#AskingAutistics #Neurodivergent #AuDHD #ADHD #ActuallyAutistic (that's me)
Subject: Food/eating
Tell me..
- one thing that helped you as a child (or would've helped)
- one thing that didn't help you at all
...around eating & food, when you were a child.
Reboosts also appreciated ☺️
@KatyElphinstone
Didn’t help:
- Father shouted at me
- Mother lied about food contents, eg saying food didn’t have onion when I could smell it from the other side of the house
Did help:
- Mother tried to make food as easy to eat as possible
- Mother ended up compiling a list of safe foods
Sad but true: as a father of autistic children I initially reproduced my father’s failed behaviour. I dropped that when I saw my mother’s own strategies on autism books
@glycojones
Thank you!! This is so incredibly helpful.
Funny about the autism books, as I am writing a book for parents of neurodivergent children (that's why I keep asking all these questions!)
@KatyElphinstone I became bulimic because it gave me control. I used to say I vomited because I'd had a gut full of their crap!
Letting me have autonomy over me food and not making every meal a battle would have been wonderful.
@KatyElphinstone
What helped: the ability to choose what I ate.
What did not help: being made fun of for my pickiness and forced to "try new things" and "get out of my comfort zone." I'm perfectly willing to try new things, just at my own pace!
I think I would have been very gated with food if it weren't for my grandfather.
I was very much a no new flavours and textures kid early on, but he really encouraged me to try things and reasons to try things, and to try things a few times before totally deciding.
He got me into cooking. I started cooking very young and it grew when I realized that learning about food was a way to travel. By the time I was 8, I'd checked out pretty much every recipe book in our school.
I think my neurodiversity has been really helpful in terms of recipe writing. I can think flavours before I cook them very well and very accurately. This was something that developed because I grew up really poor and couldn't cook most of the things I read about, so I would virtually cook and eat things in my head and got really good at it.
I think most of this was good, but I also think I had to evolve away from my issues with food and textures for survival as well. I didn't really grow up with food choices, so it was eat or don't eat with my parents.
My grandpa was literally the only person who noticed I had issues.
@model_subject
Aha - and you are not the only person who's mentioned food prep and recipes as a way kids can get into eating, as well. I like this idea so much, as it makes a lot of sense.
You then know what goes into the food, and you have some influence also, in the decision-making process.
Things parents should know:
Sensory stuff can hugely exaggerate tiny(to you) differences in textures or flavours. This means that even a safe food can be wrong if cooked differently, prep'd differently or even just left too long (cold/hot affects textures and mouthfeel). Different brands might as well be different products. Mixing foods affects textures 'ruining' them.
Fruit and veg can vary in feel/texture withal/ripeness, so can easily trigger texture sensitivities.
worst for me was 'but you like *this* food' - it was different and wrong, but I didn't have the language to understand *why* and how it was different (texture variations, or mixed textures are a huge turnoff for me).
To reduce stress at mealtimes, focus on consistency and predictability.
Same plate, forks, cups is a cheap way to help sameness.
Use kitchen timers and microwaves to maintain same cooking times.
Don't 'experiment' with recipes unless planned, or provide a safe option (e.g. split and experiment with just half).
Beware contamination and 'bits' - finding a bone or gristle can put me off a food for weeks.
use a stick blender to create soups, and adjust texture/consistency with boiling water to keep things the same. I can deal with quite a range of tastes, it's the textures that trigger me.
@RenoirDana
Oh my!! So much interesting and useful info!
Thank you so much 😊
I read the 'CW' and title, and got extremely happy - evening before opening it. Something about the word 'infodump' and then prefixed with a topic I'm truly interested in.
Fabulous. You've made my evening 😍
A bit more of a personal story useful?
I had big food issues as a kid. Particular textures, especially mixed like skins/soft and soft/sauce I can't deal with.
My mum says that as soon as I learned 'no', from about 1yr/18m onward, there were some foods I would just refuse to eat.
Very early on, my brain formed a map (attached).
Because of a few intensely awful experiences, I formed 'safe rules' - Basically no fruit and no veg. Because of certain triggers, anything similar was also suspect, leaving me only a very narrow path of safe foods.
Moving off the safe path, even in just the direction (e.g. a single orange segment used as cake decoration) caused huge anxiety.
Anxiety -> stress ->adrenaline->no appetite.
The 'edges' of these triggers were unclear, and it was a stressful time. Eating was like a lottery, each bite was like is this ok.... yes?, because triggers were so uncomfortable.
As an adult (>35), I have been able to carefully explore these boundaries and produce a better, safer map. These days, I can eat apples, strawberries, and several specific vegetables so my diet is a little more varied. Many of my old aversions still produce the same reaction though.
As an example, I was invited to a 'meet the brass' lunch meeting at work. While talking with the CTO, chatting and eating, I took a bite of what I thought was a chocolate chip muffin, but was actually a rasin muffin. The adrenaline kicked in and spat it straight onto my plate. Oops.
These food issues had side effects.
In the 70's in a not-rich family, the social rules were:
"If you are given food, you should eat it all (clean plate)"
"If given food, it is impolite to refuse"
School dinners were not fun: the rules were that you had to finish what you were given, or sit on the teachers table. I just sat there until the end of lunch break and it seemed a reasonable tradeoff : the 'punishment' was a lot less than the issues with eating.
I was paranoid about anywhere we went that would require meals out. If we visited friends, trips out, I would get very anxious about mealtimes and what would be presented.
This carried over to celebrations. Christmas was about Christmas pudding and Christmas cake, both definite 'no's from me (rasins). Even birthday parties - what if the other person has a birthday cake with raisins? It became easier not to go. to find excuses. I would even get anxious around meal times at a friend's house : what if they have an unsafe meal and offer me dinner?
I had a lot of "not hungry" and "I have something at home" or I would make excuses and leave.
I had 'internalised' the rules so much that it felt like a huge struggle : I felt compelled to follow the 'rules', but the sensory issues were worse. It took a long time to realise that I could refuse to eat things and it wasn't rude, it wasn't a problem. The early school dinner experiences of being 'strongly encouraged' to eat everything really stuck with me for a lot longer than it should have, and became exaggerated and overthought in my mind.
Even now, for team meals out I will lookup the menu in advance and pre-calculate and select safe foods. I tend to have a few very safe foods that I stick to : I have eaten the same breakfast and lunch for the last 3 years or so, and the number of days different is probably less than 20.
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