What Is Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder?

McLean’s Jacqueline Sperling, PhD, helps us to understand avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID), how it disrupts the life of a child or teen, and how to get young people the help they may need.

Find resources and more about the expert below.

What Is ARFID?

When you think of eating disorders that involve weight loss, you might think of anorexia nervosa. But what do you know about a different eating disorder: avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, or ARFID?

ARFID does involve a significant amount of weight loss, but the child who experiences it doesn’t want to lose the weight. The weight loss happens usually because of another challenge.

ARFID involves a significant amount of weight loss. It also can involve nutrient deficiencies and children may be dependent on feeding tubes or nutrient supplements.

This disorder gets in the way of a child’s everyday life, such as eating meals with their family, eating lunch at school, and attending extracurricular activities.

To be clear, children who experience ARFID have access to enough food, and they don’t have another medical disorder that interferes with their eating.

Why Does This Happen?

The potential challenges that might contribute to ARFID can be a fear of something happening, such as a fear of throwing up, having an allergic reaction, choking, intestinal distress, etc.

A child or teen might have obsessive compulsive disorder and they might have the obsession that if they eat a certain food, something bad will happen. In turn, they avoid certain foods and they don’t get the caloric intake or nutrient intake that they need.

It also can happen when a child is a picky eater and that child narrows a number of foods that they eat and they don’t get the nutrients that they need. As debilitating as ARFID can be, there is treatment that can help.

How To Help a Child or Teen With ARFID

Once a child is medically stable, cognitive behavioral therapy, specifically exposure and response prevention, helps children gradually try and eat foods and learn that eating them either is not as bad as they expected it to be, or at least they could handle the experience.

A pediatrician may be a helpful first step in asking for a referral for a cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure and response prevention provider.

If you know of a child who is experiencing ARFID, know that improvement is possible.