I saw a food guru to cure my daughter’s food phobias – here’s what happened next
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Food phobias are on the rise, particularly among children. So can a three-hour session with one of the world’s most sought-after practitioners for those with avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder help cure Charlotte Cripps’s eight-year-old daughter Lola, who won’t eat anything except fish fingers and pizza? She took Lola along to find out.
![[Felix is one of the most sought-after practitioners for ARFID in the world, using a combination of psychology therapy, hypnosis and Neuro-linguistic programming]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/09/11/Felix-head-shot.-editedjpg.jpg)
Is it all too good to be true? I’m filling up my shopping trolley with foods that my daughter, Lola, eight, would usually never eat in a million years: strawberries, bananas, cherries, corn on the cob, avocados, and Greek salad. But, in a few hours, I’m hoping she’ll gobble up the lot – and experience a profound turnaround in her eating habits.
![[Lola reluctantly eating her first strawberry after she’d finished off the lasagne that became her new ‘safe food’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/09/12/IMG_2556-%282%29.jpg)
I’d pre-cooked jacket potatoes and lasagne for her, along with foods Lola had written on a “dream list” that she’d love to eat if only she wasn’t too scared to do so, including juicy watermelon and sushi. Lola’s relationship with food has been the same since she started eating solids – she got stuck in a rut of eating the same meals: pizza, fish fingers, pasta, and omelettes. Oh and freshly squeezed orange juice but only because I told her that her legs would fall off if she didn’t drink it. I thought she’d grow out of her faddishness around the age of five when she went to school. Instead, she refused school lunches – and I now send her in every day with... a pizza. It’s worrying. Her diet is high in processed foods, and when she goes on playdates, she only eats one brand of fish fingers and tomato pasta sauce.
![[It was a miracle when Lola begged me to take her to a juice bar for a ‘Pick Me Up’ with banana, strawberry and apple in it]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/09/11/IMG_2617.jpg)
