I’ve gotten a few questions about food-training, so I decided to make a post for you all.
Food Training is basically just exposure therapy. (The thing used to help people with phobias.)
Disclaimer: Keep in mind that everyone is different, and no one’s limits are the same. What might work for one person might not work for another. I’ve only successfully managed to food-train a handful of foods, and I am definitely no dietitian.
The first step is finding a food to train on.
(You can do more than one if you feel up to it, but I prefer to stick to one at a time.)
For me, picking a compatible food is the most important part of this, and boils down to a few key components: Necessity, Availability, Timing, and Food-Hierarchy.
Necessity: Don’t food-train on something you picked out of a hat. Find something that you NEED for one reason or another. Whether that’s a nutritional requirement, a food that’s a common restaurant menu-item, a staple food near you, or something that your family/friends/household/etc have a vested interest in (like if your parents were pumpkin farmers and everything in your house had pumpkin in it but you don’t eat pumpkin). If you train on delicacies only eaten in the Himalayas with no intention of…ever going to the Himalayas, that’s not a great plan. Find something that would make DIFFERENCE IN YOUR LIFE if you were able to eat it.
Availability: If you decide to food-train on a $300 wheel of cheese, you’re probably going about this the wrong way. Food training takes a long time. Sometimes YEARS. It’s important that you can have something readily available in stores near you or relatively easy to make and that you can afford.
Timing: Sometimes whatever voodoo magic controlling my interest in food differs depending on the day. I don’t know what it is, but there are certain days where the idea of eating soup makes me want to gag, and yet other times (like every third Sunday under a waxing moon when the wind blows in an Easterly direction) I can look at it and say “…maybe……just…..maybe……” This is the time to food-train. This way you can associate the food with a better reaction. Some foods have more rigid feels, but others are kind of wishy washy. And some days they look more possible than others.
This ties into my final component
Position of the Food on the Food-Hierarchy: If you asked someone ((in the western world, at least)) without ARFID to choose between eating a brown, mushy banana and eating a banana slug, they would most likely choose the banana. They would think BOTH were a nasty option, but there’s one that a lot LESS disgusting than the other. This is what I personally think of as the Food-Hierarchy. It is different for every person, constantly in flux, and sometimes nigh-indistinguishable, but it’s a cornerstone for me in choosing foods. Trying to food-train on one of your “vomit-inducing” foods is going to be a lot harder and emotionally draining than some of your more “moderate disgust” foods.
When I decided to train with soup (which I’m currently doing now), I did so because it’s nutritious (which I need), a staple food where I live, cheap and easy to make, and relatively flexible on the Food-Hierarchy for me.
I will probably never food-train with casseroles. Because while they are all of the former things, they are MUCH more rigidly set into the “gag, disgusting, vomit” category of the Food-Hierarchy. It’s just not going to happen.
I probably won’t train with berries either. Because while they ARE more appealing on the Food-Hierarchy, it just…doesn’t seem like there’s an urgent need for me to eat berries? I can obtain their nutritional value from juices, and unless I’m going to be just eating them raw, they would probably come with more training than I really want to do (pie, cobbler, tarts, shortcake, etc). Also, they can get kinda pricey for good ones. And if they’re out of season when I’m in a better headspace for food-training, I’m gonna be kinda out of luck.
The second step is figuring out if the food is modular.
Soup is very modular. Start with broth. When that’s tolerable, add one ingredient. When that’s tolerable, add another.
If you’re trying to eat spaghetti sauce, you can start by eating spaghetti while smelling the sauce. When that’s tolerable, put a little sauce on. Then more, then more, etc.
If you want to start eating crackers…that’s going to be a lot harder, because it isn’t as modular. That’s not to say it’s impossible, it’s just harder to piece it into little baby steps.
The third step is breaking those steps (if there are any) down even further.
First, try smelling it and holding it near your open mouth. (And make sure to actually breathe in through your open mouth. Don’t hold your breath)
When that’s tolerable, try putting it on your tongue and then removing it
When that’s tolerable, try holding it in your mouth for a while before removing it
Then chewing and spitting out
Then chewing and swallowing
And most importantly: Don’t Get Discouraged!
One of the biggest struggles is realizing how long this all takes. It will probably take me years to train one very specific recipe of soup. On the other hand, I have another food that only took a month or two. That’s just the way this cookie crumbles.
Even so, I’ll be honest with you: there are quite a few foods that I have started to train on and never been able to successfully train myself to eat.
However, the few foods this has worked for have helped make my life a lot easier, and I definitely recommend it.
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