Elias: Living with anxiety and ARFID

Written By Cassidy Quinn

Do you know what anxiety feels like? Do you know what it feels like to live with an eating disorder?

Elias is a 13-year-old who knows exactly what both of those feel like from his own experience. This Mental Health Awareness Month, he wants to share his story, to help people understand what it’s like to live with these mental health conditions.

(Read on for more of Elias’ story - and/or watch this video to hear it from him!)

Elias first started to experience anxiety when he was in sixth grade, when he struggled with not wanting to go to school. He was worried something bad was going to happen.

To Elias, anxiety feels like taking, “sadness and anger - smash them into one, and then times that by 10… You get really tense, fidgeting a lot, bouncing your leg.”

Eventually, Elias started seeing a counselor. At first, Elias was closed off, not talking very much during sessions, but once he started getting to know his counselor more, he opened up. One factor that really helped Elias connect was that the counselor seemed to truly understand kids. “He kind of felt like a brother to me, honestly,” describes Elias.

Elias also lives with an eating disorder called ARFID, which stands for Avoidant-Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. If you’ve never heard of it before, that’s because it’s a fairly new diagnosis, only first being included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) published in 2013. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, “Individuals with ARFID limit the volume and/or variety of foods they consume, but unlike the other eating disorders, food avoidance or restriction is not related to fears of fatness or distress about body shape, size or weight. Instead, in ARFID, selective eating is motivated by a lack of interest in eating or food, sensory sensitivity (e.g., strong reactions to taste, texture, smell of foods), and/or a fear of aversive consequences (e.g., of choking or vomiting).”

For Elias and his mom, receiving the diagnosis was a frustrating process of seeing multiple nutritionists who didn’t understand or believe his symptoms, before eventually finding one who figured it out.

“Finally, people know that it’s not because I’m picky - it’s because of something I have,” says Elias.

If he’s eating foods he likes and is familiar with, ARFID doesn’t interrupt his meals. But if he’s trying something new, or with a different texture or color than he’s used to, the eating disorder can make it difficult.

“When I’m eating stuff I don’t really know, like I’ve never heard of, I’m just - it’s hard for me because I don’t really know what it is.”

That’s when the anxiety kicks in, and his hands start shaking as he tries to move the food towards his mouth. “I have to kind of close my eyes, my mom has to talk me through it,” says Elias. “And sometimes it doesn’t work; sometimes it does. In the moment, my anxiety’s really high, I’m not really hearing anything from other people.”

Elias is definitely not the only teenager struggling with anxiety and an eating disorder. But he says when he’s at school, he can’t really tell, because, “people are really good at hiding it… It’s more normalized to not have really tough feelings like that around other people.”

He wishes it would be easier to share our struggles and open up to people. Clearly he’s doing his part to make this happen by sharing his story!

Thank you so much, Elias 💙

Resources

If you believe that you or a loved one may be struggling with ARFID, there are treatment options, including:

  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for ARFID (CBT-AR)

  • Family Based Therapy for ARFID (FBT-ARFID)

  • Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions for ARFID (SPACE-ARFID)

Support is available - you are not alone:

For immediate support, you can contact:

Cassidy Quinn
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