Interesting. Thanks.
I agree it’s her life to run as she sees fit. I was just trying to find some consistency between her beliefs and her behavior. Which seems mostly lacking. As is her right.
I’m not anywhere close to an expert, but I’d have to guess that consistency isn’t really a consideration in eating disorders.
She won’t eat my cottage cheese (white) or my cream cheese (white) but she enjoys my butter which is as close to white as yellow can be. I stopped offering her cheese long ago because I don’t use food coloring and most of my cheese is white.
I used to try to figure it out but gave up years ago.
I have been privileged to never, in my 65 years, deal with anyone with a significant eating disorder. Or even prickly levels of pickiness.
I know a woman who mostly eats like an unadventurous teenager, favoring most of the fast food standards mostly towards the plain end of the menu plus carby snacks. But she can and will eat almost anything a typical American would call normal food. Just strongly prefers the other.
This thread is an interesting spelunk into a world I’ve never seen. Thank you.
And to think I missed Sonic 50cent Corndogs today.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. It can be a parenting problem, but often it’s an autism problem. Or some degree of it. You can’t parent a person out of a food compulsion. Talk to an adult who has this problem if you want to actually learn something.
Now why the heck did you not post that yesterday so we’d all know about them!!
I’ve known this type of person before. Two twenty-something brothers living at home without a job. Their dad bought the biggest bag of chicken fingers he could find at Costco and they were content with that for lunch and dinner. The parents tried to serve (somewhat) healthy meals for dinner, but the two brothers wanted no part in it. They were perfectly content to take their plates of chicken fingers and a bottle of ketchup into their room and play video games while they ate their “dinner.”
I feel so fortunate that my parents encouraged me to try different food. Granted, I’m about 40lbs overweight at the moment and that needs working on, but I sure didn’t get that way by eating chicken fingers.
I’ll just add another data point to help confuse you.
You don’t smoke pot, so you won’t really understand getting the munchies. When the munchies take over, anything goes. She won’t even eat white food during a serious munchy attack. Once the only sweet thing in my freezer was vanilla ice cream which she turned down. She watched me put white ice cream in a bowl and then add some green food coloring and smoosh it around a little with a fork and she gobbled that right down.
She’s a career government worker and a grandmother. I’ve met her daughters, lovely women, and they eat anything. She encourages her grandkids to eat a variety of food and will cook mashed potatoes for them, which they happily eat.
Tis odd.
I’ve heard of otherwise “professional” people who only eat steak tips at restaurants, because it’s one of the hardest things to mess up even at a bad restaurant while still being incredibly tasty. Maybe that’s similar to people who only eat chicken tenders at restaurants, they just want to eat something they know they will enjoy.
Chubbyemu, a Youtuber toxicologist who examines unusual ways people have wound up in the ER, did a video about a lad with a similar diet whose fate wasn’t quite as dire;
I know a pediatrician who encounters a few kids hospitalized with scurvy. It’s almost always kids with autism.
My young teenage son is on the Spectrum and is a picky eater. Which includes chicken nuggets/fingers and basic spaghetti and single-topping pizza but he won’t eat hamburgers or hotdogs or a lot of other common ‘junk food’ much less anything more exotic. And he hates most candy, ice cream, cakes, pies and other baked goods (but loves yogurt but only strawberry or strawberry-banana). Fortunately, his tastes are broad enough that we can usually find him something in a restaurant even if they don’t sell finger-liftable poultry chunks.
I suspect that the reason his food choices are mainly ‘toddler foods’ is because that’s what he’s used to and he’s extra-sensitive to sensory issues so the only foods he wants to eat are those he’s familiar with in taste and texture. We give him vitamins at home and some squeeze pouches with fruit/veg blends and, on rare occasions, he’ll eat some peas but that’s about it.
We try introducing him to new foods and how to be polite about foods he doesn’t want to eat but with limited success on the former. The joke in our house is that anything new you give him will be responded to with “Thank you, that’s good, now I never want to eat it again.”
I have to remember when I’m in NYC / Lawn Guyland, American cheese should be white; not that nasty yellow stuff they love there. ::shudder::
I think 'cause it looks like runny, undercooked eggs on an egg & cheese sam’ich
I have an employee with two kids, 5 and 7. The kids eat very few foods, and chicken nuggets are their dinner most nights. She says it’s not a problem because they each get a Flintstones Chewable Vitamin every day.
Scurvy is no joke.
My niece is permanently neurologically impaired because she passively followed the advice of a doctor who put her on a FODMAP diet (extremely limited food temporary diet) for her irritable bowel syndrome, and neglected to tell her it was temporary. She ate nothing but meat and eggs until she was found in a near coma on the floor of her house.
She’s had a whole lot of medical intervention since then, but still suffers from intense vertigo, vision blur, and cognitive fog. She’s in her forties and will probably need home care the rest of her life.
Admittedly she has depression and other issues which contributed to her behavior, and her case is unusual, most such scurvy victims do make a recovery a lot better than hers.
The moral of the story: if you can’t eat a fucking salad at least take a multivitamin.
Not intended to be medical advice for your employee but, rather, this made me remember: my kid also takes Miralax each day to keep things moving. This seems to be a regular issue with ASD kids anyway due to sensory problems and the low-fiber diet probably doesn’t help.
My son is a little older than yours, and is similar.
He eats enough different things to piece together a reasonable diet:
Proteins: Fried chicken (nuggets, tenders, on-the-bone) and strawberry and strawberry-banana yogurt. He will also eat some smoked meats like turkey and brisket. He has very recently eaten a steak at a friend’s house, so I’m hoping peer pressure is kicking in a bit.
Fruits & Vegetables: Not counting starches, he eats no culinary vegetables – certainly nothing green. Thankfully, there are some fruits that he likes – bananas, apples, and grapes.
Starches: French fries, natch. Most varieties of potato chips, pretzels, and tortilla chips. Granola bars and recently Clif bars. He will eat grits with butter. Donuts and cinnamon rolls. Most kinds of cake.
Junk Food: Big on candy, such as chocolate, Gummi Bears, peppermints, etc.
Also thankfully, he has taken it upon himself recently to purchase and take vitamins regularly. I understand (correctly?) that vitamin pills aren’t as good (less efficient?) than getting vitamins from food … but vitamin pills don’t seem to be doing harm.
My kid is currently being evaluated for ARFID. He’s three, and will only eat a narrow range of foods, nothing wet, sticky or fresh, all dried foods. When he first started daycare, they would not allow us to bring food from home, so he happily starved himself and lost four pounds. Never complained about being hungry, just flat-out wouldn’t eat. Once we got ADA paperwork filled out we were given permission to send food he will eat.
It’s pretty hard to watch your kid slowly starve himself. He is eating a moderate about of food currently but often refuses to eat dinner or only part of breakfast, and his list of acceptable foods seems to be dwindling.
This is a disorder with a higher than average number of autistic kids, so the people engaging in this limited eating may in fact be autistic. I’ve heard adult autistics say that getting them to eat a non-preferred food feels like being forced to swallow crushed glass. The wrong texture or whatever feels actually threatening. My kid highly distressed by certain types of foods, to the point that he won’t eat if you’re eating something he finds distressing.
You’ve mentioned this before, and I want to clarify something. The low-FODMAP diet isn’t so restrictive you can eat only meat and eggs. I know because I was on it. It excludes certain types of foods that can cause gastric distress, so you have to cut a lot out, but you do it one category at a time, to see which classes of foods are really causing the problem. It’s a kind of elimination diet, but even if you were excluding all the categories at once, there are still lots of fruits and vegetables you can eat on a low-FODMAP diet. It doesn’t exclude everything.
The doctor clearly had no idea what he was talking about, to the point of being dangerously irresponsible. I’m really sorry about your niece. The low-FODMAP diet actually has a fairly strong evidence base as an effective intervention for IBS.
But how much can a person with normal taste buds enjoy such food without at least drowning it in hot sauce, aïoli, whatever?