23M making steady progress
I’m 23M and I’ve had ARFID for my whole life.
I wanted to share my progress because truth be told I have made a lot.
As a kid my diet was incredibly limited, I pretty much lived on bread but fruits, cereals, pancakes or sweets were also in my wheelhouse. It made breakfast my favourite meal of the day and I would always try to load up as much bran flakes or Weetabix as I could because lunch was the second most difficult. And dinner was always the worst.
In hindsight I was very lucky in school, I got into a regular routine of cereals fruits and bread which just about gives you a balanced diet.
But the pain was always felt going out to restaurants or on school trips or hanging out at a friends house. I would always choose either not to eat anything until I got home or find some bread and butter or something. Generally speaking I hid it very well, and because my day to day was normal enough no one, not even my closest friends really knew it was a problem.
Then in college everything collapsed, suddenly I was presented with having to go out for food or eat in the cafeteria. It was a disaster. My diet was lost as lack of routine set in (this also coincided with covid) and I fell into a major depression. No one had any idea what was wrong with me and I just had so little energy for year after year.
A few things kept me going though my strategy was to just not mention it and really try to face it. Every time I'd eat something new my throat would seize up, (but only the first bite and the last bite if that makes sense). And eventually I did that enough times, and in enough settings to make real progress. Nowadays I'm eating meat, stir fry, eggs, noodles, weird japanese food, burritoes. THings that would have inconceivable to me 5 years ago. I also feel generally more confident about trying new foods, as long the setting is alright.
I still have a long way to go and eating routine is quite difficult and still pretty irregular but I really think slowly but surely I could one day learn to eat/try almost everything.
Some methods that have helped me so far:
-eating with friends
-asking stupid questions like how do you eat this? (I had no idea how ppl ate spaghetti, makes no sense to me)
-Cooking with chatGPT
-eating slowly
-eating without youtube
-expecting the throat spasms to come and then breathing through it
Wishing everyone the best of luck, its a silent struggle but we gotta keep growing