444 ARFID or OCD? Understanding the Difference When Food Feels Scary

Your Anxiety Toolkit - Anxiety & OCD Strategies for Everyday

Kimberley Quinlan, LMFT | Anxiety & OCD Specialist

Self-improvement, Education, Anxietymindfulnessmeditation, Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.9 • 802 Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode, Kimberley Quinlan breaks down the subtle but crucial differences between OCD, ARFID, orthorexia, and eating disorders—and how understanding these distinctions can lead to more effective, compassionate treatment.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

Why the function behind food-related anxiety matters more than the behavior itself
How OCD, ARFID, and orthorexia can look similar—but require very different treatment approaches
What exposure therapy looks like for each condition (and why it must be values-led)
The unique role disgust plays in ARFID and how to gently work through it
How to involve family members in the recovery process without reinforcing avoidance
Why healing doesn’t mean perfection—and how to measure progress with compassion

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you or someone you love has intense anxiety around food, maybe food preparation, meal time,
0:10.4	you might be wondering, is this arid, is this an eating disorder or is this OCD, or maybe an entirely
0:17.0	different condition?
0:18.7	My name is Kimberly Quinlan.
0:20.0	I'm an anxiety specialist and
0:21.7	today I'm going to be focusing on breaking apart these different presentations and
0:29.5	what might appear to look the same but in fact these are completely different
0:34.7	conditions and that require different specialized treatment so that you can get
0:40.4	the recovery and the outcomes that you want. Thank you so much for being here. Your Anxiety Toolkit,
0:46.8	we're here to bring you all the virtual hugs and effective strategies and science-based tools
0:53.0	so that you can get better faster.
0:55.0	That's what we're all about over here at your anxiety toolkit.
0:58.0	So let's get to the bottom of what is OCD, what is ARFID, is it maybe something completely different?
1:06.0	We're going to pull apart, we're going to dissect this and go through it together
1:10.0	so that you know
1:11.6	that you can move forward and get the correct treatment that you deserve. So let's go.
1:19.6	So oftentimes clients will present in our office with these symptoms of anxiety around food, lots of preparation, a lot of rumination
1:31.8	about food, maybe a lot of checking of the food item. There might be a lot of distress around
1:38.3	eating. There might be massive emotional dysregulation around meal time. These are all things that a lot of people
1:47.5	are struggling with. However, what we want to do before we immediately just jump in and try to
1:55.2	target specific symptoms and manage different avoidant behaviors is we want to understand what is actually going on.
2:04.0	What is the underlying fear of these behaviors?
	...

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