At Feeding Futures we help parents and caregivers teach children with high food anxiety to eat new foods through food therapies and food exposures.  In our world, when we say food exposures, we mean activities like playing, smelling or touching food.  It might also mean playing with plastic food, pretending you are working in a restaurant or looking at a recipe book.  All of these food activities help set the stage for better eating and help reduce food anxiety. We teach parents that proceeding with aggressive real food exposures before a child is ready and without a solid plan will only create greater food anxiety.

A very big part of our work is identifying the best days to proceed with food exposures and interventions. The purpose of learning this skill is to help caregivers recognize moments, or days of calm neurology in order to have successful food therapy experiences. We developed a red light, green light system to help families.

Red Light…Green Light…what does that mean?

In our program, we help families look carefully for red light and green light moments before we start any new food exposures. Green light days are lovely, on these days we see lower anxiety, easy transitions and they can be full of food exposure opportunities. But red light days are not as emotionally bright and breezy as green light days — they are complicated land-mines of potential emotional explosions. These emotionally ‘stuck days’ are connected to low- quality of sleep, rotten food intake, overall anxiety (past, present, and worries about the future), digestive issues, possible illness and environmental stressors. And when you live with a Sensory Processing Disordered, ADHD or an Autism Spectrum Disorder kiddy we know that if parents and caregivers push too hard or trigger anxiety, any green light moment can rapidly change to full-blown red light days. In those red light days, we count each minute until bedtime. Those days are hard. And in my opinion, the days we push very hard, without doing a full assessment of the child’s anxiety — we can actually make the food anxiety worse.

But what is really going on here? Why do these kids struggle so much with food anxiety and why are treatments so complicated? There are 3 interconnected parts at play here — sensory processing disorder, early embedded memory and fear avoidance. Fortunately for families, we can get in front of red lights and turn the anxiety train around, but this skill takes an understanding of some neurology. I’m going to make it very simple….so don’t worry if you don’t have a degree in neuroscience….you don’t need one. Here we go…..

Fight/Flight/Freeze

Most of the kids on our caseload have big, emotional reactions to food.  So we teach families about anxiety triggers and how people can flip quickly into fight/flight/freeze in times of stress. Think about what you would do if a big, giant, barking dog came running at you. What would you do? I know what I would do – I would run, and run fast, and as far as I could. In times of very high anxiety our neurology takes over and we run. This is how our neurology helps to keep us alive.  There are things we are supposed to be afraid of and run to get away from. You are lucky if the hound from hell only runs at you once in your lifetime and extra lucky if that incident does not make you afraid of all dogs forever and ever amen. That is the same emotional response that happens in babies and kids with Sensory Processing Disorders; repeated exposure to anxiety triggers (e.g., loud noises, crowded places, smelly foods, chunky soups, squishy carrots) causes repeated fight/flight/freeze. It is just all too much for them, and for kids with sensory issues, these anxiety triggers and pain filled events can happen many times a day.

So think if the same scary dog came at you many times a day? I would bet that you would quickly learn to fear all dogs and avoid them at all costs. So here you are – you are officially in dog avoidance. Avoidance can feel like a safe place, but it is lonely and to keep that dog away you need to be hyper-vigilant and hyper-controlling. When kids start avoiding things the behaviour is really, really, really reinforced. Why? Because it works — it is simple, if I avoid it I don’t EVER have to face that fear again.

So back to food fear and picky eating. Like the case with the dog,  the painful and anxiety filled sensory parts of eating creates a very strong food avoidance behaviour. Food can trigger some children with sensory processing issues to flip into that anxiety state many times a day. Often creating an elaborate food connected behaviour to avoid anxiety triggers. Then like magic, Ta Da – we have a restrictive, avoidant eater.

Play therapy authors Badenoch & Kestly (2015) tells us a little more about neurology and early anxiety. All of these early learning, fear connected, sensory experiences become embodied memories and they are resting just below the surface.

Here Come the Carrots….Run For Your Life! 

For some kids, when faced with new foods these body memories come flying into the present. When these embedded memories come back to life they also bring fear and anxiety filled perceptions – meaning the new food will smell, look and taste worse than they actually do. The lens that an anxiety-filled child sees the world through is far from accurate. So broccoli and carrots means –  RUNNNN FOR YOUR LIFE! So avoidance kicks in just in time to be seen as food refusal, food control and extreme picky eating. We as adults know that running from broccoli and carrots is an overreaction, but try telling that to a kid who has a fear-based relationship with food.  

So like clockwork, each day, over and over again the food anxiety/avoidance cycle continues. The presentation of a new food is like a time machine, it brings kids back to a negative embodied memory, so they do all they can to avoid reliving it. They set up strict food rituals, restrict to a handful of safe foods and go happily along their way eating the same meal day after day, year after year. And if you are a parent of an extremely picky eater, you are living with these food rituals day after day – year after year.

But why do we care if these kids are happy with this elaborate food avoidance system?    Well, the biggest answer is that a brain and body cannot function or develop correctly on a steady diet of 10 things.  And in our clients, these are typically 10 things with very little nutrition and are often sugar based. Plus, their anxiety lens is tricking them into thinking that they are safe in the land of food avoidance, but they are not really. Soon there will be
another fear and another avoidance train and another, and another.  This hyper-vigilance is hard for a little body. So really by not helping these kids, we are feeding the anxiety beast, and in a weird ironic twist  – the only thing getting fed in this scenario is the anxiety.

Does that sound like your child? The same meal day after day? Year after year? Want to know more about how to help your child get off the food avoidance train?  We can help, drop us a line or register for our 5 Week On line Leanring  Masterclass.  Click the picture above for more details.

Until next time,

Lisa Pinhorn B.Child Study (Special Needs), M.Ed
Licensed Naturotherapist
Feeding Futures
Nourishing Children, Families & Communities
(709) 746.9334