ceanothusspinosus:

alexseanchai:

commandtower-solring-go:

heavyweightheart:

Here is a really gigantic pic of highly respected dietitian and social worker Ellyn Satter’s hierarchy of food needs. 

First, enough food. This will be roughly anywhere from 2000-4000 cals/per day for most adults, depending on age, size, and activity level.

Acceptable food. Food that you’re willing to eat, acquired in ways you’re willing to get it. Leftovers from a garbage can would not be acceptable to anyone who had enough food. 

Reliable, ongoing access to food. Self-explanatory… you don’t worry that the next meal, or even the next week’s food, won’t be there.

Good-tasting food. Food you like! Palatable food! This is an exciting level to reach.

Novel food. Introducing variety, trying new foods and new ways of preparing them.

Instrumental food. Nutritional considerations, foods that serve a specific ‘health’ purpose. Say you’re wanting to get more of a certain micronutrient, so you choose foods that provide it. This level is what many people wrongly treat as the base of the pyramid when attempting ‘healthy eating’ in our frankly unhinged diet culture.

The context of this (by virtue of it being created by someone who is a social worker) seems to be largely socioeconomical. What I mean by this is that this hierarchy of food needs refers to food acquisition based on income, living conditions, working conditions etc. And there are two things i want to say about it. First that this alone is a very effective way of positioning yourself relative to things like diet culture. Second is that this can also be useful when talking about mental health issues and eating disorders. It does both by contextualising the priorities of eating (ie. what one needs in order to reach the next step) but also by saying, in plain words, that one cannot achieve a higher end than what is available to them (ie. You cannot each instrumentally unless you have reliable access to food).

I have always struggled with food. Always. There has rarely been a day where I haven’t had to argue with myself over the kinds of foods I want to eat; whether I really want to eat, what feeling hungry feels like, etc. In large part, this has been because I have been overweight and had mental issues and at every turning point I’ve been told by someone that I need to just ‘go outside’ or ‘eat better’ but have been physically unable to due to my mental health problems. 

The hardest part about having mental health issues, for me, is that I get lost very easily. I will think myself in circles trying to understand what is the right or wrong thing to do is and, whenever you’re lost, it’s usually because you don’t have a map or the tools to make one. This hierarchy, to me, is a map for understanding where my needs really are. A doctor can tell me I need to eat better all they want, but if I only have access to ‘Good-Tasting Food’, I will never be able to eat instrumentally. Up to this point, my mental health not only limited my ability to see the way forward, but also limited the kinds of food I was able to eat. 

One major factor in my issues around food has been the prevalence of diet culture, namely, the prioritisation of instrumental eating above all else and the undermining of eating enough, eating reliably, and eating good tasting food. Its as if I knew already there was a hierarchy, but I didn’t know where each tier began and ended. This has helped me by showing me where those tiers are. 

Frankly, without this, I wouldn’t be able to have this conversation with myself, period. So its nice to be able to look at this, understand myself better, then turn around and articulate it. 

[image description by @crashorpie : a tall triangle diagram like the food pyramid or hierarchy of needs. from the bottom to the top the sections are labeled “enough food,” “acceptable food,” “reliable, ongoing access to food,” “good-tasting food,” “novel food,” and “instrumental food”]

Thank you for articulating that, @commandtower-solring-go! I’ve been slowly poking at some similar thoughts.

It’s hard to talk and think about the ways that challenges in executive function and ability to feel and understand your experience of your body do impact reliable access to food even when there isn’t really anything stopping you besides your own brain/body and inadequate supports for the task of getting/preparing/eating food. It feels like talking about it like a food access issue is minimizing ‘real’ food access problems when I have always been able to afford enough to eat, when there are always some sort of ingredients in the pantry, when takeout isn’t going to eat the rest of my paycheck. But at the same time—when the result is a pattern of “ugh, this is too hard, maybe if I ignore being hungry it’ll go away?” that’s a recipe for sliding into an eating disorder and it is worth taking seriously. (Not an easily diagnosable one and not one that most treatment is set up to work with: the field hasn’t really caught up with how body image disturbance doesn’t always drive eating restriction.)

So, some ways that adhd/autism in particular can interact with the levels of this hierarchy:

• Enough food: most grocery stores are a circle of hell, so buying food the way most people do can be hard. Eating food before it goes bad takes a lot of executive function spread out over time. Even getting takeout requires a lot of decisions. If you have moral scrupulosity type ocd kind of stuff around food, messages that assign a moral weight to food choices can be paralyzing. Not just “good food”/“bad food” wrt calories either - “delivery companies are exploitative” “you should care about the environmental impact of your food” not technically wrong but can affect food access. “Serving size” can land weird with rules-following. That “three serving” box of ravioli about makes a meal for me if it’s the only dish I’m eating.
• Acceptable food: what is acceptable can fluctuate a lot on bad sensory days. As some autistic friends of mine say, unfortunately you have to touch the food with your whole mouth. This can make the novel and instrumental levels not possible to reach when that’s happening, and NT resources tend to assume this is actually about the “good-tasting” level - it is not, this is a much different intensity of experience than something more like “eew, this chicken is kinda rubbery and the broccoli is overcooked, guess I’ll suck it up and eat it tonight but I probably won’t have this dish again.”
• Reliable access to food: kinda goes with “enough food.” Fluctuating levels of ability make all this much more difficult to plan around. If I get ingredients for a meal later in the week, it’s hard to predict whether I’m actually going to be up for cooking it, or whether it’s going to be what I want to eat. Difficulty reading one’s own body signals, or those signals being loud and confusing and getting in the way of preparing and eating food also make it difficult to recognize when you need to eat and to eat regularly. And a drive for autonomy - “no one tells me what to do, not even me” - doesn’t always work so well with the biological need to eat regularly and the way that unpleasant sensation will inevitably follow if you don’t.
• Good-tasting food: difficult to figure out what your food preferences actually are when they don’t line up with cultural norms, and when you have difficulty recognizing the internal/physical emotional cues that help you figure out if you like something or not. Especially when you’ve been told for your whole life that your sensory experience is impossible, or at least not worth accommodating.
• Novel food: autistic need for predictability and routine meets adhd drive for novelty and interest meets trying to balance ease of planning and prepping with the way that eventually same-food becomes not-food and and and. Tolerance for novelty and uncertainty sometimes gets used up in the food prep and acquisition process.
• Instrumental food: E_FIELD_TOO_ LARGE. There are so many things that someone could modify their diet for and with and it is very hard to sort out which ones will make any particular person’s life better or worse, which will actually be effective at any given goal, all that. Also difficult when you take instructions literally and the guidance out there assumes that people won’t.

It’s extremely frustrating that even the nice inclusive anti-diet etc approaches to food and eating mostly fundamentally don’t understand or account for the experience of neurodiversity. I don’t need my experience “validated.” I need, minimum, to be able to compare my experience to the experiences that these resources think are even possible in enough detail that I can say “ok, yes, this approach requires skills and resources that I don’t have right now, so it’s not likely to work for me unmodified, and might not be appropriate at all.” Or “ah, this doesn’t state some underlying assumptions about what the experience of challenges with eating involve, so even though it says it’s for everyone it’s not likely to be so useful for me.”

“Trust your body” - well, that’s a process, but sure, good goal to have. “Trust yourself to be able to reliably meet your body’s needs”? That’s a very different thing.

(via the-question-is-now)