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 eats plain chopped corned beef, plain chopped Heck sausages, burgers if they don’t have any crispy bits (I have to cook/cool/microwave them), marmite sandwiches on homemade bread, chips with a LOT of ketchup, and sometimes omelette or potato with butter. We recently lost fish fingers, though I don’t know why.

God but it’s depressing.

Have you not heard of Google either?

DD has it but will fixate on a good for a while then reject it completely.

Currently it's fillet steak, peppercorn sauce and bought mashed potato.

Luckily she’s old enough to buy and cook it herself.

Anyone else’s dc eat anything and everything until about age 2? Suddenly it all stopped and now he just eats beige foods with a bit of carrot/cucumber/broccoli on a good day.

Yes we did till about 18m. Overnight he dropped every food.
but saying that he was awful to wean of breast milk. I ended up having to go away and go cold turkey with him at nearly 3.

Thank you for this.

DC2 was diagnosed by the Community Paediatric Team when they were being assessed for ASD. They did the assessments and the diagnosis came back as AuDHD & ARFID.

My brother has had ARFID from being a baby, he still at 53 eats only a beige diet, things like

Fish fingers & chips
Steak & chips
Chicken breast & chips
Plain pizza
Sunday dinner but no veg
Cheese with anything
Loads of white bread
Bacon sandwiches
Only veg he will eat is peas.

My mum used to be tearing her hair out over his eating, she tried the take it or leave it attitude, I ended up eating his meals on the sly to keep him out of trouble.

Yes! Used to eat a huge range of foods as a toddler then just stopped. Breast fed for years...Now 16 and has been referred by our GP for an ARFID diagnosis (but only on my suggestion). Only eats one meal a day in the evening, from this list:

pasta with pesto or my homemade tomato sauce
chocolate chips
Quorn chicken nuggets
veggie sausage rolls
ice cream (Ben and Jerrys)
Doritos
frozen cauli and grated parmesan
cheese flavoured tortilla chips
Ikea cinnamon rolls
Lipton iced tea
Starbucks

Also takes iron and vitamin D supplements.

@Nat6999 I imagine that having full control over his diet as an adult has been a huge relief to him (and probably your Mum as well). I'm 50 and back then, public awareness of ED's and how to treat them was more limited.

No

I think my brothers eating problems stem from him being a premature baby, he was tube fed for over a month & then when he came home my mum had problems feeding him as he wouldn't take a bottle, it took a midwife finding some narrow necked bottles to get him to feed properly. Once they found a bottle he would feed from he put on enormous amounts of weight, he was 4lb when he was born in March, by his christening in August he was 21lb he was never full. At first on solids he ate anything but gradually his diet got narrower & narrower. He was a chunky child but very tall with it, he is 6 years younger than me but by age 8 he was taller than me at 14, he is 6' 5" now & grossly overweight, I would estimate probably 30 stone. I honestly think he is autistic but he has never been assessed, my mum is most likely autistic, I've been diagnosed, my ds is & both my brother's twin dc are.

What's in your home made soup? Whats your health like now? Do you manage any supplements?

You can get drops of vitamins like abidec or vitamin d that have no taste that you can drop into his water or whatever he drinks?

Wow, so many of us!
Today is shopping delivery day. The email says they have substituted regular hummus for my red pepper hummus so I’m feeling stressed that my usual lunch food will not be available. It’s probably my main source of protein and what I eat for lunch most days if I’m not eating yogurt. I might have to do an extra delivery for tomorrow to see if I can get it. It must be nice to be able to shrug and just eat something different.

Not in our case, he self weaned off milk at 11mo and hasn't touched it since, other than what i put on his cereal and he doesn't drink the bowl dregs once he's done eating.

He was incredibly picky during weaning, and the only way he would eat as a toddler was off my plate, so i used to put extra on and let him 'help himself to mommys food' at meal times.

my saving grace was there was a brand of oat and raisin cookie he would eat quite happily, i think my heart about broke when they discontinued them. (i will hate nutrigrain for ever for that one, assholes)

@Unexpectedlysinglemumive tried everything. Also the multivitamin drops with no taste or smell are mostly for babies or young children. My son is nearly 15 so will be nowhere near what he should be getting a day.
I have been putting prescription vitamin D drops in his squash but any other vitamins he needs I’m hoping he gets enough from the stickers

I think my dad might have had it. I know someone who definitely has it.
They only eat

Salami/prosciutto
Bacon
Only very specific type of 'posh' bread like ciabatta.
Cucumber
Raw peppers
Cherry tomatoes
One brand of cereal bar
Chicken but only cooked very plain.
Very specific pizza with pepperoni from a restaurant.

Can you go physically to the shop to get it? That way you will be sure to not receive another substitution.

also you can turn off substitution in your preferences, tesco you can and asda you could but havent ordered from them for years.

@AuADHD Just a thought for the future but I used to make my own hummus when my children were tiny. Blend up chick peas and whatever else you like to include. You can make it exactly to your personal taste-just an idea.

It’s 2 buses to the nearest Waitrose, or two trains and would take me the best part of 2 hours to get there and back. I’ve tried making my own and it wasn’t good. I might try again.

But this isn’t the same as living somewhere with limited food, is it? You were delaying eating until you could have a “safe” food. The question I think was asking what about where that is not an option, because not only is it yam flour for lunch but every other meal for the next 6 months. Or whatever.

Food wasn't abundant when I grew up, 1 of 5 kids raised in pretty abject poverty.

I'm not a young person either! It definitely wasn't acceptable not to eat what you were given. There definitely was physical threat to refusing food. Also, it turns out, to puking it back up.

I’m sorry - but unless you were saying there was only one option for days on end, it’s really not the same. Poverty means different things to different people - from recollection it’s commonly defined as living on less than the median income. So someone in uk poverty might have a very different dietary position to someone living in - for example only - Rwandan poverty or Peruvian poverty