ADHD and binge eating in women: why it was never a willpower problem

Last updated: September 2026

If you watched The Great ADHD Myth? on Channel 4 last month — or you didn't watch it but got a text about it from a relative who very much did — you may have spent the weeks since quietly wondering whether you'd invented the whole thing.

I heard from a lot of women afterwards. One had spent the best part of two years working up the nerve to ask for an assessment. One had a referral letter sitting on the hall table. And then a programme went out, several very serious people in several very serious offices raised their eyebrows, and they were back at square one.

So I want to lay this out properly. Partly as a therapist who works with binge eating every day. Mostly because I was diagnosed with ADHD late myself, and I am navigating perimenopause alongside it, so I know exactly what that particular wobble feels like.

What is the link between ADHD and binge eating?

ADHD and binge eating are strongly linked. Adults with ADHD are significantly more likely to experience binge eating than adults without it, and the connection appears to be biological rather than behavioural. The overlap is driven by differences in dopamine regulation, impulse control, interoception (your ability to read your body's internal signals) and executive function — not by a lack of discipline.

That link now has genetic evidence behind it. In August 2026, researchers working within the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium — including scientists at the Karolinska Institutet — published a large genomic study in Nature Mental Health. They analysed nearly 40,000 people with binge eating behaviour and around 25,000 with anorexia nervosa, comparing them against more than 1.2 million people without an eating disorder.

Two findings stand out for anyone reading this.

First: binge eating behaviour showed stronger genetic links to ADHD, where anorexia nervosa showed stronger genetic links to OCD. Two different eating disorders, two different neurodevelopmental signatures. The ADHD–binge eating overlap that so many women have felt in their own bodies for decades is not a coincidence, and it is not a story they made up.

Second: the genetic variants associated with eating disorders are largely different from the variants that influence body weight. In the researchers' own framing, eating disorders cannot be understood in terms of weight or metabolism alone.

That second finding deserves a moment, because it dismantles something most women on this page have been told their entire adult lives — that the problem is their body, and therefore the solution is their body. It never was. Willpower was never the missing ingredient, and neither was a smaller plate.

Source: Termorshuizen, Davies, Lee et al., "Genomic meta-analyses of binge-eating behavior and anorexia nervosa," Nature Mental Health, 20 August 2026. Summary via Karolinska Institutet.

Why does ADHD make binge eating more likely?

Eating consistently across a day is not really an eating task. It is a self-regulation task, and it asks three things of you that an ADHD brain finds genuinely difficult.

• Notice a signal early. Many people with ADHD have reduced interoception — the sense that tells you you're getting hungry, thirsty, tired or overwhelmed while there's still time to do something about it. You don't get the gentle nudge at half two. You get the alarm at nine.
• Plan ahead for it. Eating well tomorrow requires working memory, sequencing and future-thinking today. Those are executive functions, and executive function is the core of ADHD.
• Tolerate a delay. A brain running on a lean dopamine supply is very poorly set up to want something now and have it later. Highly palatable food is fast, reliable dopamine. It is, neurologically speaking, an extremely sensible thing to reach for.

Put those together and a pattern emerges that I see in the room constantly. A woman hasn't eaten properly since half nine that morning because the day simply ran off without her. At nine at night her nervous system finally drops enough for her to register that she is ravenous, flat and completely wrung out. She eats well past comfortable, standing up, with the fridge door open.

That is not a character defect. That is an under-fed, under-dopamined brain reaching for the fastest regulation available to it. If that specific nine o'clock pattern is yours, I've written about it in more detail in why do I always eat at night?

Why does binge eating get harder in perimenopause when you have ADHD?

Because oestrogen and dopamine are connected. As oestrogen becomes erratic in perimenopause, dopamine availability drops with it — and ADHD traits that a woman had spent thirty years quietly compensating for become suddenly, bewilderingly louder. Food urges intensify at exactly the point that the strategies which used to work stop working.

This is the convergence I see most often: ADHD, perimenopause, and a long history of dieting, all arriving at once. It is a genuinely difficult combination, and it is not one that most women get any warning about. I've written about it at length in why binge eating gets harder in perimenopause when you have ADHD and in ADHD, perimenopause and food.

Is ADHD overdiagnosed? What the sceptics get wrong

The most common argument against ADHD is that its individual symptoms sound ordinary. Losing your keys. Talking over people. Starting eleven things and finishing none of them. But symptoms alone have never been the diagnosis. A diagnosis requires that traits are persistent, that they are pervasive across different areas of life, and — the criterion most often skipped in public debate — that they cause significant impairment.

Dr Ayana Gibbs, a UK forensic psychiatrist and neuroscientist, made this point in a response to the Channel 4 documentary published in Psychology Today in August 2026. It's the most level-headed thing I've read on this in a long while.

She notes that, with one exception, the most prominent sceptical voices in the programme were not ADHD specialists. They were eminent psychiatrists — which is a different thing entirely, and it's logic we would never accept anywhere else. Nobody asks a world-class cardiologist to have a look at their hearing.

She also opens by admitting that she began her own career as an ADHD sceptic — a scepticism, she says, born of ignorance. She'd had almost no training in it. What changed her mind wasn't a paper or a televised debate. It was sitting with actual people, seeing the scale of the impairment, and then seeing what happened when those people finally got support.

Her own research with Black women in the UK found them being told, flatly, that ADHD doesn't happen to people like them — and a newer, tidier version of the same dismissal: ADHD reframed as a "trend diagnosis". Which is a very economical way of telling a woman that thirty years of struggle was a fashion choice.

What if I don't have an ADHD diagnosis yet?

You do not need a formal diagnosis to start working with your brain rather than against it. Understanding why food has been hard is available to you now, whatever stage of the process you're at — undiagnosed, self-suspecting, on a waiting list, or recently assessed. The understanding is what changes the relationship with food. The paperwork simply confirms it.

And if you are on an NHS waiting list, the length of that wait says a great deal about the system and nothing whatsoever about you.

To be clear about my own role here: I don't diagnose ADHD, and I won't tell you whether you have it. What I can do is help you make sense of your own patterns, and point you towards assessment if you want answers. If you're trying to work out where your difficulties actually sit, eating disorder or ADHD? unpicks the overlap.

What actually helps with ADHD and binge eating?

The approaches that work for an ADHD brain are the ones that reduce the demand on executive function rather than increase it. Restriction, rules and tracking all add load to a system that is already overloaded — which is why they tend to work for a fortnight and then collapse. Scaffolding works better than discipline.

In practice, that usually means some combination of the following.

• Eating regularly, before you're desperate. Not as a rule and not as restraint. Feeding yourself at four o'clock does more for nine o'clock than any amount of resolve at nine o'clock ever will. This is the single highest-leverage change for most ADHD brains.
• External structure instead of internal willpower. Alarms, visible food, prepared options, the boring unglamorous stuff. If your brain won't reliably generate the prompt, the prompt has to come from outside your brain.
• Learning to ride an urge rather than fight it. Urges peak and pass, and they pass faster when you aren't wrestling them. Urge surfing is one of the most useful tools I teach.
• Addressing the shame directly. Shame reliably makes binge eating worse, not better. Any approach that runs on self-criticism is working against you at a neurological level.
• Therapy that treats the cause rather than the food. The eating is the symptom. The regulation is the problem.

Notice what isn't on that list: calorie counting, food rules, and any plan that requires you to out-discipline your own neurology. Those are not oversights.

The part I'd like you to take away

I came to my own diagnosis later than I'd have liked. What I remember most is the peculiar relief of it — not because anything about my brain changed, it did nothing of the sort, but because the story I'd been telling about myself for thirty years finally changed. That story had an awful lot of "lazy" in it, and a fair bit of "too much".

The diagnosis cured precisely nothing. What it did was move me from what is wrong with me to oh — so that's what's been happening. That shift sounds small. In my experience it is most of the work.

A television programme cannot take that off you. Nobody with a clipboard and a suitably grave expression gets to un-know what you know about your own life.

Frequently asked questions

Is binge eating a symptom of ADHD?

Binge eating is not a diagnostic criterion for ADHD, but it is far more common in people with ADHD than in the general population. Research published in Nature Mental Health in August 2026 found that binge eating behaviour shares genetic links with ADHD, supporting what clinicians have observed for years: the two frequently occur together, and the overlap is biological.

Why do I binge eat at night if I have ADHD?

Night-time binge eating in ADHD is usually the end of a chain that began much earlier in the day. Reduced interoception means hunger goes unnoticed for hours, so by evening you are physically under-fed, dopamine-depleted and mentally exhausted. The binge is your brain reaching for fast regulation, not a failure of self-control at nine o'clock.

Does perimenopause make ADHD and binge eating worse?

Yes, for many women. Falling and fluctuating oestrogen reduces dopamine availability, which intensifies ADHD traits including impulsivity and emotional sensitivity. Women who managed their ADHD unknowingly for decades often find their coping strategies stop working in perimenopause, and food urges become markedly stronger at the same time.

Can I get help for binge eating without an ADHD diagnosis?

Yes. You do not need a formal ADHD diagnosis to work on your relationship with food. Understanding how your brain regulates dopamine, hunger and impulse is what changes the pattern, and that understanding is available whether you are diagnosed, waiting for assessment, or simply suspect ADHD.

Will therapy for ADHD and binge eating involve dieting or tracking?

No. My approach is non-diet and weight-inclusive. Restriction and tracking increase the demand on executive function, which is already the area an ADHD brain struggles with most — which is why those approaches typically collapse after a few weeks. The work focuses on regulation, structure and shame, not on rules.

Is ADHD overdiagnosed in women?

The evidence points the other way. ADHD in women has historically been under-recognised, because diagnostic criteria were developed largely from studies of boys and because women often present with inattentive rather than hyperactive traits. Many women are diagnosed only in midlife, often after their own child is assessed.

Working together

I'm Claire Feldman, an eating disorder therapist working online with women across the UK and Ireland. I work with women in midlife, women exploring ADHD, and women using GLP-1 medication. My training includes ADHD and binge eating, Eating Disorder Master Practitioner, a PG Dip in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Rapid Transformational Therapy and EFT — and I have lived experience of both an eating disorder and ADHD.

If any of this sounded like your life rather than an article, Food Freedom Therapy is my 1:1 work for exactly this. And if you'd rather just talk it through with a person first, you can book a free 30-minute discovery call. No pressure, no plan, no homework.

This article is for information and is not a substitute for individual medical or psychological advice. I do not diagnose ADHD and I do not advise on medication, prescriptions or dosage — please speak to your GP or prescriber about assessment and treatment.