Crystal Aura Gaze

ARFID is unrelated to “dieting,” but toxic diet culture influences fears of foods and ingredients.

If you are unfamiliar with ARFID, please go ahead and check out this article for a detailed explanation.

In summary, ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder) is a condition in which a person severely restricts the amount or variety of food they consume – due to anxieties unrelated to weight or health.

Reasons for avoiding certain foods may be related to overstimulation, irrational fears, aversions to textures, paranoia of food poisoning or choking, hypersensitivity to flavors, apathy, fearing the unknown, or feeling out of control. It comes from a place of internal anxiety, rather than external motivations such as changing one’s weight or health conditions.

However, modern society’s obsession with toxic diet culture still plays a part in children developing ARFID. Children are exposed to diet culture before they even consciously know what “dieting” is. These beliefs shape their minds in ways that they are not even aware of.

As a child, toxic diet culture taught me to fear whole foods, real ingredients, and complex meals. Even though I had zero concerns with my body until puberty, little did I know, diet culture was contributing to my ARFID.

A great example is margarine. Growing up in the ’90s, butter was severely demonized. It was replaced with a popular product called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!” This was margarine designed to taste exactly like butter.

Margarine is a processed water-oil product filled with mainly plant oils along with artificial flavorings and other additives. It was said to be healthier due to less saturated fat and cholesterol.

There is still controversy regarding if butter is better or worse for you than margarine. Some will hold onto the argument that margarine has less saturated fat and cholesterol. But the fact is that butter is an unprocessed food while margarine is highly processed – and the fact is that processed foods are unhealthy in comparison to whole foods.

But the toxic diet culture of the ’90s didn’t care about health – it only cared about weight. And weight concerns were reduced to demonizing ingredients including fat, sugar, and cholesterol.

So as a kid, I looked at a tub of margarine and read the words, “I can’t believe it’s not butter!” In my mind, butter must be bad. But I wasn’t old enough to understand why there would be fear around butter – or if it had anything to do with weight control. I just knew it was bad – therefore classifying it in my brain as something to fear.

For a product designed to taste exactly like butter, you’d think I would’ve loved the taste of butter. But I developed an aversion to butter and refused to eat it at restaurants or other people’s houses. It was nothing to do with health – nothing to do with dieting – it was a deep-rooted belief I developed that butter was bad. And I couldn’t even tell you why.

Another great example is whole milk. Toxic diet culture told us to choose skim milk, or at least 2%, over whole milk. It was all linked to the fear of fat and a few extra calories.

But after doing the research into whole milk, I discovered how beneficial it is. While it does have just a little more fat and calories than reduced-fat milk, it does contain a vastly enormous amount of Omega-3’s that the other milks severely lack. Omega-3 is absolutely essential in functioning brain health. What is a few extra calories in comparison to a healthy brain?

Toxic diet culture pushes processed and unnatural foods – in order to distort nutrition through reducing calories, fats, sugars, etc. – often replacing them with far more unhealthy ingredients. Children – even adults – are effected by toxic diet culture, even when there is no interest in losing weight.

Toxic diet culture pushes an extreme way of thinking, teaches us to fear specific ingredients, and makes us believe that processed is better than whole. It contributes to the need to control one’s foods and meals.

On top of that, toxic diet culture also makes it extra difficult for a person with ARFID to accept their condition and heal from it. As a teenager, I had several instances in which women (usually my friend’s moms) would have concerns that I was anorexic, when in reality, I was restricting foods for reasons completely unrelated to weight loss.

My friend’s moms would cook dinners that I couldn’t eat, or take us to restaurants with foods that I couldn’t eat, and they would assume that I was dieting for weight loss. Because of the prevalence of diet culture, their first assumption was that my restriction was related to dieting.

ARFID comes with a lot of shame – because you so badly want to fit in with your friends and family who are enjoying the foods that you find unsafe. And when people assume that you’re dieting for weight loss, it comes with another layer of shame. It just doubles the judgment and makes you feel even worse about yourself.

One way of healing your ARFID is taking a look at toxic diet culture. It’s time to rethink the ingredients you’ve been taught to fear and demonize.