Making Changes. Slowly.

Every Day Can be Different

Life isn't the same every day.  There are different stressors, levels of exercise, amount of sleep etc.

Food eaten in one place may not be eaten somewhere else.

Once, I was told that autistic people have poor autobiographical memory - they have trouble integrating memories of past experiences and creating a sort of story of themselves within that memory system. I wonder if that changes how you find food, whether food can easily become something comfortable or rather it tends to stay strange.

Slow Change

Making very small changes slowly

Being persistent - re-introduce food after a period of time in a non-confrontational way. A nutritionist talked to me about food exploration (maybe it was being a food explorer, I forget exactly). This was about a gentle stepped approach to getting used to a new food. I am not sure about the order of things but it really recognises that we engage with food in so many ways and actually all of this is progress: looking at it, touching it, smelling it, licking it, having it on your plate but not eating it, taking a tiny bite and spitting it out, taking a tiny bite and THEN eating it! This knowledge made me feel so much better about trying to introduce food. I had encouraged smelling and licking and didn’t mind (controlled) spitting out, so I felt kind of great that I was actually getting somewhere despite feeling quite the opposite.