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.

I don't know the answer exactly but most food cultures have a bland carb - rice, pasta, mielie, bread.

Even around 1900, for the working classes in Britain, two meals a day were mostly bread. My instinct is that it's a lot easier to be a restrictive eater in a less globalised food culture because the range of foods is smaller and more predictable.

My AFRID child will only eat chicken goujons, chips/ptostoe waffles - occasionally a scoop of home made mash but depends on how relaxed he's feeling. Croissants, chocolate milk and Chicago town pizza. Recently got him to try pizza hut too which he managed to eat which is a step up from only eating chips when we go out.
He also won't use wooden spoons or paper straws so I have to take reusable out.

@Motomum23 my son also won't use wooden cutlery or paper cups or straws, the feel of a wooden spoon in his mouth makes him vomit. We all carry spares!

My eldest (young teen) has high functioning ASD & eats restrictively compared with his peers, but amazingly well by the standards of this thread! He was very restrictive in early childhood but has gradually broadened out - he'll eat most meat now, mild curries, most fruit. Tuna made very smooth in lots of mayo is now acceptable, but no other fish at all. I got very excited recently when he started eating carrot sticks. Sweetcorn is the only veg he'll go near. His younger brother is really adventurous with food so I feel a bit sorry for him, as we are a bit samey due to the eldest one. I just wish he would eat a little more amountwise

After months and months of:

quorn dippers
twice cooked spuds (bake in the micro, chop, air fry for crispy edges)
diet shake
cheddars

I have just added back in some bread (not a lot, not that great for my guts), sweetcorn (ditto) and am entertaining other sorts of potato.

And at my first trip outside in months (work event), I had cheese toastie and chips in front of a bunch of people, only one of whom I'd met before!

And we had sweetcorn fritters yesterday :D

Theres a fair bit I will try - tried a marmite and cheese sausage roll yesterday - but much is rejected due to odd flavours. The marmite and cheese sausage roll had a strong underlying pork fat flavour that I couldn't handle (shame as the cheese n marmite element was nice!).

Some foods make me retch/gag and I will throw up.
Some I can try but the flavour or texture is off and after a couple of mouthfuls I can't swallow it any more (and forcing that issue will result in retch/gag/vomit).

Some safe foods I have gone off when either the taste changes (mucky air fryer, change in recipe) or I've associated them with feeling unwell, which sadly happens a lot as I've got various issues (Gallstones that can't be removed, gastropareisis)...

I do prefer foods that are very predictable - can't do a lot of textures (meat with its original texture ie, steak, no. Meat thats been reformed like burgers, probably yes.) - and not messy. Definitely cannot stand messy drippy food!

Putting my historian hat on, I think this is a very good point. The variety of food now available to the average Westerner is completely unprecedented. Up until quite recently that variety just didn't exist, at all. And there was a logic to sticking to familiar foods, in a society with much less information at its fingertips. If you'd eaten lots of X already, you knew more X was likely to be safe. Also we tend to see embracing dietary variety as inherently good, independent of nutritional concerns. People who just like sameness and blandness are seen as odd, and maybe even a bit Gammon.

Obviously I'm not saying ARFID is great! Of course restrictive eating is worrying and life-limiting past a point. But there can be un helpful pressure on us as parents even when the kids are actually eating enough and things are sufficient nutritionally.

DS aged 7.

Consistent:

1. Plain pasta (penne only)
2. Sausages
3. Hash browns (Aldi!)
4. White of a fried egg, well cooked
5. Ham sandwich made with brown bread, Aldi olive oil spread and honey roast ham. Won't eat crusts.
6. Scampi
7. Banana
8. Cheese & Tomato pizza, most brands are ok and will try this when out
9. Chips

10. Garlic bread 11. Chocolate Waffles

Hit and Miss (will be ok one day then refused other days)

1. Satsumas
2. Carrots
3. Sweetcorn
4. Pain au chocolate
5. Broccoli
6. Toast
7. Apples
8. Baked beans
9. Cucumber

10. Grapes

As you can see fruit and veg can be tolerated depending on day / mood etc. I would say he eats veg once a week on average. Only drinks water or blackcurrant squash, nothing fizzy, no juice, no milk etc.

Takes a multivitamin every day.

From what I’ve been told , it’s down to the way they are produced so those type of foods are always the same in colour , shape , taste etc

My son is getting better at trying new foods as he gets older (recently discovered fondue on a school trip!), but at 17 he still won't touch ANY fruit, inc tomatoes cucumber etc. Peas and sweetcorn are bad because of texture. He also won't eat rice pudding/risotto, porridge because of the texture.

BUT he will now eat tinned beans/chickpeas of various variety, onion if it is blended (likes the flavour, not the texture) and minced meat. The latter has made a big difference to our meals as he will now join in with shepherds pie, lasagne, bolognaise etc.

Carbs of all sorts are fine, and he happily eats meat and fish.
He has multivits every day and seems incredibly healthy despite restrictions.
We don't put pressure on him to try new foods, though do thank him for trying when he does. If he can't take the texture/flavour he's always free to stop eating and go make himself some toast or cereal (safest foods ever!) to fill him up, without guilt.

Uniform colour, taste, and texture. As an example, DC will eat a Birds Eye Chicken Dipper but not a typical chicken nugget, it's because Birds Eye are the least fibrous and have a noticeably different 'mouth feel' which DC prefers.

A Birds Eye Dipper is exactly the same whether you buy it on Edinburgh or Liverpool or Portsmouth, always the same and you know exactly how it will taste and feel. However a strawberry can be mushy or firm, or sweet, or juicy, or tart, it might have just a few seeds or loads of seeds, the seeds might be crunchy or they might be unnoticeable, it might even have a surprise worm inside and you won't know what the strawberry will be until you bite into it.

I'm using Dippers and strawberries based on my own DC but people with ARFID have lots of different safe foods. Beige foods tend to be a common factor as they tend to be fairly bland in both taste and texture.

Do people give their DC the bland food to start with or in desperation when no other food is eaten? I avoided chicken nuggets with DS when he was little as that always seemed to be the food of choice of people who struggle with food. DS ate pretty much everything so I wanted to avoid them just in case he got fixated on them to exclusion of other foods. He is now a student and eats plenty of junk food so don’t think he missed out! So don’t know whether there was any merit in what I did.

I was quite fussy as a child, although not to the extreme of some eaters listed on here. I was reluctant to try new foods but I have improved as I have got older. DH was quite picky until he had his tonsils out and then ate everything. Not sure why they made a difference

Yes exactly this !
Thank you x

My DC will almost always eat:

• Birds Eye Dippers (only Birds Eye)
• mini cheese pizza, the mega cheap kind with barely any topping
• cucumber
• plain poached chicken breast but only the fillet
• flour tortilla
• sweet potato but only cut into wedges
• bananas, mustard be slightly green and firm with no brown spots
• cheese toastie, must be white bread and two mozzarella cheese slices
• plain hamburger but must be separated on the plate so bun there, patty here, no sauce or salad/onions/pickles
• sausages, Richmond thick only and must be only just cooked as of they go a dark colour then he thinks they're 'burnt'
• Weetabix, plain with a tiny splash of whole milk
• Yorkshire puddings, home made only and dry with no gravy

Will sometimes eat, if feeling settled and regulated:

• grapes, green only
• apples, red only
• pork, only the inside of the cut and not the 'burnt' outsides
• very rare steak
• Frubes
• cherries
• malt loaf

In those situation, we say in the helpline to explore the possibilities as in ruling things out.
but also to recognise if there is a pattern.

in my daughters case - she is one of the reason I volunteered in that ED charity as I wanted to know more to help her and support others (my way of giving back) - i can go back to when she was a tiny newborn.

she was breastfed for 7 weeks. It was agony. She would suck for an hour and a half every hour and half or 2 hrs. My nipple were raw, bleeding and crusty. I put her on a bottle at 7 weeks because I was started to resent her and i didnt want to resent her.
it took 14 tits before we found the one that was best for her.

then she was sucking her food instead of chewing it. Meals took ages. I had to puree it for a long time.

the goos thing with her is her capacity for reasoning from her very young age. So by age 3 she was able to explain a few things: she needed to get the juice out of the food before swallowing it, etc.

by aged 8 she was able to tell me that some meat was too strong, to chewy, some veg were too fibery etc.

then aged 9/10 during covid she told me she was vegetarian. Covid coincided with her growth spurt where she put on a bit of weight before growing taller. She was very conscious of her body and started controlling.
luckily a friens of mine is a chef and started an online workshop on Fridays “teen dinners”
so she started cooking dinner. We all ate the same as her.

she was able to research vegeterian proteines so was able to make the meal plans as long as we had a “rainbow plate”. But then I looked into charities that would trained me.

so i became involved on the helpline and i came accross arfid and i realised thats what my daughter has.

the pattern was

• had to wear the school inside out as the sewing on top of the toes hurt her
• my mother in law had to knit the school jumper in the school colours as too itchy
• needed to wear a cami vest in 100% cotton under the school summer dress as didnt like the fabric
• couldnt wear a puffy coat
• some shoes made her feet hurt - still buying shoes age 15 is a nightmare

and the list is longer.

so as the food issue wasnt an isolated issue, we recognise ot was something else. So thats how you differentiate between being picky and having arfid potentially

When I started weaning DC, they were offered a wide variety. This was not my first (weaning) rodeo. They would eat nothing, hated it all, massively distressed and repulsed almost the entire time. Through trial and error and the offer of everything imaginable, we gradually worked out what they would and wouldn't eat.

You offer and offer and offer and when you find something your ARFID child will eat, you make damn sure that it's always available because they will literally starve themselves if there are no safe foods available. It's not the case that parents reach straight for the nuggets and call it done.

DC still has a variety of foods available as we serve all of our meals family style, they are welcome to touch/taste everything served however they rarely do because those foods are not part of their accepted range.

As a baby DS ate everything I gave him. He stopped drinking milk at 12 months and has taken against any diary by 2 but other than that ate a very wide variety of foods. I have pictures of him in Greece at 1 loving the moussaka.

at 5 he started to become fussier. By 7 he was losing weight at a rate of knots and eating nothing some days. At 9 he was fitted with a feeding tube. At 15 he is thriving thanks to the tube

@AuADHD When were you diagnosed and what advice have you been given? I’ve posted on another thread about a friend’s son who was diagnosed 18 months ago. He has to take various supplements as he’s about to enter puberty and his doctors were concerned.

Of course it does. Some people with ARFID get very ill with scurvy for example

Wtf is ARFID?

https://letmegooglethat.com/

If the thread content hasn't given you a clue already of course...

My son has it, and he lives on Huel. He's an adult (39).

He will eat vegan burgers and chips as well. That's it.

@CatRescueNeeded Someone upthread said that taking a multivitamin is a good idea. I’d also suggest a calcium supplement, especially for women as we’re more prone to osteoporosis. Having weak bones is no joke as we age.

Hooray, a thread where I feel at home - I think DD is on the edges of ARFID, not as extreme as some, but with a far from normal diet.

To those asking, why offer your child chicken nuggets, in our case it was because the paediatric dietitian suggested them, as DD was eating basically no solid food at 15 months. They (along with chocolate buttons - also suggested) were a hit, and remain so.

We have travelled overseas, though DD is not always enthusiastic (and food is the main reason why). We usually go self catering, which makes it much easier, but I should say that DD will eat any normal fusili (pasta); it doesn't have to be a specific brand, the same with chicken nuggets (though some have been refused). We have taken some things with us in hold luggage, and been very flexible about what gets eaten when (sushi for breakfast? why not?!)

Solidarity with those living with this.

It can also affect some people so severely that they have to be tube fed.

Following. DD has ARFID. Does anyone else find it extends to issues taking medicine/swallowing pills?