29 Aug 2025

Eating at the Intersections: Understanding the Unique Experiences and Needs of Neurodivergent People

In this blog, Lived Experience Advocate and Clinical Psychologist Lumen explores how sensory differences, executive function, systemic factors, and trauma play a role in eating disorder risk amongst neurodivergent people.

Eating disorders (EDs) are often misunderstood as just being body image issues, “all about control”, or only affecting a very specific demographic. These reductive narratives consistently overlook and erase the experience and needs of many people with EDs – particularly neurodivergent and other marginalised folk. The co-occurrence of neurodivergence and EDs of all types is high, with countless unique traits, factors, and experiences intersecting and interplaying with neurodivergent folks’ experiences of food, eating, feeding, and body.

When we talk about neurodivergence, many people first think of Autism or ADHD. While these are absolutely part of the picture, they are far from the whole story. Neurodivergence is an umbrella term encompassing a wide range of experiences – Autism, ADHD, persistent drive for autonomy (PDA) profiles, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, synaesthesia, OCD, bipolar, schizophrenia, plurality, depression, anxiety, trauma, and more. Some neurodivergences are innate (the bodyminds we’re born with) and lifelong; others may be acquired, fluctuating, temporary, or episodic. For neurodivergent people, food and eating are rarely just about nutrition or choice. They are deeply shaped by differences in sensory experiences, executive function, nervous system, motor coordination, cognitive processing, capacity, other intersecting identities, and more, alongside sociocultural and systemic pressures, stressors, and experiences. Without recognising these unique factors, we misunderstand the entirety of someone’s experiences, offering support that not only overlooks and pathologises their needs, but actively harms them.

Sensory Differences, Executive Function, and More

Navigating food, feeding, and eating involves a significant amount of sensory input, cognitive processes, and capacity. For example, when done by mouth, eating and drinking are two of the few activities that engage all eight senses (taste, smell, touch, sight, hearing, vestibular, proprioception, interoception) simultaneously. For neurodivergent folk, differences in sensory experiences and needs can make eating feel engaging and stimulating, grounding and soothing, neutral and uninteresting, stressful and overwhelming, or painful and dysregulating (to name a few things).

For example, some neurodivergent people – particularly Autistic folk – textures, flavours, temperatures, visual aspects, or even sounds related to food are highly aversive, making them intolerable; detail-oriented processing and strong pattern recognition can mean being hyper-aware of changes in sensory characteristics, which others might not detect. This is far more than “fussy eating” or “personal preferences”, and it is not a form of “resistance” or “non-compliance”. Rather, it reflects innate sensory needs and processing differences. Trying to force someone to “just get used to it” will not work (Autistic bodyminds do not habituate to sensory sensitivities), and risks causing food and sensory trauma, which increases the likelihood of developing an ED.

Interoceptive differences (such as markedly reduced or heightened awareness of hunger, fullness, nausea, and/or thirst) can also profoundly impact eating and comfort in body, while proprioceptive differences can shape how people experience movement, exercise, and their sense of embodiment. For a person with reduced interoceptive and proprioceptive awareness, this might look like someone being unable to identify hunger or fullness cues, and only “feeling” movement/exercise when done in intense or “extreme” ways. Meanwhile, for someone with hyper-awarenesses, even a small amount of food, or a slight bodily change, could be experienced in an acute, overwhelming, painful, and/or distressing way.

Executive function differences are also deeply connected to eating, feeding, and body. Differences in decision-making, attention, working memory, emotional regulation, time perception, planning, sequencing, and task initiation or completion, and more can mean that neurodivergent folk have different eating patterns, sometimes rendering eating difficult, distressing, or outside their capacity.

For example, difficulty deciding on and preparing food, remembering meals, shifting focus, disrupted routines, or navigating unexpected changes (amongst many other things) can all impact whether eating is accessible or manageable. The more stress someone is under, the more overwhelming these tasks can become, too; this is particularly relevant when considering co-occurring differences in nervous system (structure, function, and responsivity), cognitive processing, and capacity amongst neurodivergent folk.

ARFID

ARFID is common amongst neurodivergent (particularly Autistic) people. Despite its prevalence, it is widely and dangerously misunderstood, frequently being misconceptualised as “picky eating” or misdiagnosed as another ED.

In ARFID, one’s intake is significantly limited due to sensory sensitivities (resulting in a very small range of “safefoods”), little or no interest in food, and traumatic or fear-based experiences involving food/eating (such as fear of choking, nausea, vomiting, pain, allergic reactions, and more). These factors can make eating extremely challenging – if not unbearable or impossible at times – for people with ARFID.

Such experiences often exist on a background of innate sensory hyper- and hypo-sensitivities, co-occurring medical conditions, stressors, and nervous system dysregulation, alongside executive function, cognitive processing, motor coordination, and other differences. When stress or burnout increases, ARFID also increases, as sensory differences become more pronounced, chronic illnesses flare, and one’s nervous system becomes more dysregulated, directly impacting one’s capacity for sensory aspects of food or drink, digestive function, and more.

All too often, ARFID is approached through sensory desensitisation and CBT frameworks, which pressure individuals into “exposure activities”, frame justified fears as “maladaptive”, teach compliance and masking, and focus on “changing eating behaviours” to meet neuronormative standards. These tenets are far from neuro-affirming, confer significant trauma and dysregulation, and – ultimately – perpetuate and compound what is underpinning ARFID, rather than alleviating it. When supporting folks with ARFID, it’s essential that we look at the whole person: who they are, what stresses they’re experiencing, what identities do they hold, what circumstances they’re navigating, and what they need. Support must be grounded in safety, consent, and collaboration, with a focus on reducing stress, increasing access to safe foods (fed is best), honouring boundaries and felt safety, and supporting their unique needs (accommodation, not habituation).

Stress, Survival, and Systemic Factors

Whichever way we look at it, it is vital that we recognise EDs as stress and trauma responses. Trauma can take many forms – interpersonal, sensory, medical, systemic, complex, and more – and EDs often serve as regulation and survival strategies amidst a world not built for neurodivergent people. EDs frequently meet otherwise unmet needs, offering regulation, predictability, familiarity, a way of quietening the noise, or accessing autonomy over self/body in a world that strips these away. A multitude of intersecting factors can shape neurodivergent folks’ experiences; these are far more complex than mainstream ED frameworks touting “control over food, weight, or shape” acknowledge, and cannot be siloed.

Such factors include neurodivergent folks’ unsupported differences and needs, trauma and survival responses, sociocultural pressures (e.g. diet culture, healthism, misinformation), systemic discrimination (e.g. ableism, weight bias, racism, queerphobia, transphobia, classism), internalised shame, oppression, “masking”, inaccessible care, burnout, chronic illness, capacity limitations, financial disparities, stigma, and othering. Many neurodivergent people also learn hide parts of themselves to “fit in” and be protected from judgement; this can include suppressing/overriding their own needs so they do not appear “visibly different”, and/or adhering to diet culture and appearance ideals to reduce risk of further discrimination.

When these factors aren’t recognised (and, sadly, even when they are), ND folk are often given “one-size-fits-all”, so-called “gold standard” treatments, grounded in neuronormativity, ableism, cisheteronormativity, Eurocentrism, weight-centrism, oppression, compliance, and more. These “gold standard” models cause significant harm – sometimes inadvertently, sometimes overtly, and always inevitably. They assume universality, ignore, and pathologise ND folks’ needs, traits, and experiences (mislabelling everything as “the ED”); push rigid exposure-based approaches without safety or consent; fail to explore or accommodate capacity limitations or chronic illness; overlook intersecting identities and systemic oppressions; dismiss neurodivergent trauma; label self-advocacy and autonomy as “treatment resistance” and “non-compliance”; and pressure neurodivergent folk to adhere to neuronormative ways of being – a process tantamount to conversion practices. These approaches don’t just fail to help neurodivergent folk; they actively harm us – causing shame, disconnection, and trauma – and are a core reason why we see such high rates of ED “treatment ineffectiveness” and relapse.

When it comes to ED treatment, and society more broadly, we should never focus on changing the individual to fit the system, nor should we label those with multifaceted identities, experiences, and needs as “too hard”. Rather, society and its systems must change to support every individual in all their complexity and humanness, providing support that centres and uplifts diversity, dismantles ableism, sanism, and colonialism, and holds space for all bodyminds. Eating disorders are social justice issues, neuroaffirming care benefits everybody, and there should be room for everyone at the (proverbial) table.

About the Author

Lumen Gorrie (they/them) is a queer, trans, multiply neurodivergent (AuDHD+), chronically ill, disabled person, based in Naarm on unceded Wurundjeri Land. They work as a clinical psychologist, educator, and advocate, and are founder of the Appetite for Change Project. Lumen recognises the immense privilege they hold as a white, middle-class, tertiary-educated person, which significantly influences how the world responds to them. They also recognise that psychology, psychiatry, and medicine have a long – and ongoing – history of pathologising and harming neurodivergent and other marginalised people, and are committed to working in ways that resist and redress these harms.

As a multiply neurodivergent, chronically ill, disabled person, Lumen has had – and will always have – eating differences and difficulties. They also have a history of past eating disorders which, retrospectively, they understand as inextricably interrelated with then-unidentified neurodivergent needs, Autistic burnout, gender dysphoria, internalised queerphobia, and complex trauma which they navigated into early adulthood. Lumen also has ARFID; for them, this is episodic, emerging in times of significant stress, burnout, and loss of capacity. View: @brains.beyond.binaries and @appetite_for_change_project

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