ARFID-what do you or your child with ARFID eat?

[AuADHD]

I’m sat here eating the same comfort food that was safe back in 1994 and it got me wondering what other people with ARFID eat. What are your safe foods and what are your absolutely won’t eat?
Mine:
Black coffee with vegetarian pâté on toast.
Pizza but preferably homemade or from certain restaurants. If it doesn’t look right though I won’t eat it.
Dry cereal, preferably Frosties, Golden Grahams or Cheerios
My homemade soup
Chips
Biscuits

I eat more than that but not a lot of variety.

Ds with suspected ASD and ARFID will only eat/drink:

Buttered toast

Pain au Choc
Cheese / cheese sandwich
Weetabix minis dry
Breadsticks
Ritz crackers
Plain cheese pizza
Chicken nuggets
Crepes with nutella/strawberries
Kids little yogurts
Smoothies
Milk
Bourbon biscuits

The sandwiches/toast have to have Anchor butter on.
The cheese has to be yellow cheddar.
Smoothies can't taste of banana.

This year he has started to tolerate a bit of ham with his cheese sandwich.
He has introduced fish fingers and will have a couple of mouthfuls of alphabites. I am really proud of him.
In 2024 he only introduced chicken nuggets so three items in 6 months is great progress. I follow his lead completely.
In the past he has been pestered by well meaning family members to try things and not wanting to disappoint them has gone ahead and immediately vomited.
I had to refuse offers for tea at grandparents, aunties etc for a very long time after a couple of incidents where he has vomited and become distressed. I had sent his own food on these occasions but of course people don't fully understand.
In my case ds is the younger sibling to much older sisters. I believe people initially suspected both I and my daughters had indulged and pandered to ds.

These days everyone is well informed about ARFID and is on board with my approach.

My son is severely autistic and has Arfid. He has only ever eaten..
red Pom bear crisps
chocolate raisins
kinder bars
galaxy counters
1 red apple a day
and a few dry coco pops a day

ive tried so hard to get help and support. He was referred to the Evalina clinic in London but they wasn’t interested because he’s not under weight.
i can’t get any kind of oral supplements in to him so have to spend £40 a month on patch MD supplement stickers that I’m not sure work. He fights to have a blood test once a year.
his last blood test in 2024 showed low selenium and low vitamin D. He’s due one again soon and I’m dreading it. I’m at a complete loss of what to do as he will not try any other foods. He’s also non verbal with PDA profile that makes things more difficult.
i stay awake at night worrying

Oh I hadnt realised my sons arfid is this bad. Only cheese and tomato pizza and mcdonalds fries. Everyone else here seems to eat so much better. Damn

This instagram account is incredibly comforting and inspiring I find. It's a teenage boy (Toren) and his mum, both autistic, him with ARFID, and they just share about their lives. They started the account as a way to try to encourage Toren to try new foods and it's grown from there. He talks a lot about his ARFID and it can be quite informative too. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKIMK5yS_4j/?igsh=OWdvd29udTAyZnJn

My partner is Arfid and won't touch vegetables. Except chips. He eats chicken with rice or chips for every meal pretty much. With the occasional McDonald's. He is extremely fit so it's done no harm we know if. He also snacks constantly on peanuts and chocolate

Autistic daughter (15 years old) not officially dx with ARFID. she eats:

Breakfast - Coco pops with milk (doesn't consume the milk) or Nutella sandwich on white sandwich bread.

Lunch - as above

Dinner - plain pasta with mild cheddar cheese and Heinz ketchup.

She also eats - McDonald's chicken nuggets and fries and McDonald's chocolate milkshake. She occasionally eats a few grapes or blueberries.

She drinks water 99% of the time but also drinks apple juice.

She does not eat if someone isn't available to prepare the food for her.

@wizzywigwe aren't doing much better if you look at my post above! I can give you a list of food she has cut out over the years. She's only recently started eating bread again after a couple of years of only eating wraps.

As a child I ate chips, potatoes, chicken, fruit, eggs, some crisps, some biscuits. No veg not even beans. No sauces. By late teens I ate Bolognese, pasta and rice. Around 18 I started trying veg, first thing I was able to accept was frozen broccoli and cauliflower florets because they had no flavour and were very soft. Then I started eating homemade Bolognese instead of jars and my flatmate would put onions and peppers in it which I slowly learnt to accept.

Mid twenties I met my husband who delighted in Introducing me to new foods with no pressure and by about 30 I ate almost everything with the exception of salad. Now I CAN pick at salad but wouldn't choose to.

My kids are fussy but I comfort myself that there was a time I lived on bread, eggs and bananas and refused all other food and now love varieties of food.

My husband is great at introducing new foods to our kids in a stress free way, he has some kind of knack for it. He gives them a plate of safe foods with a little bit of something interesting or he'll eat some things alongside them and they end up trying because he's entirely engrossed in it and not addressing them. He's the reason eldest eats peanuts, porridge, salad leaves and noodles off the top of my head.
.

My son, 13, ASD -

So much better than he used to be (there's some very random things on here that he tried on a good day and then went on the list). He loves salty food.

Cornflakes
Bagels
Garlic bread/naan
Spaghetti Bolognese
Plain pasta tubes
Banana and peanut butter smoothie (specific ratios)
Ham
Bacon
Chocolate spread sandwiches (specific spread, not easy to find - buy in bulk)
Chicken satay sticks
Chips/waffles/sometimes roast potatoes
Smoked or fresh salmon
Salmon sushi
Prawns
Mussels with garlic
Scampi
Super noodles (chicken flavour)
Plain crisps
Dark chocolate
Apples
Pears
Kale cooked in the air fryer so it's crispy
Cucumber

Occasionally will eat broccoli, peas and green beans.

That's pretty much it.

Quite a long list by some standards, but all quite specific and random which makes eating out challenging.

When he was about 6 it was only super noodles, bacon, apples and bananas. I would never have dreamed of this list then! And he's done it all on his own, no pressure just gentle support and offering options when he's having a good day.

Gala apples, pears and one brand and flavour of crisps.

he will occasionally eat some lettuce and cucumber.

Two sons with AFRID.

DS1 ( 12 ) Aldi chocolate waffles. Toasted but not crispy.
Ready salted crisps, certain brand only. Southern fried chicken, KFC brand only. No bones. Aldi garlic pizza bread, slightly burnt.

DS2 ( 5 ) oat so simple golden syrup porridge, milky.
Bread with a very very slight scrapping of seedless strawberry jam.
Birdseye chicken dippers.
Aldi mini wrap, plain.

I have an ARFID child and they will only eat toast and bananas. Five years now. Zero support.

Has your son been diagnosed with ARFID? My daughter eats way less than that but I have never queried ARFID before.

Sorry I should have said fruit and veg - he won’t even eat a piece of lettuce in a sandwich or apple juice, absolutely none at all

My 6 year old was recently diagnosed with ARFID , he doesn’t eat any hot foods , meat or veg …. Its soul destroying at times.

His diet consists of Aldi chocolate digestives , wotsits , Frubes and Minion/PawPatrol Ham .

@Purpleturtle43 the GP gave a tentative diagnosis when he was about 4 or 5, when he was most restrictive. and we were referred to a dietician who did some work with him for a bit (I think we saw her 2 or 3 times in as many years) then it was lockdown when he was 8 and everything stopped, since then we have just worked through it ourselves so I think it's on his medical records but I haven't been back about it for a good few years.

He still will only eat on his own and will refuse all food for a couple of days at a time if he's very disregulated. He wouldn't eat if left to his own devices and is very skinny. So he fits the criteria in a lot of ways still, but the safe foods list is much longer now.

I could list quite a few few things that my son will eat but what’s important is that it has to be a certain type, brand or prepared in a certain way. So he’ll eat McDonalds chicken nuggets but not Birds Eye ones. He’ll eat cucumber maki but no other sushi, or cucumber in any other form! Pizza is often good and we’ve managed to get him to have ones at home but if something doesn’t look right he just won’t eat it.

I know two children with arfid
2yo eats smooth baby pouches, yogurt and chicken nuggets only
8yo eats anything spicy and nothing else

Our fruit and veg is so depleted of vitamins and minerals, if you take a multi vitamin it probably doesn’t make that much difference.
A lot of these foods are junk foods, which is what a lot of people eat.

Watching

All food groups are needed for a healthy diet, but millions of people in the world survive on a diet of rice or yam flour.

There are small amounts of protein and fibre in the typical ARFID diet as well as the beige carbs. Enough to be perfectly ok now (mine is 6' tall, did well at school, works in construction) but I do wonder about longer term health.

I suspect lots of people with ARFID will be amongst the groups that are higher risk for bowel cancer etc.

Porridge with full fat milk & honey.
Potatoes & sweet potatoes
Cauli/broccoli
Home made soup of different types (eg beetroot, spinach, cavolo nero)
Pasta of various types
Tinned tomatoes
Ciabatta bread/rolls
Cheese - mainly Cheddar or Lancashire

I drink Clipper organic tea, Barleycup coffee substitute, Copella cloudy apple juice or bottled water.

That's pretty much it. These are my safe foods.
I never eat out, don't touch ready meals or takeaways.
I'm vegetarian & teetotal.

DD would definitely have met the criteria for ARFID when she was younger but is slowly expanding her diet now.
I remember a holiday when she just had chips for every lunch and dinner for 2 weeks

The best thing I ever did was buy a bread machine. It allowed me to always produce the same bread, sneak protein in by making brioche with egg or milk, and make pizza dough. It also made me feel like less of a shit mum by massively reducing the amount of upf in her diet.

My dd ate very little, living on fortified milk drinks, chips and things in breadcrumbs at 3. She’s autistic but, huge but I had really good advice (living in the USA at the time) and was told to take it really slowly and introduce things using distraction, novelty etc and eating in public can be useful too for new things. I found if you can pick it up and better still build it yourself it helped so flour tortillas with fillings - taco mince, cheese and sour cream, we then got literally a couple of leaves of spinach in, she developed a like for rice and liked building her own sushi rolls (helped we had friends the same age who liked doing this) so ingredients in middle build your own, so despite refusing any fruit, most vegetables she would eat raw salmon go figure!

eventually over 10 years got her to the point she would at least push the ingredients she didn’t like in a stew for instance to one side rather than screaming but I had never pandered, she hated onions so whilst I blended for curries and bolognaise, I deliberately left a few chunky ones so she built up that tolerance for things. Big breakthrough was at 14 when she wanted to become vegetarian, difficult when you don’t like vegetables bar carrots and raw spinach, I only agreed to cook her vegetarian food if she ate far more foods including most vegetables (she could pick 5 she didn’t like), beans & pulses etc. it worked, the first few weeks she pushed the new dishes around her plate and gagged on it quite a lot but over 6 months she went from beige to rainbow