As a parent of a child with challenging feeding behaviors, it may feel like you have been struggling for years trying to help your child improve their eating. Maybe your child’s struggle with a limited diet is more recent, following the stomach flu, Covid, or choking incident. Maybe your child has a food phobia or simply never appears hungry. Perhaps your child has autism or sensory concerns that are limiting their food choices. While Avoidant-Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, or ARFID, presents quite differently from other eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, the stress it has on families can be just as severe. Individuals with ARFID have limited food intake but do not have a desire for weight loss or a distorted body image. If you or a family member is struggling with ARFID, it is often a challenging and overwhelming disorder to battle. It can be exhausting trying to ensure your child meets their nutritional needs from day to day.
Knowing there is help available right in your own backyard is exciting! In Lake Nona, Kelly specializes in ARFID and is here to guide you through some steps that you can implement to help you support your child with ARFID.
1. Start with mini exposures
The want to have your child increase their preferred food choices is often so strong that the risk of pushing too hard is strong. Often in treatment, people are asked to incorporate foods they may never have had. If we set expectations too high, it can ultimately lead us to believe that is not working. To keep spirits up, exposures should be small – start with a bite and continue to increase over time in size as the exposures become tolerated. The goal is to provide underwhelming bites or exposures, increasing over time. This allows yourself and your child to make incremental progress and minimize discouragement.
2. Stick with it
Exposures are hard! They can elicit high emotional responses. It is easy to get discouraged if an exposure fails and can make you want to quit. It can be helpful to keep in mind that it can take up to 15 exposures of the same food before you are able to accept the food with ease. Repeated exposures increase familiarity with new foods and demonstrates dedication and belief in the process to your child.
3. Rotate it
Once a new food becomes well tolerated, it is important to keep that food in the rotation. This simply means continuing it once or twice a week. By NOT doing this, it will be like starting all over again when the food is tried again down the road.
4. Child inclusion!
Although the idea of increasing food variety may be anxiety-provoking for your child, including them in the planning of exposures allows them to be curious about foods. It shows their dedication and buy-in to the changing process, which is important! Making it an adventure is key. Go shopping…explore new aisles. Download fun or silly recipes. Draw pictures and guess the tastes of new foods. Make three “similar” foods and have a taste test…see which one wins! Feeling extra adventurous? Have a blindfolded taste test! Have a kiddo who likes crispy foods? See all the crazy things we can put in the air fryer! Help guide them on this journey – but remember, you make suggestions, they make decisions.
6. Think outside the box-hypnosis!
In some cases, utilizing techniques, especially in situations where eating has become a phobia, such as hypnosis can be extremely beneficial! Not many people are qualified to help people in this manner, so it is crucial to find a competent provider. You can find out more about this method by visiting Kelly’s YouTube Channel listed below:
7.Keep things fun!
Limit stressing about things like taking away tablets or “not allowing a treat until after dinner.” These rules create distress and anxiety during meals! Focus on reducing anxiety, implementing dinnertime rules that create a calm atmosphere, and use what works! If tablets help, use that method until a new routine can be cultivated in the future.
