Food Chaining in Feeding Therapy

What do bagels, pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese, and pepperoni have in common?  They are the ingredients for one of my feeding therapy sessions this week!  My sweet patient is beginning to work on food chaining.  His favorite food at the moment is bagel bites (the small, frozen, bagel pizzas you cook in the oven).  So, this week, we will start with building our own bagel bites.  Why are we going to build our own bagel bites?  Because it works on the following skills:

• tolerance of being around non-preferred foods (pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese, and plain bagels)
• tolerance of (hopefully) touching non-preferred foods
• and (hopefully) tasting a (kind of) new food

Now you may ask, why cook him the same food he already eats?  Good question!  While he eats bagel bites, he does not eat bagels, mozzarella cheese, or spaghetti sauce separately.  I hope to chain his preferred food (bagel bites) into some non-preferred foods (bagels with cream cheese, french bread with peanut butter, etc.) to expand his list of preferred foods.  Here is an example:

frozen pizza bagel bites → homemade pizza bagel bites → bagels with butter → bagels with cream cheese → french bread with cream cheese → french bread with peanut butter…and the chain continues

In summary, we can move frozen bagel bites into french bread with peanut butter 🙂

I wish I could take credit for food chaining as a therapy method.  Unfortunately, that is not the case!  If you want to learn more about food chaining, checkout this great book: Food Chaining: The Proven 6-Step Plan to Stop Picky Eating, Solve Feeding Problems, and Expand Your Child’s Diet.

I will let you all know how our session goes later in the week.  Stay tuned!