At 6, Hannah was diagnosed with ARFID, an eating disorder rooted in fear and anxiety, often mistaken for picky eating. To get her to try new foods, her mother started filming her and posting the videos on Instagram, on the account @myarfidlife.
Hannah first felt a deep-rooted anxiety around food when she turned 6. Whenever she visited her grandparents’ or a friend’s house for a meal, she would get nervous about having to turn down foods she didn’t like. Some of them — broccoli, Brussels sprouts — would make any kid turn up their nose. But even the possibility of mac ’n’ cheese or cake being offered at the dinner table would make her lose her appetite.
This was more complex than picky eating. Even subtle exposure to certain foods would send her into sensory overdrive. At age 7, Hannah was diagnosed with ARFID, which stands for avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, a relatively newly known eating disorder first introduced for diagnosis in 2013.
There is something entrancing about how ritualistically Hannah repeats this process in video after video. Soon after she started posting, hundreds of thousands of views began to roll in, with the account amassing over 1.5 million followers. In part, her videos have found such a broad audience because they impart the delight and surprise of trying a new food for the first time, with each moment a bite-size step toward making peace with the unknown.
Eventually, Hannah stopped being able to put on weight. When she fell off the growth chart, doctors warned that she would have to be put on a feeding tube if the situation became more dire. After asking around at her son’s school, another parent suggested that Hannah might be struggling with ARFID. When Michelle brought the possible diagnosis to Hannah’s pediatrician, “they didn’t really say yes or no,” she recalls.
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