“A lot of people don’t understand and just think he’s fussy and doing it for attention”.
Anxiety can manifest itself into many different physical ailments. If you have ever experienced high amounts of stress this is something I’m sure you can relate to. Feeling hot, feeling cold, having stomach issues, getting headaches, feeling not real… the list could go on forever. However there is a side of anxiety that isnt commonly spoken about and that is the eating side.
For those who have suffered from eating disorders, I put in here a trigger warning as this blog post will be discussing eating disorders and weight loss.
Appetites change when someone is going through a bad mental health patch. Sometimes we may binge and over eat to feel comfort, however there are times we also may restrict ourselves from eating the normal amount we usually would. Sometimes you may lose your appetite completely due to stress. This is very common as when we are in our fight and flight mode, our digestion shuts down and so we dont find ourselves that hungry as often as we should.
However, there is a condition that a small number of people suffer from which is called AFRID. ARFID stands for ‘Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder’. The NHS defines ARFID as “when someone avoids certain foods, limits how much they eat or does both. Beliefs about weight or body shape are not reasons why people develop ARFID. Possible reasons may include:
- negative feels over the smell, taste or texture of certain foods
- a response to a past experience with food that was upsetting for example choking or being sick after eating something.
Generally, one lacks the feeling of being hungry or lacks interest in eating.
“I always felt like a pain – whether this is to my family for having to prepare certain meals, for my friends having to avoid certain restaurants when I dine with them, and everyone around me when I start hyperventilating because something ‘unsafe’ ‘contaminated’ my meal”.
Today i am going to be speaking about ARFID in response to a traumatic event. Before we get into that, ARFID is commonly seen within people who are diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder and can be hard to find within people who aren’t diagnosed with ASD.
When a traumatic event occurs that involves your throat or body in general, it can create an automatic response within yourself that makes you avoid anything that reminds you of your trauma. This can be seen within people who suffer from PTSD, whereby high levels of avoidance trauma occur, even if the thing you are avoiding doesn’t have a soul relation to the event.
I will be speaking about my experience with ARFID and how it affected me. As always I state that this is my personal response and journey and everyone experiences things differently. If you relate to anything that is said there will be links at the end of this post that can provide you with further information and help lines.
I never had trouble with eating, I never had trouble with my body image. Food was my love language. My favorite thing was to order a full English every Sunday morning or make one. Like clockwork I would get up and immediately think of hash browns and baked beans. YUM. However, I have always been picky about the food that i eat. I avoid certain foods sometimes because i don’t like them but also out of fear of the food. I became a vegetarian in my early twenties because meat scared me. I loved the taste of meat, especially roast chicken, however i was always so fearful that it wasn’t cooked. I would convince myself every time i ate meat that it was going to make me sick (even if it was cremated). So I stopped and have continued to be vegetarian to this day.
I went traveling in Central America, where being vegetarian or even vegan (which I tried to be) was quite hard. When I was out there I was afraid of the food as I had heard horror stories of people getting ill at hostels. I read up on all the foods to avoid whilst being out there such as not eating vegetables and fruit that had been washed in tap water or avoiding eating westernized food. My diet consisted of chips, rice and beans for three months. At the beginning i was loving it, however towards the end it got quite tiresome eating like that. I decided that I would loosen the reins a little and be more adventurous. I ate the most amazing food and I was fine and happy that I was eating something that wasn’t beige. However, on my last few days in Guatemala before i was scheduled to come home, I ate something that didn’t agree with me. To this day I can’t think of what it really was. Maybe it was the brownies, maybe it was the files that were on my avocado on toast that contaminated it, I don’t really know. However, this hostel was notorious for making people ill. I started to feel funny during the day and by the late hours I was bed bound in a tent crying because I felt so strange.
Because I am fearful of being ill, I was inconsolable, crying on the phone to my mum who was 8 hours ahead of me. But suddenly i felt extremely sick and felt like i needed to be sick and so i rushed out my tent and reached for a bag and heaved. To me this was terrifying and anyone with emetophobia I’m sure can relate. The world around me started spinning and I felt as if I was choking on my own tongue and couldn’t breathe in intervals of 20 seconds every 2 minutes for around an hour. For me (and this is my own feelings) I was traumatized with what had happened. It may seem silly for some people reading this, however I felt as if I was going to die with how badly I was choking.
After that event, I admittedly had the shits for a good few days and felt quite rough, however I soldiered on and made my way home back to London. It wasn’t until a few months passed that I suddenly had no appetite. I completely stopped eating. I was confused as to why I wouldn’t eat at first because usually I love food. But soon enough, every time I looked at food I would have a panic attack. When it came to dinner time I would break out in sweats and cry at my plate in front of me. When I ate food it felt like my throat was closing up with every bite I took, and so I simply stopped eating.
I became fearful of eating in front of people because I didn’t want to cause a scene. I didn’t want to eat in restaurants full of people because that scared me even more. When I ate I had to be alone, with someone I trusted nearby just in case something happened. One night I was alone and ordered a Pizza Express and ate it in front of the TV and suddenly I began to choke because I couldn’t swallow the food properly. It was terrifying and so I thought that I could never eat alone again.
Suddenly people started commenting on my weight saying how ill i looked. I had never really paid much attention to what I looked like in that part of my life as my head was so consumed with anxiety that I thought I had bigger fish to fry. The more people told me that I needed to eat, the less I wanted to. I felt pressured to finish a plate of food and within one bite I was done. If I was told that I needed to finish, I would stop eating and would have to leave the room because I thought that someone was going to shove it down my throat and I wouldn’t be able to swallow.
During this period of my life I would go days without eating or drinking and my weight became alarming. I was told by the doctors what would happen to me if I didn’t eat and it terrified me. However, no one ever told me what was wrong with me, they just put it down to being stressed. I thought to myself can stress really make me go days without eating and if so, why is no one helping me with this? No professional doctor seemed to be that concerned that I couldn’t drink a glass of water.
Fast forward a year and a bit of struggling with eating and putting it down to stress, juggling with going up and down extremely quickly with my weight, I decided to see a psychiatrist. This psychiatrist was specific to ADHD and asked me to explain why I was coming to her and what was wrong. Within 3 minutes of listening to me she asked me if I had ever heard of ARFID. I said no and she explained to me what it was and how it specifically related to me and my later diagnosis that followed.
Since learning about ARFID and knowing I have it, things have become easier for me. Now when i feel funny around food, i know it’s because of something rather than it being because of some unknown thing. It gave me reassurance that my throat wasn’t actually closing up and that it was all in my head and that the bad feeling would pass. I learnt techniques that would get me comfortable with eating food and learning to eat in places that make me uncomfortable. I am still on a journey of learning to recover from ARFID, and now my GP is aware of this condition. I am regularly checked and weighed and get my bloods done to make sure that I am healthy and getting all the nutrition I need.
“People don’t understand it at all. They think it’s a body image issue and I’m trying to lose weight, or they try to “fix” me by telling me I’m being ridiculous and childish and need to “just eat it”.”
I feel that this is extremely important to discuss as for so long, no one knew what was wrong with me and why I wouldn’t eat. Every doctor, psychiatrist or person thought that it must have been down to me not being happy with the way I looked. I kept saying that I didn’t care but no one would believe me. Nothing I read resonated with me and so I felt hopeless at times and extremely scared.
AFRID is a dangerous condition that is caused by a trauma and is an anxious response. It is so unknown and untold that so many people are suffering without the right resources to help them and make them better and healthier. By creating this discussion and raising awareness for ARFID will help people who are suffering be diagnosed quicker and therefore helped faster. Get to know this condition and if you yourself or know anyone who seems to be suffering with these symptoms, please reach out for help.
If you think you might have ARFID, you should make an appointment to discuss this with your GP. If you are concerned that a family member or friend has ARFID, it is important to talk with them to support and encourage them to seek the right help and support. It is usually best that this help and support is in place as soon as possible after the difficulties have been recognised. You may feel daunted by idea of trying to change your eating, or the person you care about may be scared or may not be as concerned about their eating as others. People with ARFID may not be able to see any possibility that they can ever change their eating behaviours. This may lead to them being reluctant to reach out for help, or saying that everything is okay. However, ARFID can lead to serious malnutrition and be associated with significant impairment to psychological wellbeing, so it is important that they receive this support.
Here are some resources to read and places to contact:
England Helpline: tel:0808 801 0677
Mind0verMatter 
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