ARFID Recovery: Becoming More Flexible

It will come as no surprise for those with ARFID, their family members or their treatment team, that there is a certain amount of inflexibility that co-exists with ARFID, and makes ARFID recovery more challenging. For anyone that has been presented with a new food, or a variation of a known or tolerated food, you’ll recognize the very quick mental thought of “NO!!!!! I can’t do that!” and the quickness of turning away or rejecting that new food. Once a food, or a thought of a food, is rejected, it is very hard to make yourself or your loved one try that food.

This blog is intended to explore one main idea for increasing flexibility specifically for the purpose of being open to the possibility of trying a new food, or a new variation of a tolerated food. Building flexibility overall is a much larger discussion and may be explored in further blogs.

ADJUSTING FOODS

When I was a kid, I loved my mom’s homemade spaghetti sauce. I loved the first night, pasta with the fresh sauce poured over it, and the leftover night, when the sauce and spaghetti had been mixed together and reheated that way. But what completely grossed me out was lasagna. So what was different about lasagna? The squishy, yucky cheese glopped into the layers between the lasagna noodles and the sauce. Big time NO!!!!!! But my parents weren’t the type to make a completely different “lasagna” for me, so the choice was to eat it, or not eat it, and try to fill up on other things on the table, like bread and butter. Over time a new choice emerged, which was to take the piece of lasagna I had been given and eat the parts that I could. Did it look pretty? No. Because my plate would have glops of cheese left on it. But I could salvage some of the pasta, with some of the sauce, and force it down. Ironically, being exposed to some of the taste of the cheese that couldn’t be scraped off, while unpleasant initially, made it more tolerable over time and eventually it was more manageable to eat more of the cheese.

So, here’s the idea: Could we work on ADJUSTING foods that we are given? Could we use thoughts like: “is there a part of this food I can eat?” or “is there something I could do to this food that would make it more tolerable?”

Lasagna

Let’s consider some different ideas of how we can ADJUST a food to be able to eat it:

• Add a sauce or condiment

• Scrape off a sauce or condiment

• Pull apart the food and eat a part of it, for example, take the ham and cheese off the bun and eat the bun, the ham, or the cheese, or some combination of these

• Take a topping off, for example, take the pepperoni off a pizza and eat it like a cheese pizza, rather than rejecting the pepperoni pizza because it wasn’t just a cheese pizza

• Push aside the parts that you don’t like, for example, you want to like soup but all of the vegetables, noodles, or pieces of meat can be overwhelming. Think of the soup as separate things, and consider whether you can eat the noodles, any of the veggies, or any pieces of the meat, or whether you can just drink the broth plain.

• Pop the food in the air fryer to make it crispier

• Pop the food in the microwave to make it warmer

• Add a favorite seasoning

• Come up with a different strategy and let us know!

BEYOND THE AUTOMATIC NO

How do we consider possibly, perhaps, maybe, finding a way to make a food tolerable even when Fred (our name for ARFID) is yelling NO!!! Maybe there is another part of ourselves, the NOT-FRED part that could say “I wonder if I don’t have to reject this completely? Maybe there is a way to have at least part of this, or change it in some way to make it more tolerable?”

Maybe first we need to accept the idea of eating something TOLERABLE, even if it isn’t something that we would prefer. And maybe we need to put on our scientist hat, pull out our clipboard, and write down (or draw, for younger or more artistic folks) all of the parts of a food and develop some experiments about how to adjust the food. In the Bridge the Food Gap: An ARFID Recovery Workbook there is an experiment worksheet to help in laying out a plan.

Food Experiment - Bridge the Food Gap: An ARFID Recovery Workbook

In conclusion, the word “NO!” is a quick ARFID response to many new foods, particularly ones that have scary features based on smell or how they look, or the belief that their taste or texture will be intolerable. Sometimes foods are rejected just based on the thought of them. Getting to the point of increasing willingness to think flexibly about possible ways to adapt or adjust foods is a huge step in the recovery process and definitely worth working on. Stay tuned, there may just be a new worksheet showing up on our website!! 😊