TW: difficulties with food, food sensitivities, sensory sensitivities, disordered eating, eating disorder behaviours, and related topics.

When I originally saw the photo challenge for July – every prompt being food related – I immediately closed the window. Nope, not for me. As an autistic person with a lot of sensory difficulties, food is a daily nightmare for me and the thought of having to think about food even more than usual did not sound like a fun thing to sign myself up for. But then I thought about it a bit more and thought that maybe it could be the vehicle to talk more about the relationship between autism and food, from my point of view at least, which is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time but never quite felt able to…

I have struggled with food for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest food related memories – I can’t have been older than eight – is of reading an article about someone who needed IV nutrition and/or a feeding tube because they were unable to eat by mouth and I vividly remember showing my Mum and telling her that I wish I could do that, I was that distressed by food. I dreaded meal times because I found food stressful. As an eight-ish year old, I obviously didn’t understand how difficult this lived experience is for people but if there ever was a way to just fulfil your nutritional needs through just a pill or an IV rather than food, I would choose it in a heartbeat. The only way I actually enjoy food is when it satisfies a sensory seeking stim (I’ve talked a little bit about this in my recent post about my current stims).

For a long time, I didn’t understand why I found food so difficult and I was labeled as a “picky eater” (which is a phrase that I think should be struck from all human languages and if you ever want to see my deepest levels of fury, I actually dare you to use it in front of me) and it was a source of frustration for everyone in my circle. No one was intentionally unkind about it – I am a hundred percent sure that most of that frustration was about me missing out, both on a nutritional level and on the enjoyment of food that they were all experiencing – but I don’t think that that didn’t impact me on some level. Everything always felt too complicated and overwhelming to me: all of the tastes, the textures, the dry things getting wet (yes, I am an autistic person who separates their food on a plate), and so on. All of that is incredibly stressful to me so plain, simple, separated foods remove (or limit) that stress and allow me to engage with food at some level. When food becomes stressful, I struggle to swallow, my gag reflex becomes super sensitive, and sometimes I can’t even be in the same room as food; I will just avoid it rather than engage with it but it’s more like a fight or flight reflex than a choice. I also have terrible interoception (I don’t feel or recognise signals that I’m getting from my body about hunger, thirst, muscle tension, etc), which isn’t uncommon with Autism, and so I often don’t realise I’m hungry or in need of food until I can’t stand up or I’m shaking from the lack of it and by that time, I barely have the energy to find myself food. All of these things make it very difficult to eat healthily and it’s something that I really struggle with, something that I constantly feel frustration and shame and self-loathing about. The Autism diagnosis helped all of us to understand and manage the situation better but it still an ongoing, exhausting battle.