74. Are You Overcomplicating Selective Eating?
In this episode of The Nourishing Autism Podcast, join Brittyn as she discusses the challenges that come from overcomplicating mealtime for autistic children. Brittyn walks you through common mistakes that she sees parents making such as expecting kids to eat healthy foods right away, offering too many choices, and using tactics that backfire. She also shares tips on reducing mealtime anxiety and fostering long-term consistency and confidence in food introduction!
Don't forget to grab your FREE spot to Brittyn's webinar, Selective Eating Made Simple, here: https://www.nourishingautism.co/webinar
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TRANSCRIPT
Hi, I'm Brittyn, a Registered Dietitian and autism sibling. I have a passion for helping parents of neurodivergent kids navigate nutrition and wellness for their child, one small step at a time. Here we'll explore practical nutrition tips, learn from top autism experts, break down the newest research, and share inspirational stories that will empower you to utilize nutrition to help your child feel their best and thrive.
Listen in while picking kids up from school, sitting in a therapy waiting room, taking a quick walk or wherever you find yourself, looking for some inspiration and a friend to guide you along this journey. This is Nourishing Autism.
[00:00:00] When we start to overcomplicate mealtime, it can lead to more resistance. It can lead to more sensory overload. It can lead to power struggles. It can lead to increased anxiety for both you and your child. And these are all things that we don't want for meal time. We don't want there to be sensory overstimulation or power struggles or anxiety because we know that that also increases really stressful hormones for the child that biologically are going to decrease their hunger.
[00:01:00]
Hey everybody. Brittyn Coleman here, the host of The Nourishing Autism Podcast. I'm so excited that you're here. We are going to be talking about how to simplify selective eating today. One of the most common topics that I'm talking through with parents or in my DMS are when people are actually, over-complicating selective eating and they're making their child's diet more limited than it needs to be because of the approach that they're taking.
So I want to make sure that you are not over-complicating your child's diet and that we are making it as simple as possible. So I am super excited to talk through this today with you. I also wanted to share, I will be going deeper into this topic in some free trainings that I'm hosting next week on Tuesday and Wednesday, September [00:02:00] 24th and 25th.
It's completely free training for parents on how to expand your child's diet.
It's called Selective Eating Made Simple and you can sign up completely for free at https://www.nourishingautism.co/webinar. Or if you DM me the word webinar on Instagram, I'll automatically send you the link that you can grab your free spot. And just note that we do have a limited number of spaces available.
So if you want to sign up for that, be sure you do so ASAP so you can secure your spot.
Now, while we'll be going way deeper into this topic on the free webinar, I do want to talk through some things that I commonly find that are making your child's selective eating even worse. Now we know that selective eating is really common in autism, and this is typically due to sensory overstimulation.
It could be due to low muscle tone. There are a lot of things that pull into it, but sensory overwhelm being one of the biggest ones. And when we don't take a sensory minded approach, oftentimes we are [00:03:00] using approaches that are just not going to work well for the child who does have these sensory processing challenges or when we are working almost too hard to try and correct
your child's selective eating, it can cause things to backfire. And that's where we get into trouble is we are almost putting not too much effort, but we're putting the wrong type of effort and energy into resolving your child's selective eating. Now, this is really hard because it is super anxiety provoking to have a child with a limited diet.
So I completely understand coming to mealtime dysregulated as a parent, yourself or anxious. Trying to help correct your child's selective eating, but I want you to know some of these things may be working against you. So let's talk about some common pitfalls that parents make that can be damaging your progress. Number one is the pressure to eat healthy [00:04:00] foods.
Now there are two parts to this. The pressure behind wanting your child to eat a new food is really difficult. Because what often happens is the more pressure that we put on kids to eat something, the less that they want to do it. Now, this isn't just mealtime, but this can be any demand that we're putting on children, especially if your child has a PDA profile, which stands for pervasive or persistent drive for autonomy or otherwise known as pathological demand avoidance, which can make these demands at mealtime really difficult. I have had a guest in the past, Dr. Taylor Day, come on and talk about PDA
if that's something that you're interested in, definitely go and check out my past episode with Dr. Day. And she also came in as a guest expert inside of The Collective, which is my membership, to host a PDA workshop. And it was so fantastic. And we developed a PDA guide for nutrition that is exclusively [00:05:00] available to the members inside of The Nourishing Autism Collective.
And it is just so, so good. So if you have questions about that, we do have resources for you.
So, while it is one of the most natural things, we want our kids to try new foods, there's also this delicate balance of putting too much pressure on the mealtime that is also going to pass on some of that anxiety and make mealtime feel too forced, that is going to cause kids to pull back at mealtime and feel anxious themselves. If you want some ideas on how to offer foods without creating that much pressure, we will be talking about that in the webinar that I'm hosting next week.
So be sure to join us. Number two is offering too many choices.
When we offer too many choices at once, it can be really overstimulating and can cause them to not want to eat at all. Now it feels a little bit backwards because you'd think that you would want to offer a lot of different choices for your child so [00:06:00] that you increase the odds of them trying something.
But it actually works in the reverse way that we want to reduce our options so we can reduce that decision anxiety or decision fatigue and decrease overstimulation at mealtimes.
Another thing that is actually pretty counterproductive is either forcing or coaxing or bribing a child to try a food.
And what we see in the research is that when we say, hey, if you eat your broccoli, you can have XYZ food or a Reese's cup or whatever it might be, we actually see that that destroys their connection with that food that we are forcing them to eat in order to get something that they like, and we don't want to assign those kinds of negative associations with food, because then longterm, it decreases the odds that they're ever going to eat that food.
Now what all three of these things have in common. When we start to overcomplicate mealtime, it can lead to more resistance. It can lead to [00:07:00] more sensory overload. It can lead to power struggles. It can lead to increased anxiety for both you and your child. And these are all things that we don't want for meal time. We don't want there to be sensory overstimulation or power struggles or anxiety because we know that that also increases really stressful hormones for the child that biologically are going to decrease their hunger.
And so we don't want that to be happening, especially at a meal time where we're trying to expand their diet and help them eat more. So what I want us to do is simplify our approach to selective eating. Coming to the mealtime more regulated as parents, having a very clear idea of what we're doing. Starting with very simple approaches that are going to reduce your child's overstimulation. And this is where we start to see a lot of progress.
It feels backwards. Because it's almost like the [00:08:00] less effort, the less anxiety that we're bringing into mealtime, the more success we actually have. Now, this doesn't mean just show up at meal time and just hope that things go well and not doing anything intentional. No, we're actually being really intentional with the approaches that we're taking. But we're also keeping it super simple and we see that this can keep a lot of that overstimulation away. So what we want to focus on is less pressure, more exposure to foods, and I'm not just saying, okay, just keep putting it on their plate because I know you've been told this by your pediatrician. Well just keep offering more foods. Eventually they'll eat something, you know, they're not going to starve. That's not the case
when it comes to autism and sensory sensitivities, we can't just put a food on their plate and just expect them to try something new. We actually have to take very intentional steps and they're intentional steps that happen before you put a food on their plate. And after we put that food on their plate.
So, we want to be intentional with that. We also want to be really [00:09:00] consistent. Having that consistency, even if we're just staying consistent with offering one or two different foods, that is better than being super inconsistent with offering a huge variety of foods. We want familiarity, we want comfort.
We want confidence. And those are going to make a huge difference longterm for your child's eating.
I think oftentimes we also over-complicate the foods that we're going to offer to our kids because we want to offer them this big, huge nutritious meal. Oftentimes that's something that has mixed ingredients. Like let's say a lasagna, for example, which can actually be one of the worst foods to offer your child because of the combination of sensory experiences, when it comes to texture and colors. And the look of the food.
We actually want to keep it really simple when we introduce new foods to them as well, and incorporate their preferred textures and flavors and sensory profile. If you've never heard me talk about sensory profiles before we will be digging [00:10:00] super deep into that on the free training that I'm providing next week.
Again, if you want to grab your free spot to that, be sure to visit https://www.nourishingautism.co/webinar. And you can sign up for this free training.
And lastly, I think one of the things that we tend to overcomplicate is the timeline. We want a really clear timeline and say, okay, well, how long am I going to have to do this in order for them to eat every food under the sun? And I wish it worked that way. I wish it were super simple. And I could say, you know, if you do this every day, in six weeks, you're going to be able to introduce every single new food to your child.
When in reality, it actually depends on a lot of different variables. It can rely on your child's ability to chew foods. It can rely on the severity of their sensory sensitivity, it can come down to their schedule. And their daily routine and the therapies that they're getting, there's so much to take into account. But what I want you to [00:11:00] do is be able to develop these long-term strategies that are not difficult to implement that you can do every single day. And keep consistent in that so that when you do look back, you're like, wow, look how far we've come.
And it wasn't even that complicated. That is my goal for you. So if that is your goal for yourself too, be sure to join us for these free trainings, I'm super psyched for them. I'll be going into more detail on all of the topics that I've discussed here today, because I know that we just scraped the surface, but I hope that it gives you some insight as to where we can go from here and hopes you release some of that anxiety that helping your child expand their diet
doesn't have to be as over complicated as it feels right now. And I'd love to help you simplify that. So be sure to join me, https://www.nourishingautism.co/webinar or DM me the word webinar. And I can't wait to see you next Tuesday or Wednesday. We have three times available so you can choose what works best for your busy [00:12:00] schedule, because I know that being a parent of a child on the autism spectrum, you don't have all this free time to throw around.
So we have offered three different times, you can listen on the go, and I am really looking forward to it.
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Transcribed by Descript
About Brittyn Coleman, MS, RDN/LD
Brittyn Coleman, MS, RDN/LD, is a distinguished Registered Dietitian and Autism Nutrition Expert, known for her innovative, sensory-friendly feeding approach to nutrition for children on the autism spectrum. As the founder of the Nourishing Autism Collective, and as an autism sibling herself, Brittyn brings both professional expertise and personal understanding to her work. She empowers families with her expert guidance, helping children receive essential nutrients for optimal health and development. Her strategies are tailored to the unique dietary needs and sensory preferences of each child.
Brittyn's influence extends beyond her membership site through her active social media presence and her popular podcast, 'Nourishing Autism'. Her educational content on Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms has established her as a leading voice in autism nutrition, providing valuable resources, practical advice, and a supportive community for parents and professionals.
