Good Morrow! My name is Beckett.

I am an autistic 14 year-old child with Avoidant-Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID). This essentially means that I haven’t been able to eat any new foods for quite a while now (most of my life). As a result, I could only eat things like soy sausage links (from one company), peanut butter sandwiches (only on one specific bread), milk, and a very few other foods that were all simple carbs. I am extremely skinny and, even though that doesn’t bother me, my parents and my doctor have all been very worried.

When I was very little, my parents hired an occupational therapist to help me with the sensory part of eating new foods, but it did not help. They also took me to a therapist, and that did not help. I took some hypnotherapy for a couple of days, that didn’t work as well as I wanted, so I got hypnotherapy from a different person. And that actually helped a lot.

Before hypnotherapy, I was afraid of even stepping into the kitchen, for fear of seeing or smelling something “disgusting.” I could not go into a restaurant with my family, and ended up waiting in the car. After hypnotherapy, I was brave enough to eat a carrot for the first time. It did not make me gag, as other new foods have done for a long time. And I only got braver after that, so brave in fact, that when my mom decided to start this “one food a day” project, I actually accepted, something that my younger self would never have done.

I’ve made this blog to record my progress and also to make it available to more people than we could just on Facebook. I hope that reading my food reviews and looking at my illustrations will inspire other parents who are worried about their kids, as well as the kids themselves.

Thanks for reading about my journey.