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NEW PARENT TIPS: Eating
Eating Problems & Potentials
How can I find out if my child has an eating disorder?
One of the risks of doing diagnostics for other conditions, secondary to Autism, comes out of the reality that dozens of diagnoses have proven to be “subsumptive” to Autism. This means that symptoms of those other conditions can and do exist within Autism, as part of one’s Autism itself, without fully meeting the necessary diagnostic criteria of these other possible disorders. This does not mean that people with Autism can never have secondary conditions, particularly those related to the types of central nervous system problems that cause Autism. However, most often our population’s atypical behavioral symptoms are best explained by the pervasive sensorimotor, communication, and social awareness losses within the Autism Spectrum. Careful differential diagnostic consults with experienced Autism professionals can offer the clearest determination. There may also be medical examinations of the brain and body that can rule other secondary conditions in or out. However, certain eating disorders versus symptoms are often confused in this way: our infant’s failure to nurse or suck a bottle, refusal to eat and extreme weight loss, vomiting after eating, or eating small non-food objects can easily be mistaken for the psychodynamic features of failure-to-thrive, Anorexia, Bulimia, or Pica syndromes. Therefore, if your child is in any urgent nutritional crisis, then immediately seek out medical help and follow your physician’s orders to treat that health risk appropriately. However, before prematurely adding another diagnosis or proceeding with medications or psychodynamic therapies for more typical populations with these eating disorders, one fairly easy way to distinguish between traditional and Autistic origins of symptoms, is to first trial best Autism education intervention practices. See if symptoms rapidly respond to these behavior modification and/or adaptive developmental self-management assessment and key intervention strategies. Such a trial will help confirm the correct condition and methods to address its problems. If they work, you will not need to add any new diagnoses to explain your child’s eating problems outside of Autism. An educational Autism specialist, skilled in behavioral or developmental strategies, can help teams target and test interventions, which can support a differential diagnosis. Another professional, who can help here is a licensed Occupational Therapist, who is training and experienced in infantile aspects Autism and related early sensorimotor development, particularly the use of oral sensorimotor processing evaluations and useful intervention protocols. Together, this team can determine if eating problems are subsumptive to the developmental features of Autism.
EATING WELL IS WORK
How can I help my child neatly eat the correct kinds, amounts, and varieties of healthier foods?
These are fail-safe eating skills strategies for people with Autism who eat too messy, too much, too little, only junk food, narrow diets, and/or tiny nonfood items:
•Do not let them run all around eating food on demand, refusing to sit at the meal table, at will.
This makes eating a play option.
•Set up a spot for eating “work” as a single site, single function. •Create object, picture, or word menus of their desired diet first.
•Put a “start” container in the left to hold their meal items, and a “finished” basket on their right. •Add an eating place mat with a drawn/photo pictures of eating, for them to serve their food onto.
•Use an eating chair with arms and add a Velcro seatbelt to help us “stay” but NOT as a restraint. •In the start basket use divided plates and bowls or, if needed an ice cube tray. Now divide and cut their narrow or junk food choices into just some bite-sized pieces.
(This structures their current eating habits into a workspace and times we can now influence.) •If they eat too little start with a few tiny pieces and work up one at a time. If they eat too much start with more and bigger pieces and work down one at a time. If they eat only machine made junk foods, then slowly change the perfect quality of that food and introduce similar but new healthy option gradually. They may not eat it at first--that is OK let them get used to its new look. •Whenever they stop eating, put the food plate in “finished” and send them to do some fun play.
•Securely store all foods out of reach. Do not give into tantrums.
•Practice five or more “eating as work” skills sessions per day.
•Remove tiny nonfood items in all play areas showing, “Always put in trash/keep out of mouth.” Soon they will be eating only a good diet of the healthy food you serve according to visual menus for planned meal/snack times.
Note: these articles were originally published with the author's permission in the The Net Journal of the Autism Society of Oregon. Winter 2004 Issue. Sharone Lee, Editor and Author. They have been returned to their home at Threshold, but have been kept in our public access pages for all our parent's use.
You may send in additional questions on this topic for us to answer.
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