85. The Mental Load of Selective Eating
In this week’s episode of The Nourishing Autism Podcast, Brittyn unpacks something every parent of a selective eater knows all too well: the mental load of feeding your child. She talks about the constant thoughts swirling in your head: preferred foods, burned-out foods, new ideas you hope might work, meal-planning for the whole family, and the fear of losing a food that used to be accepted.
Listen in to learn why this feels so exhausting, why keeping everything in your head makes progress harder to see, and how small feeding wins (like tolerating a food on the table or helping prep it) matter just as much as actually eating it. Brittyn also shares her simple four-list system to help parents organize foods in a way that brings clarity and takes some of the pressure off when it comes to introducing new foods.
Don't miss these important tips to make feeding a selective eater just a little lighter this week!
Join the Food Hopper Waitlist! Get early access to the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale, updates, and launch details: foodhopper.co
Enter the Food Hopper Giveaway to win one of three lifetime memberships:
foodhopper.co/giveawayCLICK HERE to join Brittyn’s Instagram Broadcast Channel - Food Hopper Insiders!
Join the Nourishing Autism Collective to start getting nutrition support today!
Follow @AutismDietitian on Instagram
SUBSCRIBE ↓
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.
Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Nourishing Autism Podcast. I am Brittyn, your host, the Autism Dietitian. I'm so psyched that you're here this week because we're talking about a very, very real topic for so many of you, and it may have been a thought that has just never been put into words. So I'm hopeful that today's episode is validating for you and also helps you come away with some actionable items to make this even easier on yourself. Today we are talking about the mental load of having a selective eater. So you know that moment when you're standing in the kitchen trying to decide what to feed your child, and all of these foods flash in front of you. Of course they're preferred foods, but then there's the foods that they've burned out on. Then there's the foods that you know they won't even try or look at or touch, or maybe they'll even gag.
Then you see the foods that you're going to feed the rest of your family, and then you have all of these new food ideas that sometimes you feel like if your child just tried them, they would really like them, or just these like huge aspirations that you have for your child to eat all of these different foods that you love too.
That is the mental load of selective eating. There's so much that you have to juggle in your head when you are the parent of a selective eater, and I truly believe that it's like carrying a thousand mental tabs just open all of the time because it's not only just the actual act of like sitting down and your child eating a meal.
It's the planning that goes into it, like grocery shopping and running to multiple stores so that you can find the exact brand and item and flavor and making sure to keep all of the foods that they will eat in rotation and then thinking like, oh my God, when's the last time that I served spaghetti or mac and cheese? You know, it's been a month and they used to love that. I wonder if they'll even eat it now. Remembering to bring back the foods that they burned out on months to years ago, because sometimes we just put that in the food graveyard and we don't think that it could possibly come back, which it can, but it does take some time and some effort and some intentionality behind it, or thinking of new food ideas to introduce that they might actually be interested in trying and really having to plan to think through, okay, what is their food sensory profile, which we talked about in last week's episode by the way, decoding what your child's favorite foods are telling you and understanding what you need to do first, which is understanding your child's sensory needs so that you can plan and then introduce foods that are similar.
There's a lot of work that goes into that as a parent and trying to have the time of day to sit down, write down your child's foods, the textures, colors, temperatures, finding the patterns, and then coming up with creative new ideas that are going to fit that pattern as well. I get it. I'm also the person who's recommending you do that, but I also recognize that it is a lot to do, especially when you're juggling so many other things. Then there's also keeping track of the foods that you have introduced that are new, so that you're in some kind of rhythm and consistency and making sure that you're introducing it enough times so that they recognize it the next time you offer it, but not so many times that you're gonna burn them out on it.
And then you're trying to meal plan for the rest of the family, for yourself and maybe your other kids. And you have this huge goal of trying to get everyone eat this one big meal. So if you're feeling exhausted, it's no wonder this is so much to be keeping track of.
Not to mention on top of the baseline mental load of just being a parent. You also might be juggling therapy appointments and IEPs and billion other things too, and multiple kids. I don't mean to keep piling it on, but then there's the emotional load, worrying about nutrition, the pressure from others, what your friend's kids are eating, what your child used to eat, what your other kids eat.
The fear of losing a food. There's so much wrapped up in all of this that feels so emotional and scary as a parent too.
Now the problem is that when everything is tracked mentally or scattered in Post-It notes or iPhone notes, progress gets lost and you really can't see how much you've accomplished or how far you've come, which makes it really hard to stay consistent or hopeful. It's also super easy to get disorganized and have no consistency, like offering a new food once and then never again for months. Like how are they really supposed to learn new foods whenever we are being super inconsistent? But you are managing a lot too, so it makes sense why we can't be as consistent as we want to.
And then it feels like you basically start over again every time that you introduce a new food after a long break because it's been a while. So you might feel like you've reintroduced mac and cheese like five times this month and you're not having any progress, but when it's on your head, it just feels like failure instead of progress, especially when your child never ended up actually eating the food.
One huge mistake I often see parents make is by tracking progress by if your child ate it or not, and that's just too black and white. You can't just say, yes, progress, they ate it. No progress, they didn't eat it. Because there's so many other steps along the way, and I remind my clients of this all the time because it's so easy to forget, but there's so many other feeding wins than actually just eating the food. You can be talking about it, reading about it in a book, looking at it on tv, or maybe a show that your child really likes featured a certain food, and you can talk about exposure that way. You might put a food on the table and they don't melt down or maybe on their plate, and it's okay to just sit there even if they don't eat it, and maybe in the past they couldn't even have it in the room.
Helping prep it can also be a great way to make progress with a food. Whether they're cutting that, putting it into a blender, maybe they are touching it through a glove or a Ziploc baggy, smelling it, taking a bite, spitting it out. These are all amazing wins and when we only track progress by them actually chewing and swallowing it, we miss out on all of these other things.
And it just makes it so defeating that you just don't wanna continue at all. So we can't make progress though when we don't count those wins as progress because your child might be at the stage where they need to have it across the table. They're not ready to eat it yet.
And if we're trying to push them to the point of only having a win by them eating it, well, we're not meeting your child where they're at, and we're not making the kind of progress that they need, like those small little steps to eventually get them up to eating that food. And in the end, we're just measuring the wrong thing.
So if you needed to hear that today, I really encourage you to change your mindset around what constitutes a food win and breaking it down so much smaller than you really think. Now, one of the simplest ways to reduce the mental load is to sort foods into just four different lists.
One your child's favorite foods. So what always works or what almost always works. Two, the foods that they're learning to like. So foods you're gently exposing or you're working on over time. They don't eat them yet, but you're working on it. You're making progress and have an intentional effort behind getting them to feel more comfortable around that food.
Three is previously liked. Foods that used to work and they don't eat anymore. Maybe they food jagged on it, meaning that they ate it the same way so many different times that they eventually burned out.
It's important that we keep track of these previously liked foods because these foods actually are more likely to be accepted in the future than a completely new food, and oftentimes we just accept that these foods have been lost. But I really want to encourage you that they can come back. But it just does take some intentionality and sometimes I tell the families that I work with to introduce burned out foods as completely new foods. Take the approach of the gradual sensory exposure, starting with a small amount and work your way up. And then number four, your plan to try foods. Foods that make sense based on your child's food sensory needs.
Again, if you didn't listen to last week's podcast, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that one because it can help you understand which foods should belong in this category. There may also be foods that are really important to you culturally, or that you really love and you wanna share with your child and don't match their sensory preferences, and that's okay to have those aspirations for your child in that list, that feel important to you as well. Maybe those are foods that we work toward by using some of the foods that do match their sensory needs, but I think it's important to have those in your plan to try folder. So when you see these categories laid out, it brings a lot of instant clarity and helps you organize your thoughts so much better. And maybe you even wrote down more foods to your list than you've been keeping in the rotation mentally. I mean, there's only so much that we can hold onto.
So I would really encourage you to not hold onto all of this in your head anymore. I don't know about you, but when I can offload something from my brain to a phone note or a piece of paper, I do feel instantly relieved, like I have just a little bit more space in my brain and I feel a lot less stressed.
And I encourage you to think of this like a form of mental rest. You are juggling so much as a parent, and if we can offload one thing so that you can look at a list instead of trying to juggle all of this in your head, let's do that. Now what's really exciting is that I have actually created an app to do this very thing.
Well, this is actually just one feature of the app to track your child's food list and keep a list of their favorites, their learning to like foods, their previously liked, and their plan to try foods. And it goes on presale this month. It's called Food Hopper and it's the first and only app to help map your child to new foods based on foods that they already love.
It will be going on presale during Black Friday, but the wait list will get early access and can tap into special pricing that will only be available for a limited number of people. If you want more details, you can go to foodhopper.co or click on the link in the show notes.
Now, if you could just close one of your mental tabs this week, what would it be? Writing down the safe foods, burned out foods, new ones to try, ones you're working on. Which one feels the heaviest for you right now? You can just choose one and write it all out in one list.
I would love to hear, you can DM me on Instagram @autismdietitian, and I would love to hear what you're working on and what felt like the heaviest for you right now and that you can offload and make your mental load a little bit lighter this week.
Next week, we are going to be talking about the correct way to track your child's food exposures so that you can see visible progress and keep the momentum going to help your child expand their diet, get more nutrition, and feel their best and thrive.
I'll see you then.
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.
