Kevin Allison (0:00)

On this episode of Risk Reacts.

Danielle Minard (0:03)

In college, I was choosing my major based on what I thought my condition could handle in person sales. That requires, you know, making deals and eating meals with other people. Out of the question. English major though. I'll be unemployable. Perfect. Risk.

Kevin Allison (0:32)

Hello folks, this is Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. I'm Kevin Allison and this is another one of our Risk Reacts episodes, a video and audio episode where I listen to a story for the very first time and give you my instant reactions. Now if you're hearing this on our podcast feed and you want to watch the video version inst, there's a link to that in the show notes. But all of our audio episodes go back 16 years and are at risk-show.com or wherever you get your podcast. So let's get started. Our friends at the Story Collider sent us this story by Danielle Minard that was on their podcast on July of 2024. It was an episode called Food Fights. Now, I have never heard that episode. So beside it having something to do with food, I have no idea what the story is about, but one of our Risk producers, Taj Easton, he listened to it and he thought that I would find it really interesting. So I guess we're going to find out how well Taj knows me. So after this quick break, we'll hear Danielle Minert's story from the Story Collider.

Danielle Minard (1:52)

We'll be right back. Ready to level up Champa Casino is your playbook to fun. It's free to play with no purchase necessary. Enjoy hundreds of online social games like blackjack, slots and solitaire anytime, anywhere. With fresh releases every week. Whether you're at home or on the go, let Chumba Casino bring the excitement to you. Plus, get free daily login bonuses and a free welcome bonus here. Join now for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Play Champa Casino today. No purchase necessary. VGW Group void board prohibited by law 21/TNCs apply this holiday. Discover meaningful gifts for everyone on your list at K. Not sure where to start? Our jewelry experts are here to help you find or create the perfect gift in store or online. Book your appointment today and unwrap love this season only at K. We're back. I'm eight years old, standing outside between my therapist's office and a fountain, warming a penny in my hands. Eyes closed, I whisper in my head so no one can hear aloud. I wish by the time I'm 30, a real grownup that I could eat anything. Eight years prior, I was born half deaf, and I could eat anything. My parents called me the garbage disposal because I'd grab anything I could get my little grubby hands on. And by the time I was 2, I got an ear surgery to address the first condition I was born with. A doctor pried my mouth open, drilled a hole in the roof, and drained the fluid that led to my ears. On the way home, in the backseat, I held my hands over my ears, open, closed, open, grinning at this new sense I'd gained access to. I could hear, but I couldn't eat. My parents spooned my favorites into my mouth. Broccoli, fluff, mustard, creamed corn. Because I was a toddler, but if it managed to make its way in, it immediately fell out. I developed this gag reflex for just about every food and smell near me. Just about any. Anything that I could try to eat before or that I loved to eat before read as inedible to me. I don't remember any of this. I was about 2 years old. It's right before the age where little kids start forming long term memories. But I do recall the way I ate for the next 27 years. For example. Again, 8 years old. Back at that therapist's office, sitting at her giant desk, staring at a chicken finger. She's begging me to take a a single bite. And if I do, she's promising the reward of a reliable plain animal cracker. I can't eat the chicken. At 16, a teenager. I go to a birthday party and I go straight for the cheese pizza. Absolutely thrilled to see a happy, safe food there. I bite into it and there's a surprise pepperoni right underneath of the cheese pizza. Sorry to do that to y', all. Y'. All. And I could not finish the pizza. I gagged. I looked around, I felt just shame in my chest. And I left early. I was a teenager who couldn't eat. This stuck with me in college. I was choosing my major based on what I thought my condition could handle in person sales that requires, you know, making deals and eating meals with other people. Out of the question. And English major though, I'll be unemployable. Perfect. I literally won't have coworkers to comment on why I'm eating the same Easy Mac every day for lunch. It's a plan. I'd grown up with this condition called ARFID A, R, F, I, D. It stands for Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, which is the only acronym I'll share with you here tonight. And it can manifest in many ways. But for me, it meant that almost all, all food was disgusting. I could smell a fresh ripe orange on the other side of the room and think that we'd left out last month's trash to rot. This made me feel like my brain was configured wrong. Like the wires that are supposed to properly transmit information to tell you about food were just like clumped together, snipped out and thrown away. And when you feel like your brain is configured wrong, you tend to hide from the world. I knew I couldn't live like this. I didn't want to live like this. So as an adult, I took myself back to therapy. Just regular talk therapy this time I thought maybe I could talk my way out of my condition or convince myself not to have an eating disorder. But turns out my expectations were a little bit misaligned. Did have some great therapists who really helped me emotionally cope with what was going on, but needed a different tactic. So I tried exposure therapy, similar to when I was 8 years old. But I'm a grown up now. I've got a grown up brain. Maybe I can do this differently. Maybe I can eat a walnut. I can if I convinced myself for about three weeks to work up to it. And can I keep it in my diet? No. But look, I ate it, I tried the walnut, and then I went to YouTube.com and I thought maybe I'll just try some at home. Hypnotherapy. It's. It didn't work, but anything is worth a shot. That was earnestly my perspective a year and a half ago. Settled at home after eating buttered toast for dinner, laying in bed, eyes heavy from a long day at work, just like cycling through Netflix, letting it tell me what I'm going to watch tonight. And then I heard this narrator on this show say, psychedelic assisted therapy can help eating disorder patients recover in as little as a single session. What? I sit up in bed and I Google psychedelic assisted therapy, Arfid, psychedelic shrooms, mushrooms for people who are scared of them. I literally cannot move fast enough. I am stoked on the idea. There's nothing online or in this documentary about my particular condition. But it did not matter to me. Taking psilocybin containing mushrooms on purpose to say goodbye to my eating disorder. This could be the solution. This is a really important time to describe to you all that I was a narc growing up. In high school, I overheard my neighbor telling his friend that after school he was going to buy weed. And empowered with a whole childhood community of misinformation Absolutely terrified for his health and safety, I immediately called my mommy. But I thought, how wild. Taking psilocybin containing mushrooms that can rewire your brain on purpose to say goodbye to your eating disorder. Anything is worth a shot. So I signed myself up for an at home, undirected, unofficial clinical trial of sorts, led by my sweet husband, almost a doctor in creative writing. And I knew I needed to feel prepared. So I read everything I could about every clinical trial that had been done in the US in the world, on using psychedelics to help people heal from tons of conditions, ptsd, depression, other eating disorders. It's going in my notebook. I'm making a guide. What am I gonna do the night before the day of? Hopefully eat some food. What about after that? And the weeks after that? I also made a guide for my sweet almost doctor in creative writing husband, which was a little bit shorter. It said, please make me food the day that we go on this trip. And also, please make sure I don't fall off a ledge. Thank you so much. And then the night before we go grocery shopping, we grab the big cart. Budget in hand, we walk inside the grocery store. I'm real tempted to make a beeline straight for the frozen pizza section like I do every time when I go to the grocery store alone. But this time we go to the produce section and we walk past some nectarines that smell like trash. But I pick one up, it's in the cart, and suddenly we're picking up a dozen fresh, new to me foods that I've never considered eating before but have always wanted to. Bell peppers, green onions, tofu. Why not avocados? They're all in the cart. They're going home with us. The next morning, I wake up and I feel like it's my birthday. I don't know if this will work, but I believe that it will. I'm nervous, I'm scared. I'm looking through my notes again. Again. Psilocybin creates new neural pathways in the brain. This is what you want to do. You want a new brain? You can do it. Time to get out the coffee grinder. Use it on my three and a half grams of psilocybin. Mushrooms. I'm now a drug experimenter. I'm ready to do this. I grind up the three and a half grams in the coffee grinder. I dump it in a cup, I fill it with water, I spoon it around, I smell it. You might be asking, how is she going to drink mushroom tea? I was also asking that. And so I pace and I delay, and I turn on Carly Rae Jepsen to try to feel a little more pumped up and confident. And I find myself my favorite Swiss Miss hot chocolate mix. And I dump it in the mushroom water. And does it mask the taste? No. But I drink it. I chug it. It's the biggest food exposure therapy of my life. I have to do it. It's in my stomach. The mushrooms are in my stomach. And so I wait. Ten minutes later, I'm on a boat floating in the air, and the horizon is shifting my walls of my kitchen. And the sun is brighter than it's ever been in my living room, looking at the ceiling light. And so I know that it is time to walk over to the couch, put on an eye mask, to close my eyes, and turn on the Johns Hopkins psychedelic therapy Psilocybin Spotify playlist made public for this very moment. And look inside my brain. In the corner, I see this sweet, friendly, scared, fluffy purple monster kindly wearing a name tag for me. Arfit. It's really sweet of him. And I was high at this point, obviously, but not so high that I didn't remember what I was here to do. I remembered from my reading this advice that said, if you see a creature in your brain, an entity, say hello, greet it. See what you can learn from this part of your brain that's here to teach you something. And so I said, okay. Hi. Arfid, right? Yeah. Okay. Nice to meet you. See you. Thank you for keeping me safe, but I don't need you like that anymore. I love you. Goodbye. I push my eye mask onto my forehead. I look at my sweet, almost doctor husband and I say, I'd like that nectarine, please. He grabs my hand. He walks me to the kitchen, sits me on the bench. I'm high. He grabs a nectarine, runs it under the water of the sink, puts it on the counter, gently slices into it with a knife, picks up the piece, walks it back over to me on the bench, puts it in my hands. I'm holding a nectarine and I'm toying with it, like a bag baby learning solids for the first time. It's wet and soft and juicy and it smells like a sweet flower and it tastes like sunshine on a cold day after a wind just passed by. Food can do this. I am stoked. I eat everything I can. A juicy purple plum food, Definitely food, and delicious. A kale salad with lemon juice and goat cheese food. Neutral, maybe. Great. I'm not so sure yet. But it's food. A raw slice of Avocado. I finally understand why my peers can't afford houses. I am eating food. There's this tiny voice in the back of my head every time that says, danielle, are you so sure you want to do this? Are you and your purple, fluffy monster friend Arfid gonna be all right? Can you handle it? Yes, I can. I eat the food, and every time the voice disappears, it's just food. The next day, sober and nervous, my usual state. I don't know if I can keep up the progress. So I go to the freezer. I take out my favorite frozen pizza, put it in the toaster oven. When it's time to eat it, I reflexively start taking off the three pieces of very generous basil the frozen pizza company give us. And I stop myself, and I smell it, and I eat the basil on the pizza for the first time. And it tastes like herby oil harvested for royalty. But it's for me. The next day, I think, maybe I can make it 10% more challenging than what I did yesterday. And I'm licking the bowl clean from my first Caesar salad. By the end of the week, I'm eating raw sushi and pig's feet and trying 10 flavors of hot sauce on literally anything. I can try. I love food. I am alive. The past year and a half, I have been learning how to eat food as an adult. The years in your childhood that you get to experience learning how food interacts with your taste buds and your brain and your body. I get that as an adult now with adult consciousness and adult therapy skills, and that is a real joy. And I'd like to talk to you about oranges. They're like gushers, except good. And have you ever heard of sandwiches? You can put literally anything on a sandwich. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I'm alive. I'm eating for the first time, and I understand what it's like to take in this sense without fear or being terrified. And every moment, I have the ability to try to unite people through food, because it turns out, most of us don't have an easy time with eating. I was born without one sense, my hearing. But when I gained that, I lost another. But now I'm 30, and I eat everything. Thanks.