I ended the last blog post with an either/or choice between what I think is good for us as a family and what Lily wants or needs for a healthy food intake. I left my computer feeling guilty. How could I impose some family construct on her if that meant she found eating uncomfortable, stressful and hard to do? Yet we had actually had a very pleasant time all together at the table the night before so I couldn't quite believe that it is was always as bad as she suggests in her angry moments.
Last night was a 'get-your-own-dinner' night. She was buzzing after spending time with friends so I felt I could sit at the table with her without troubling her. She was happy to talk, I mentioned the BBC programme and she came back with a YouTube channel she'd found with a video on burnout vs depression and she was thrilled by how much made sense to her (It's this one by Mom on the Spectrum ).
I picked up on one of her bugbears which is people 'understanding' (or not) and said to her, "On that subject, you've talked a number of times about how you are not happy about the evening meal set up and eating. Do you want to tell me some more things about food and eating and what you are noticing?"
These were her main points:
Breakfast and dinner are the hardest, they are her most anti-social times.
Breakfast because she has just started her day, dinner because she's worn out.
I put the case that the neuro-typical world puts a lot of weight on family meal times. I said I thought that was because it's the only time members of the family get to spend a bit of time together, find out what each of them were doing and how they were. She agreed and related it to the bonding you get with pets by feeding them.
Lily went on to acknowledge that she was really out of touch with her hunger signals and that the idea of eating was overlaid with many, many competing thoughts. These include:
the sensory experience - cold milk with her cereal, crunchy not soggy, fear of choking
other people observing her eating
her body feels guilty or too sick if her plate is empty
is it comfort food?
is it healthy?
anxiety
It occurs to me that I've often raised the issue of being hungry with the children yet the truth is, very few of us eat because we are hungry. We eat because it's lunchtime or because someone is offering us something or because we are sad. As I said in my last post, I've been raised with a fear of hunger and a fear of the people around me being hungry so who am I to tell her to tune into her hunger signals?
Once we gave the children the flexibility to organise their own breakfast and lunch they both abandoned all sense of routine and regularity. I put this down to neglect and disordered routines in their earliest years and 5 to 6 years of standard 3 meal a day routines with us and the foster carers, not being long enough to instil this habit. Now I'm wondering how the ASD plays into this. I have seen, with both children, that not having the habit of regular mealtimes, combined with sensory stress and a mess of confusion in their heads about why they should eat at all, they can go a long time on very little food.
I told Lily that I would love to give her, or rather make available to her, regular, nutritious meals, spaced say 3 or 4 hours apart. It just felt like it made sense from the biology point of view to me, to help her energy level and her mood and her focus and her sleep.
"Shall I try that?"
She leapt at the idea like I was Einstein!
So that's what we are going to try. I'm wondering if we can use what she calls her hyper-focus which kicks in sometimes when she starts preparing super-elaborate snacks and turn her into some kind of ASD food instagramer...but I need to be patient don't I!
Photo by Ella Olsson: https://www.pexels.com/photo/flat-lay-photography-of-vegetable-salad-on-plate-1640777/
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