Trying Food

Thank you! I will try this.

WOW!!! Thanks, I will look at all of these!

What foods do you like? Maybe you could experiment with some of those 

    This has been the case for myself all my life as well. I'm now close to 70 and these are my strategies.

      First and foremost build up one's beneficial gut bacteria.This is easy to do with probiotics, live yogurt without additives (like sugar), cider vinegar and the like. These are called the "live" foods.

    Next to do is to get a comprehensive allergen test. The test was the most helpful for me in my whole life as I could delete many items at once that I could only guess at before as being the cause of distress.

      I also have heightened smell and taste and "ick" factor. For me it is: "will this make me sick if I eat it. Does it look right?" I have a battery of allergies and sometimes I eat the wrong thing and pay. so I tend to stay with a few food/restaurants/stores/processed foods I know are clean and won't make me sick.This has been through trial and error.

    I don't know if you eat meat. I can't speak to it's benefits. I am allergic to beef and pork and don't want to eat animals at all anyway. Staying away from meat is a cleaner diet overall, for me.

I would break how I do it down to these three groups: eat one from each at every meal.

1. starch, 2. fresh veggies and fruit, not canned 3. vegetable based proteins.

experiment with this.

add a few you already know are ok, like, say, brown rice. try a new kind of starch every week or two. If you have a bad reaction scratch it off. I had to scratch wheat off, for example.

Try this with the other food groups, one new thing every week or so, depending on if the last thing you ate got you sick and you need time to recover.

       Learn to cook a stable of simple meals you can mix and match from.

Here are some of mine, for example.

        rice/ steamed peas/Beyond burger

        baked or boiled potato/ salad/ 2 soft boiled eggs (unfertilized).

       quinoa/steamed spinach/baked falafel balls/

        oat bread toast with peanut butter/papaya/

A few certain things 

• processed foods are the most unreliable, the most pernicious.

•reading ingredients on labels is essential.

•fresh foods are the most nutritious.

•one needs to ask, in restaurants, about ingredients and whether the food was fresh prepared or canned or from frozen. ask to have things not included or replaced. Like no onions on the salad. Dressing on the SIDE, please. One must demand and send back items delivered not to one's specifications. [Be a generous tipper to kind servers going out of their comfort zones for you to deal with grumpy cooks. eye rolling servers.. not so much.]

•heating to the proper temp is essential.

•buffets in health food stores are good places to experiment and to ask questions.

•sugar is poison.

•fried foods are poison.

•sips of warm lemon water with a meal soothes the esophagus and aids digestion.

•cooking for oneself is a joy.

If you want a summary let me know, I know that was a bit of an info dump. If that wasn't enough I also have more. 

Like with many autism things, the research has been done on children, so a lot of this refers to 'children'. I apologise for that. Ignore it though it works for adults too.

OK, so this is a very in depth booklet that might be a bit overwhelming: https://keltyeatingdisorders.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CBT-AR_workbook_12.4.18.pdf but you could definitely work through

this is a good article you may find useful on someone else who has been on this journey

https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-practice/autism-eating 

This is a shorter guide for teens that I think is a good one to self guide with:

https://youngwomenshealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Food-Chaining-for-ARFID.pdf 

In short, there are two main techniques for food widening. The 'food hierarchy' and 'food chaining' and these work best if you combine them.

Food chaining works around using foods that are similar to foods you already can eat. 

So for example you might already be able to eat oven chips, from which you could try mostly oven chips with one 1 hash brown (using the food hierarchy if necessary) and then maybe try some loosely crushed potatoes

Food hierarchy works on the steps it takes to actually eat a food, from tolerating its presence in the room to eating it. It can be split into 5 steps with 12 or 32 sub steps. 

The 5 main steps are 

Tolerate 

Smell

Touch

Taste

Eat

The 12 smaller steps, which I prefer personally

1. Tolerate food in the same room

2. Tolerate food on table

3. Tolerate food on plate

4. Touch food and throw away

5. Smell food and throw away

6. Kiss food and throw away

7. Lick food and throw away

8. Lick food x times and throw away (usually 5 times, but work up)

9. Break food with teeth and throw away

10. Chew food x times and throw again (again work up)

11. Eat a small piece

12. Eat an entire piece

A really important aspect is also keeping the food in your diet once you are prepared to eat it. If you don't use it you lose it.

Something mentioned in the article of someone's experience is that relaxing methods like breathing exercises, mindfulness, or distraction can be useful to combat the anxiety when acting with new foods

Feel free to ask questions, that was an info dump sorry it's the autism 

Give me a mo, there is a really good step by step plan to adding a new food for people with restrictive eating habits. I'm just going to find it for you