Reply to Extreme picky eating- what has worked for you

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[quote=Anonymous]I totally get how frustrating this is, and how the usual advice just doesn't work for some kids.

What has worked for us is to sit down and make a list of all the foods she likes to eat. You can include things on there that she only eats sometimes or only likes a little of, too. But everything she likes to eat (btw, if the list is extremely short, like 10 foods or less, she probably does have ARFID and should be evaluated).

We then took this list and planned a variety of "safe" meals we could reliably and easily feed her. To the extent possible, we tried to overlap with our own dinners so that she got the experience of eating the same foods as us, but realistically what this looked like was that we would have have a Thai curry with rice, and she'd have the rice with some yogurt, strawberries, and green peas.

Once you get into a rhythm of serving these safe meals, make a second list of foods you think she might be willing to try based on current preferences, and start offering very small amounts of these with the safe meals. So like our kid liked white rice, so we tried yellow and black rice, quinoa, couscous, and lentils. Don't make a big deal of it and don't force them to try. We discovered she liked seasoned yellow rice and couscous, and would eat lentils WITH rice but not on their own.

To be clear, this took YEARS. We started with about 18 foods she'd eat and she ate some variation of those 18 foods in different combination for almost three full years, barely adding any new foods but consistently seeing them and having them on her plate. And then she started trying them, and then she started actually liking and requesting them. But if her pickiness started at age 3, and we started this method at age 4.5, I'd say things started to improve noticeably shortly before 6. She is still a picky eater, but it's now possible to take her to other people's homes or out to a restaurant without bringing food, for instance. And I stress a lot less about her getting a varied diet. She even eats some vegetables now (she ate zero vegetables at age 4) though in fairly small amounts (like 1-2 green beans).

One thing to remind yourself throughout the process is that it is ok to do it in a way that helps you stay calm and doesn't stress you out too much. For us that meant we prepared a separate meal for her pretty much every night for years (and still do) because it was easier than trying to convince her to eat our food, or trying to craft a meal for normal eaters from the very limited list of things she would eat. People will frown on this and say that giving her a separate meal was making her picky, but I was in the trenches and knew the problem was bigger than that, and it honestly saved my sanity.[/quote]

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