ARFID in the Spotlight – What Awareness Hasn’t Solved Yet, and Why That Matters
- Brainz Magazine
- 8 hours ago
- 10 min read
Blending innovation with compassion, Kylie Gallaher brings cutting-edge expertise in clinical hypnotherapy to empower lasting change. Grounded in evidence-based practice, her professional journey is dedicated to helping clients overcome challenges and thrive with confidence.
ARFID is having a moment. Visibility has arrived. ARFID is now present in mainstream media, across social platforms, and in public conversation. Recognition has brought relief, validation, and language where there was once only confusion. But visibility alone does not automatically lead to progress, and for many living with ARFID, awareness has not yet translated into meaningful change.
When recognition brings relief, but not resolution
For many, recognition brings genuine relief at finally being seen. What once looked like defiance, fussiness, attention-seeking, manipulation, resistance, or “just a phase” is now understood as something far more serious. Behaviours that were labelled difficult, dramatic, controlling, irrational, too sensitive, or overly anxious are increasingly being viewed through a different lens, rather than judged by appearance, compliance, or assumption. ARFID is no longer invisible, even if it is not yet fully understood.
Parents and adults who have spent years feeling confused or blamed are finally encountering language that reflects their lived reality. Having a name for what has long been misunderstood can ease shame, validate experience, and make sense of patterns that previously felt isolating or inexplicable.
And yet, as ARFID becomes more visible, an uncomfortable reality is harder to ignore. Visibility does not automatically bring understanding, and what is illuminated is not always seen clearly. Recognition can end confusion without necessarily opening pathways forward.
For many families and adults, being named does not change the daily reality of ARFID. The complexity, restriction, and exhaustion of living with an ongoing food-related threat often remain much the same, even after the relief of recognition has arrived.
Why ARFID exposes a deeper problem
This is not a failure of awareness, it is because ARFID, by its very nature, exposes gaps in how health, risk, safety, and recovery are currently understood.
Part of what makes ARFID so difficult to understand is that people do not simply grow out of it. What does change, over time, is the way a person learns to live with it. As children become adolescents, and adolescents become adults, relationships with food inevitably evolve. Coping strategies become more sophisticated. Avoidance can become quieter. Accommodation can look like adaptation. And for some, that adaptation can conceal a deep sense of shame.
From the outside, this can resemble resolution. But adaptation is not the same as safety. For many people, the underlying sense of threat remains, even as life moves forward. What appears as improvement may reflect survival within constraint, rather than a genuine shift in how the nervous system experiences eating, or how a person feels within themselves.
This is one reason ARFID can be mistaken for a passing stage, particularly when the cost of adaptation to a person’s sense of self, psychosocial wellbeing, relationships, and health is hidden or normalised over time.
In online spaces, media narratives, and even some advocacy conversations, ARFID is increasingly framed as a lifelong condition to be managed rather than a state that can meaningfully shift. Coping strategies, accommodations, and acceptance rightly feature as essential tools, particularly when safety has been absent for a long time. But alongside this, an implicit message often remains that this is permanent, and hoping for more may be unrealistic or even harmful.
What is far less visible in public discourse is any clear explanation of how meaningful change might occur without repeating the harms that led to this caution in the first place.
No one is to blame for this narrative. It has developed in response to very real harm and heavy costs. Many families have experienced coercive treatment approaches. Many adults have been dismissed, misunderstood, or retraumatised by systems that focused on behaviour without addressing what was driving it. Over time, these experiences can narrow participation and increase withdrawal from care and everyday life. In that context, accommodation becomes protection.
Permanence can come to feel safer than false hope, particularly when past attempts at change have only ever been offered through the same narrow lens. For some, progress has been defined by small behavioural gains that, while hard-won, feel vanishingly small when set against the scale of eating itself. Eating is an ongoing, inescapable part of daily life rather than a single challenge to overcome. Eating is not a single task or an outcome, it is something required multiple times a day, every day, across nearly every setting of life. When the underlying sense of threat remains, even meaningful gains can feel tentative, fragile, or unsustainable, overshadowed by the ongoing physical, emotional, and social demands that eating places on a person’s nervous system, health, and sense of self.
ARFID is distinct from other eating disorders in ways that matter deeply here.
ARFID is distinct in its primary drivers, even though it can intersect with or sit alongside other eating disorders over time.
For people with ARFID, food avoidance is not about weight, shape, or control. It is about threat. A nervous system that has learned, often early and implicitly, that eating, swallowing, certain textures, sensations, or internal bodily cues are dangerous. When this distinction is flattened, ARFID is pulled into frameworks that were not originally designed to hold it.
When ARFID is understood in this way, its complexity becomes harder to contain within neat categories. The nervous system threat that sits at its core does not exist in isolation from development, context, or experience over time. This is where the boundaries between diagnostic labels begin to blur, and where ARFID’s distinct drivers can intersect with other patterns of eating difficulty in ways that challenge simplified models of both disorder and recovery.
When ARFID intersects with other eating disorders
Acknowledging ARFID’s distinct drivers also requires holding the complexity of how eating difficulties can evolve or layer over time.
This does not mean ARFID simply becomes another eating disorder. More often, layers are added. The underlying nervous system threat remains, while additional meanings, behaviours, or coping strategies develop around it, shaped by prolonged restriction, social pressure, medical risk, or repeated experiences of misattunement in care.
For some people, patterns of restriction driven initially by fear, sensory threat, or bodily mistrust can intersect with concerns more commonly associated with anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, or orthorexia. In these cases, weight, shape, control, or body image may begin to influence the relationship with food alongside the original threat-based avoidance.
Over the past few years, ARFID has moved into a clearer public view. Mainstream reporting from outlets such as ABC News has drawn attention to its prevalence and frequent misunderstanding, while other Australian media coverage has highlighted that ARFID affects far more people than previously assumed.
This growing recognition is not limited to Australia. Internationally, similar patterns are emerging, with UK health services reporting increasing numbers of ARFID-related presentations and growing pressure on eating disorder services. At the same time, research across Australia and New Zealand has noted rising clinical attention to ARFID, alongside persistent gaps in prevalence data and treatment clarity.
Before ARFID was formally recognised, many children and adults were diagnosed with atypical anorexia and treated within anorexia-based frameworks because restriction and weight loss were the most visible risks. In those contexts, treatment often focused on weight restoration or behavioural compliance, without adequately addressing the fear, sensory processing differences, or bodily danger that were driving the restriction in the first place.
When treatment does not align with the mechanism, it can unintentionally reinforce the threat rather than reduce it. For some, this has not only failed to help but has compounded fear, eroded trust in care, created a cavernous distance between their lived experience and treatment, and made recovery more complex rather than more accessible.
As a result, progress is often measured externally. Can the person eat enough? Can they tolerate exposure? Can they comply with expectations? When those benchmarks are met, the condition is considered managed. When they are not, families are frequently told to lower expectations or accept long-term limitations.
More than food: How ARFID shapes life
What gets lost in this framing is that ARFID is rarely confined to food alone.
It shapes participation in life. Medical care becomes complicated. Schooling, work, travel, and social connections are carefully negotiated or avoided altogether. Parents reorganise entire family systems around safety. Adults learn to narrow their worlds quietly, often with remarkable ingenuity and resilience, but at a cost that is rarely visible from the outside.
From the outside, this can look like preference or rigidity. From the inside, it is often about survival.
When hope becomes culturally unsafe
The current information ecosystem around ARFID reflects this tension, particularly in online support spaces and lived-experience-led communities. Social media and mainstream platforms have played an important role in validation and visibility. They have helped people feel seen and less alone. But they can also, unintentionally, reinforce the idea that coping and accommodation are the end of the road.
In one large online support group, I once saw a parent ask, cautiously, whether anyone had seen improvement beyond accommodation. The responses were immediate and protective. Many reassured them that acceptance was the goal, that ARFID was lifelong, and that pushing for change could do harm. What was striking was not the advice itself, but the emotional charge around the question. Hope, even gently expressed, felt unsafe.
That reaction makes sense. When recognition has been hard-won, anything that sounds like “fixing” can feel like a return to force. When people have been harmed by treatment, permanence can feel more honest than optimism or even hope. But when a culture quietly communicates that meaningful change is not to be expected, something important is lost, and possibilities are limited to a very small window.
Part of the difficulty is that ARFID sits at the intersection of systems that do not align well. Eating disorder models tend to prioritise behaviour. Anxiety models often prioritise cognition. Medical systems focus on risk management. Social narratives emphasise identity and acceptance. Each offers something valuable, but none fully accounts for what happens when a nervous system is organised around an ongoing threat.
When safety is misunderstood, risk is misjudged. Well-intentioned interventions can inadvertently reinforce danger rather than reduce it. Accommodation becomes both necessary and limiting. Awareness increases, but pathways forward remain unclear. For many people, this is not a lack of willingness or effort, but a reflection of how approaches that begin with safety, agency, and nervous system regulation remain underrepresented in public-facing discussions of ARFID care.
Rethinking recovery without oversimplifying it
ARFID challenges us to rethink what recovery actually means.
Recovery does not have to mean erasing sensory sensitivities, pretending food is neutral, or forcing bodies into compliance. These framings have caused real harm, and the caution that has followed them is understandable.
But neither does recovery have to mean a lifetime of shrinking around threat. There is a wide, largely under-recognised space between coercion and resignation, between “just eat” and “this is as good as it gets.”
This is not a theoretical or mythical space. It is the space I work in every day, informed both by clinical practice and by the lived experience of recovery, where safety is treated as the starting point rather than a reward for compliance. It is a space that already exists in clinical practice, where work is oriented toward restoring safety, agency, and trust in the body, rather than simply increasing tolerance or compliance.
In this space, change is understood in relation to the scale of eating itself, as something that occurs multiple times a day, every day, across almost every context of life. It is therefore approached with care for sustainability, not just short-term gains.
Many families and adults are already expending enormous effort to live alongside ARFID. They are often highly resourced in coping, accommodation, and protection, having learned how to manage risk and reduce harm in daily life. What is often missing is not effort, insight, or willingness, but a shared understanding between those living with ARFID and the systems meant to support them of just how meaningful change might be possible.
The difficulty is not a lack of effort or willingness. It is that while approaches grounded in safety, agency, and nervous system regulation are already being practised, they remain largely underrepresented in public-facing conversations about ARFID treatment. Where specialist services do exist, they are often oriented toward children and families, with far fewer clearly articulated pathways for adults.
More intensive or residential care tailored to ARFID’s distinct mechanisms remains scarce or unavailable in many regions. As a result, even when this work exists in practice, it can be difficult for many people to find, access, or recognise as relevant to their situation.
This gap between what exists in practice and what is publicly understood helps explain why increased awareness has not yet translated into meaningful change.
Why awareness alone isn’t enough
This is why ARFID matters beyond itself.
Because it reveals the limitations of frameworks that equate management with healing and compliance with recovery. It exposes how often we stop at recognition and mistake naming the problem for solving it.
What the research currently tells us about ARFID treatment is still emerging, uneven, and incomplete. There is no single answer, and no universal pathway. But what is already clear is that awareness alone is not enough. Recognition without meaningful change leaves families and adults suspended in a state of informed uncertainty. This uncertainty is magnified when eating remains a daily, embodied source of threat rather than a neutral background task. And while information is abundant, validation is widespread, coherent pathways that bridge safety and change remain largely out of public view.
This article is not about offering solutions or protocols. That conversation belongs later. For now, it is about naming the gap between visibility and impact, and why that gap matters.
ARFID deserves more than a spotlight. It deserves ways of thinking about safety, risk, and recovery that allow it to be seen clearly, rather than simply seen, without collapsing into force on one side or permanence on the other. It deserves a discourse where seriousness and hope are allowed to coexist, and where imagining change is not seen as a betrayal of lived experience, but as a continuation of it.
For those living in the space between recognition and resolution, this is not a question of waiting for better answers someday. It is about finding approaches that already begin with safety, respect complexity, and allow change to unfold at the pace the nervous system requires.
This is the space I work in every day. For those seeking support that moves beyond coping alone, this work is already happening in practice. Future articles will explore what current research tells us about ARFID treatment, how nervous system-informed approaches are being used in practice, and what recovery can look like when safety is treated as foundational rather than optional. Future articles will continue to explore what it means to approach ARFID treatment and recovery and related experiences through the lens of safety, complexity, and lived experience.
Read more from Kylie Gallaher
Kylie Gallaher, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Strategic Psychotherapist
Kylie Gallaher leads Newcastle Clinical Hypnotherapy, the region’s only specialised hypnotherapy team, offering comprehensive support in all areas where hypnotherapy is beneficial. With advanced qualifications and a focus on evidence-based methods, she has established herself as a leader in the field. Kylie specialises in ARFID, eating disorders, trauma, anxiety, and related conditions including gastrointestinal disorders, and is committed to reshaping treatment approaches in Australia. Her professional journey reflects a dedication to blending science with compassion, delivering measurable results and raising the standard of clinical hypnotherapy nationwide.
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