For me it was about gaining a sense of control in my life (I didn’t know I was autistic-adhd). No one could make me eat or drink & so gate-keeping my own food intake enabled me to create the illusion of being in control - That was until I lost so much weight, my ability to think rationally reduced and I lost what control I thought I had.
Food is too often used as a reward or punishment and not seen for what it actually is for- our survival. We don’t withhold air when we want to achieve a change in behaviour and so why use food? Behaviour is communication. Maybe we need to just see it as that and stop with the operant conditioning.
When I’ve eaten I don’t like to feel too full and I really don’t respond well to being hungry and so I prefer to graze, which doesn’t always suit the rigid traditions of 3 meals a day or sit well with the ‘no eating between meals’ brigade.
Then there’s the demand avoidance. The pressure to eat certain things because of a lack of understanding or, dare I say, empathy of sensory differences, the expectations at meal time to make small talk and eye contact coupled with unhelpful comments about how people eat their food. I suspect it comes down to this;
Autism + environment = outcome (Beardon,2017).