Do you have food aversions?

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My extreme aversion to most foods is my least favorite symptom of Asperger's. I want to eat healthy, but I can't when every food is disgusting to me and makes me want to vomit. Whenever I'm at a place where I'm treated to lunch, it's always something I can't eat and I have to endure questions about why I'm not eating. I'm tired of it. Do you have to put up with this crap too?

I used to be quite choosy in what I eat. I'm less choosy now.

I don't like liver, celery, meat loaf, nuts, heavy spices, and some others.

My husband has horrible food aversions.

He finds eating vile. If he could get a doctor to put in a tube in his stomach, and just dump formula in there, he would. The thinking about the actual act of eating makes him quesey.

Smells gag him. Cheese is a huge one. Salad dressing. Cooking vegetables. Fruit smells. The chemical out gassing of plastic packaging and or containers like Tupperware. Anything stored in Tupperware he will not eat. I'm taking about containers which have been used and washed a bunch of times. Zip lock bags. I can't smell the chemical smell he is talking about, and neither can anyone else. It drives him wild. I've asked if the food in the container has a chemical taste. He says no, but he can't get past the smell to eat it.

No left overs. The thought of food just sitting there, "decomposing" gets to him.

My husband has issues with textures and how food looks. He basically likes soft, mushy food.

His daily go to foods

Soft drinks
Mc Donalds (the smell of McD gags me, go figure)
Ramen noodles
Pretzels
Nuts
Rice
Potatos
Lunch meat
Pickles
tuna
white bread
chicken nuggefs

Fruits and vegetables: (this is when the stars align right) cucumbers, carrots, peas, a salad, oranges, bananas.

He tells me eating isn't worth the hassle. I've seen him live off of hot chocolate and vitamin pills.

We almost divorced over this. His mother never cooked. Like scratch cook. He never grew up with a kitchen that had cooking smells in it.

I'm a gourmet cook. He would lose his sh*t every time I cooked. I'm talking like tomato sauce or cooking a chicken. Nothing exotic.

We didn't know he was on the spectrum at that time, and what all the smells were was a huge sensory overload he never dealt with. He never ate at work or at school, so he never had to deal with a steamy kitchen cooking noodles, chicken, baking breads or cookies.

He also has misophonia to table/eating sounds on top of all that.

So yeah, I understand how hard it is for you to be fired up about eating.

ETA: he's "better" now, than he was in his 20s. He'd go days without eating and just pass out. He eats every day now. Like kraftiekortie said, it got better over time. For my husband that's 36 years (how long we have been together).

Yeah, I'd say that I'm a picky eater, I don't eat any fruit or veg and a lot of other foods I don't like the smell or texture of, my diet mainly consists of junk food, coke, beer and jack Daniels.

Ugh. Yes I have severe food aversions. No, it's not attention seeking, no I am not trying to be difficult and no, it's not because my mother 'spoiled' me. I have avoided going on conferences just so that nobody would find out and most foods make my throat close over. If someone were to offer me a cure for $10,000 cash I would buy it.

My diet has far too much junk food and coke in it even though I am FAR healthier than any of my relatives. Smells such as Vinegar and Parmesan cheese will make get queasy and will usually end up far worse. I spent years trying to figure out why and how and have concluded it all occurred because of some terrible advice my paediatrician gave my mother due to my milk allergy) that led to me getting an underdeveloped and sensitive system.

I'm sure many people told mom to just let me starve and I would eventually learn to 'get over it'. She tried just that and I went three days without eating because it bothered me that much. I've learned that NOBODY really understands. The best way I can describe it is to ask your average person to eat out of a smelly garbage can. Not easy!

I was pegged as a "terribly picky eater" as a child. I had aversions to a lot of foods, especially salads, milk, eggs in any way, shape or form. I also couldn't stand crumbs on a table, any kind of odor in a dish or glass, and cream on milk. And goats' milk was and still is horrible. It tastes like goats smell, no matter how much somebody says their goats don't taste "goaty." To me they do!

I was forced to eat at least a little bit of everything. There are some things I forced down through the gag reflex and they came back up. Or I would have to sit at the table with a plate of unappetizing stuff in front of me till I ate it.

My parents were not cruel people. They just didn't get it. They thought it was an attention thing or that I was "spunking."

Nobody in my world understood aspergers or autism in the 1980s unless you were severely autistic and I was not.

My dad is an aspie, I am sure, and one of his favorite foods is eggs. (I have not noticed that he had food aversions as an aspie symptom, but he has certain foods that he will eat 3 times a day if they are available. Eggs and graham crackers and peanut butter could be his daily bread.) Since he liked eggs, and in his black and white thinking, then *everybody* should like eggs, I was forced to eat eggs in every shape and form you can think of because he couldn't understand how one of his kids couldn't like eggs.

My mother still calls me a picky eater. She still doesn't get it. I have learned to eat enough different types of food to be polite. I am choosy but don't stand out as someone who just won't eat *anything*. I follow a gluten free diet due to digestive issues so I do come across as fussy in that department. But that is separate from my food aversions.

There are certain things that will NOT go down my throat and I will just gag them up. I have learned not to bother trying these. I will never learn to eat them, politeness or not. These are hard boiled eggs, mayonnaise, and cold mayo based salads such as ham salad, chicken salad, and the like. And cold butter on anything, such as cold butter bread. Melted butter is ok but cold butter has that cold greasy texture. I think my aversions are due to texture and smell as much as flavor. The absolute worst, the food from Hades itself, would be egg salad due to the combination of hard boiled eggs and mayonnaise.

I have had aversions to the way food looks. Like, if milk or juice had bubbles in it, that would make me gag. Celery or any other stringy food is also gross to me.

@Tawaki - Wow! 36 years married. I'm sure, by now, you must get a lot of requests from people to write a book about your experience living with a man on the spectrum.

I was an extremely picky eater as a child, but I'm much better.

I don't like:

Mushrooms
Green peppers
Cucumbers
Raw tomatoes by themselves (mixed in something is ok)
Melons of any kind
Mayonnaise
Egg salad
Chicken salad
Potato salad
Tuna in a can
Casseroles
Food cooked by strangers
Greasy foods
Meat that includes skin, bones, tendons (ugh)
Organ meat
Bananas by themselves
Cottage cheese
Hamburgers
Sloppy Joes
Corn dogs
Most lunch meat
American cheese
Blue cheese
Lamb
Tomato soup
Soda (most , not all)
Margarine
Fake whipped cream
Most salad dressings
Relish

There is more but I can't remember. I'd rather not eat than eat something I dislike. When I was a kid the list was maybe three times longer.

It does cause problems when eating outside my home.

I have about 10 different foods I can eat. The rest, my stomach just refuses to digest so it's pointless to try.

I don't like fruit for some strange reason, apart from tomatoes, and grapes (preferably dried into raisins). I have to drink orange juice to get the vitamins, and that's pleasant once I've started drinking but I often feel reluctant to begin, and I have to warm the stuff to room temperature first. I'm also wary of any food that's new to me, which has for a long time been limited to a restrictive, repetitive and stereotyped diet (albeit a fairly healthy one), though I've been getting more adventurous lately.

I'm a very picky eater, one of the worst ones is seafood. I won't go anywhere near seafood of any kind. Aside from that, certain things such as Tomato, Olives, Prunes, Pineapple, Mint, Liquorice, Onion and various random foods.

There are so many foods that I cannot eat due to texture, taste, and/or smell. My picky eating is improving and I am trying more foods as time goes by but I still find it extremely difficult. I am having to introduce foods slowly by cutting them up into small chunks and mixing it into something else.

I can relate to the plastic smelling thing though, I find that often with Tupperware products and thus cannot eat from them as I can taste the plastic too - much to my Mother's despair and confusion lmao.