Arfid avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder:
You have heared of eating disoders in which someone eats too little or too much because of some reasons such as emotional reasons, body shape insecurities but there is also newly emerging rare eating disoder in which a person is too picky about foods.
Eating disoders is a mental condition in which food is being a source to cope and control the emotions or other situations
There are some common eating disoders
• Anorexia nervosa: a condition in which a person eat too little because fearing weight gain and linked eating to sole cause of weight gain. This condition leads to serious malnutrition and weakness.
This disoder is prevalent in fashion models because of the constant demands of industry size zero models. In an survey about 62% of models were told to loss weight to get fit in industry. This is also increasing in general populations due to increasing social media trends and glam affecting women around the world that's leading to eating disoders.
• Bulimia nervosa: it is eating disoder in which one binge eat and then rid of it purging self induced vomiting as an compensatory behaviour. It's a cycle of binge eating and compensatory mechanism for the effects of binge eating. It is an serious issue which required treatment. It is more common in teenage girls. There are many factors due to which this obsessive behavior occur such as body shape insecurities, cultural norms and society pressure and emotional stress that leads to these eating disoder.
Where as ARFID is an rare and different type of disoder that develops from childhood characterized by highly selective eating and fear of foods based on their color, shape, smell and texture that may trigger person to the level of been faint due to anxiety.It's an newly arise eating disoder that has limited studies around 0.5 - 5% of population have this disoder.
However this may cause a person to become highly selective to foods which may not meet its nutritional daily requirements and can lead to serious health consequences and also affect social life due to difficulties in eating around people or fearing seeing other people eating food that you fear impact your behavior.
The factors are diverse vary from person to person of such eating disoders, however the from the date we know childrens with other mental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, and anxiety disorders may develop ARFID.
Sign and Symptoms
Difficulty in eating around people
Only eating certain textured foods
Fear of vomiting and chocking
Difficulty paying attention
Delayed growth
Abdominal cramping
Lethargy
The management of Arfid is to navigate mental health, sensory aversion, and fear regarding foods.