Diet Guide

I recently downloaded and printed ADDitude's new free printable: 5 Ways to Cook Up an ADHD-Friendly Diet. Thanks, ADDitude! It was just the tool I needed to try and bring my husband, Don, on board with some ADHD diet recommendations for our daughter, Natalie.

Natalie's ADHD behavior is clearly reactive to her level of hunger. When Natalie is busy, the last thing she wants to do is to stop and eat, but a kicking and screaming fit is nearly guaranteed when intense hunger hits. More than once I've spooned ice cream in the poor girl's mouth as a flailing fit is in progress, desperate to get her blood sugar level to rise as quickly as possible.

It seems I'm always reminding Don that Natalie needs a snack. "She's been eating all night!" he always says.

"But she hasn't had any protein!" I respond, sounding like a broken record. Now, I can point to ADDitude's #1 ADHD diet tip: Beef up protein levels!

I've also been working on ADDitude's tip #2: Limit foods high in chemicals. I try hard to keep foods (if you can call them that!) containing artificial sweeteners out of the fridge, freezer, and pantry, but Don seems to be drawn to them. I buy the all-natural frozen fruit bars; he buys the sugar-free, artificially sweetened variety. I buy no-sugar-added applesauce; he buys the artificially sweetened variety. To me, it's more important to eliminate artificial sweeteners than to reduce sugar. My approach when Natalie eats sugary foods is to balance the sugar's effect with protein.

ADDitude's ADHD diet guide is on our fridge as a reminder, to Don and I both, that diet matters.

Tomorrow, I'll share a funny--in the "you might as well laugh as cry" kind of funny--story about my next challenge: cutting back on artificial color in Natalie's diet.