Don’t worry: It’s a food thing

Note: This post was originally written on The Mental Health Lifestyle which has now shut down. The original article was written by Jay Parrack in August 2016 and has been modified for release here on Young Adults with ARFID.

Ever heard anyone say this before - “Don’t worry too much about me, it’s just my food thing”. I’m not going to say who I head this from but what I can say is that I’ve

used this line before and some of us get it.

To clarify, a “food thing” is a shorter way of saying “I have an eating disorder – don’t talk to me about it”. As many of you are aware, eating disorders take many forms and as mentioned in the DSM-V, these are named as Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia, EDNOS and ARFID. We then attribute these with other disorders such as anxiety, depression or body dysmorphic disorder (more so with anxiety and depression as they may not want to eat in front of people and/or try to avoid food all-together).

I’m going to give some brief guidance about what to look for in “food things” as I believe they are useful. If you are a parent, it may help for you to take five minutes to read this and accept that your child has an eating disorder (while I may sound harsh here, disordered eating is fairly common in children, however, it gets particularly dangerous around teenage years!).

Some tips

• In European countries such as Sweden (🇸🇪), it is typical for food to be distributed on large plates and then the member of the family can take as much as they want (or to how much they can eat). In England, this is the opposite as we are expected to eat what we are given. Get a small plate and remove the foods you don’t feel as though you will eat and/or cannot finish – this helps deal with portion sizes. Alternatively, save any unfinished food for leftovers (this works great for foods like pasta and pizza).

• If you have a fear of trying new foods, set aside a week for trying new foods every 3/4 days. Grab a copy of the food experiment template from the resource hub.

• Don’t try and avoid meals – be honest with us and yourself! Is your brain saying that you cannot have food because you feel that your fat or overweight or are you just not hungry?

• You know how they say resistance is futile? There will be a time where you will want to have treatment (for example, I decided after my great nans passing that I wanted to start treatment – it’s a work in progress by today’s standard). Only you will know when the time is right.