Hi all!

I have been kind of going it on my own with the ADHD thing since I got diagnosed at 21. I've got a lot of it under control (I think, anyway. it changes haha) but one area that I just... have never been able to manage productively is my food habits. I'm not sure really if I'm looking for advice or just people who have been through the same kinds of things but I'm open to almost any interactions about this.

Here's my situation: I haven't had a healthy relationship with food for pretty much all of my life, so this could be part of the "why". I kicked a mild eating disorder in my late teens/early twenties for the most part and my relationship with eating and body image and all of that has slowly gotten more managable. The problem now is not how food makes me look. It's morphed into a three part nightmare. First, I can't make myself grocery shop. it's expensive, discouraging and overwhelming. I don't usually have the energy or motivation (or spoons, if that's your preferred method of explaining energy levels) to get to the store for really anything but food is at the top of the list. Second, if I do have groceries, for some reason I have so much trouble MAKING food. If it's not pre-prepped or frozen I will genuinely shut down trying to make myself eat. I can count on one hand the amount of meals I have prepared for myself over the last year. When I say shut down, it's very much a "my body is hungry but it takes so much out of me to make food that my brain decides we aren't that hungry and shuts down the hunger signals". Third, as I kind of mentioned, the whole idea of appetite vs hunger signals problem. I don't get those signals a lot anymore because they have gone unheard for so long and when I actually have an appetite, I do not want to eat. It is rare that I crave anything, and it's becoming tedious to have to feed myself because I never have an appetite for anything. I get hungry, yeah, but I generally have to force myself to eat food that may or may not make me sick because I really did not want to eat it (plus gluten sensitivity is another really big issue so I can't have a lot of fast food options).

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all that to say I am fed up with this issue. I used to love food, I loved finding new kinds of food form all over the world and I think I could really like cooking if it wasn't so much of a burdensome task. I know it'll probably never be completely extinct and will likely be an issue here and there for the rest of my life but it's causing so much anxiety at the present that I have trouble functioning because my body isn't getting enough of the things that it needs. As I said at the beginning of this, I don't know if I'm looking for a specific type of response here. I would welcome tips and tricks, advice or even just commiseration. I feel completely alone in this and I know I'm not.

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TL;DR my eating habits are causing a lot of frustration and anxiety and I think I'm just looking for any kind of response from advice to just agreeing and commiserating lol