Why are Aspies such picky eaters?
Q: I've heard that a lot of Aspies have eccentric eating habits. What is your experience and how can I get my child to eat a wider variety of foods?
A: Food pickiness... yeah. I tend to go through phases of eating one food at a time. Right now I'm going through a Frosted Flakes stage. For the past six weeks or so, I've been eating Frosted Flakes two meals a day (I have a slow metabolism and almost never eat lunch). Every once and a while I'll have a cookie or a sandwich instead of my bowl of frosted flakes, but only when Frosted Flakes aren't readily available. These phases usually last somewhere between two and six weeks. Then I'll spent a week or two not really wanting to eat anything, until I get hungry enough to latch onto a new food and the cycle starts all over again. Luckily I consistantly like milk and I take vitamin pills, so other than occasional bouts of anemia I've never really had problems with my bad diet.
This has pretty much been the pattern since I started having a choice in what I ate. When I was little and Mom was still trying to get me to eat whatever the rest of the family ate, there were a lot of things that I just couldn't swallow. Most meats, most vegetables, and a large number of fruits. I would start gagging and if I did manage to swallow it, I would have a stomach ache afterwards. Between taking multivitamins for so many years and having a heart condition that requires a lot of medication, I've gotten good enough at swallowing pills that I can now eat something like salad, which I would not normally be able to eat, by wadding up the lettuce and swallowing it with a sip of water. Obviously I usually just avoid salad, because eating it that way is unpleasant and takes a long time. And I usually still get a stomach ache.
Foods do sometimes move on and off the list of foods I eat, though. Over the years I developed a mild allergy to apples, which at the time was the only fresh food I ate. It wasn't the sort of allergy that caused any serious problems, it just made my throat itch. To get my mom to stop making me eat apples, I managed to start eating bananas. French Fries, baked potatos, and bacon have also switched sides a couple of times. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I have very vivid sense memories, so encountering a bad French Fry means that every time I see them for the next couple of years I can remember exactly what that bad French Fry tasted like. On the other hand, when I get really hungry and then eat a piece of bacon, I will remember that feeling of finally getting food after being hungry whenever I smell bacon.
My mom worked incredibly hard to instill me with better eating habits, but as soon as I went away for school I went back to eating what I wanted. One thing that Mom did that I think was very helpful was train me to take multivitamins. Multivitamins are probably the only reason I don't have scurvy by now. In general, the trick to getting an Aspie to eat something they don't like is to disguise whatever it is they don't like about it. I actually rather like the taste of tuna with lemon, but I can't stand the texture. I had been using the swallow it whole method for years because it's one of the only forms of meat I can even do that with, until one day I discovered tortillas. If I wrap the tuna in a tortilla, I can usually sneak the texture past myself because I'm focused on the texture of the tortilla. I have similar objections to the texture of chicken, but fresh chicken nuggets from Wendy's (and only from Wendy's, it drives my mom nuts) have crispy enough breading that the chicken inside doesn't bother me. It's a trial and error thing. Whereas telling an aspie over and over again to eat a piece of brocolli is just going to lead to gagging and nausea, if you keep trying different foods, keeping in mind the reasons that he doesn't like the things he doesn't like, you might hit on some new foods he does.
