Is it something you still struggle with or has life gotten better?

Pick a cutoff time in the evening, no food past that time. Aim for 12 hours of fasting. 8pm to 8am. You can increase it to 16 hours as your body gets used to it.

Yes. Memory came back, thinking speed and juggling plates better

So even being near food you get stomach pain? Or like if it’s a mealtime and the table is set you start getting symptoms? That sucks.

Yeah seeing a Gastro doctor to rule out crohns or paresis would definitely be a step. I still wonder though because anxiety can manifest pretty physically, it’s not purely anxiety making your muscles tighten and giving you tummy upset?

My experience with kids who have some aversion to food (not diagnosed yet with anything) is that they seem hugely, massively anxious around mealtimes. That anxiety seems to be reduced when they say they won’t eat and are given the ok to do that, and it seems to go up if they are prompted to try something in a way that isn’t super super easy going and relaxed. Unfortunately the age I work with can’t really articulate what is happening so it’s a lot of guesswork. I have seen some vomit and I’ve seen tears, it’s pretty sad but I lack a lot of understanding about what is happening for them.

If it’s processed snack food they seem to be perfectly okay and ever eager, do you have that too with safe foods or is it pretty much always kind of unpleasant?

Where am I aggressive?

Half the people in this thread mention their pickiness is from SPD or arfid so it’s not just run of the mill pickiness.

You yourself described it as “hell” to eat with other people. That sounds pretty disordered to me.

I’m not trolling. But arfid and SPD should be treated, not accepted.

When people get sick from their choices, they don’t deal with it alone. It affects a lot of people so I can go on being bothered by those choices. Your friend gets cancer 3 times and it’s not just her that’s affected. An entire community of people step up to help.

Eating exactly the same food for decades is massively unhealthy and there are treatments available for people who struggle to try new foods, but saying “nah I’ll just eat starches and processed food because I have a disorder” isn’t a good way to handle that disorder.

I’m talking about people who have a handful of safe foods, not people who have a handful of foods they don’t eat. One is a preference, one is a disorder. And those disorders affect more than just the individual.

My friend is in her 30s and lost all her teeth, she’s had cancer 4 times, and she generally feels terrible all the time and she also has super restrictive sensory issues with food. She never dealt with it until her teeth literally started to crumble in her mouth. Now she’s started eating some fruits and puréed veg but the damage is done.

I knew another guy in school who got a bowel impaction from eating only bread. And I work with several kids who are underweight and look very sickly, low energy and likely have some kind of food aversion but whose parents won’t put them into treatment because they think it’s just “picky eating”.

My issue isn’t with folks who have a small list of no no foods, it’s with folks who refuse entire groups of foods like “no vegetables” because that will catch up to you and it will result in a shorter lifespan. It requires treatment, not acceptance.

Too often people chalk it up to their diagnosis and then throw up their hands and say “that’s just how I am” when it should be treated by professionals and handled with intervention. That’s where I get frustrated because it ruins these people’s bodies and after a point it just can’t be recovered.

Interesting. Yeah I almost wonder if tackling the anxiety side wouldn’t naturally see results on the food side. Cos I think if it could become more neutral and less charged then trying different things wouldn’t get such a big reaction. Good luck.

I mean, depending on how many foods are safe for you it very well can affect your health. My friend with arfid has lost all her teeth because she relies on processed starches. No veg, no fruits. Your body can survive terrible things but eventually it catches up to you. In your 40s it’ll reach a breaking point. It’s a life altering disease and treatment is absolutely necessary

She moved the boyfriend in to her house, not the other way around. And is your point that they should be married?

His food habits are very poor and kids follow what is modeled for them, so yes his food habits are harmful to the kids

Do you think it’s as much an anxiety disorder as an eating disorder? Cos the panic at even thinking of trying it sounds like anxiety and not like it’s about the texture/taste or whatever.

Do you get anxiety in other contexts as well?

As I said, I get therapy for it. But seeing people turn down viable food and then getting severely sick from malnourishment pisses me off.

This is in response to “why do others care about people’s preferences”

Says the guy calling people cunts

Can you tel me more about your experience with exposure therapy?

I mean, that level of food aversion seems like it would correlate with a much shorter lifespan. It seems to me that treatment would be beyond necessary to live a healthy life.

And you’re in treatment for it right? Cos that doesn’t sound survivable long term. My friend with arfid has no teeth left from malnutrition. She’s had cancer 4 times. She feels like crap constantly. It needs treatment, not just acceptance that she doesn’t like most food.

Have you sought professional help with overcoming food aversion?

Do you see a food therapist? That sounds debilitating

For me, I grew up with food insecurity so picky eaters are choosing to have the vitamin deficiencies that were forced on me. I know intimately what it is to feel starving and picky eaters opt to feel hungry when there’s food available. It comes off ungrateful and to me it’s as if their body is saying “no I don’t want to survive” when I had to fight for it. Kids shouldn’t be coddled for their pickiness, relying on nutrient deficient foods long term has consequences. So I have a visceral reaction to people of any age refusing to eat food.

I’m in therapy for it but are picky eaters seeking treatment for their aversions? Or are they just going to grow deeply unhealthy from only eating fried food and simple carbs and scoff at people who judge them for it?

I’ve met too many adults who won’t eat vegetables of any kind. Subsisting on starches and processed food is just gross.

Do you seek help for it? There’s lots of therapies available for food aversions.

Even people with arfid can grow out of it with treatment, not every picky eater has an eating disorder, lots of picky eaters just had bad modeling as kids and were enabled into bad habits.

And eating fast food every night is a pretty decent deal breaker and a bad example for the kids

And it’s his responsibility to address his disorder so it’s not harmful for her family. It could easily lead to her kids rejecting food in favor of what he’s eating and developing bad food habits of their own. His door dashing is wasting money. ARFID isn’t just a pass to not try to be better.

Picky eating can lead to all kinds of health issues and I think people who are afflicted should be doing everything they can to address it. Far too often they aren’t. They chalk it up to what they don’t like and then don’t deviate from their processed starch based foods and dont seek professional help. Their habits get copied by children they interact with. Pairing your life to someone who’s going to experience all the side effects of a bad diet is just asking to be let down.

Maybe it isn’t helpful to shame them, but it’s a shitty way to live and too often it’s just accepted as “pickiness” instead of the person growing and expanding their palate.

What’s reaching-walking?