Austin Davis, a 20-year-old man from Keystone Heights, Florida, claims to eaten almost nothing but macaroni and cheese for the last 17 years of his life.

We’ve featured picky eaters before, people who only enjoyed things like pizza or french fries, but Austin Davis isn’t one such person. Even if he tries eating something other than macaroni and cheese, and actually enjoys it, his body will immediately reject it and he’ll start to gag. Doctors say he is suffering from a psychological condition known as avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, where new foods trigger negative physical side-effects. This condition is often linked to traumatic events, and Davis was indeed diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and removed from his home, after being physically abused by his father. This has negatively impacted his social life as well as his eating habits, but he wants to change.

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It isn’t exactly food fit for a queen, but it’s good enough for 33-year-old Claire Simmons. Claire loves cheese and tomato pizza so much that she’s been eating nothing else for 31 years. Which means she’s been eating the stuff since she was about 2 years old. That does sound too young to be eating pizza in the first place. But it’s not that she doesn’t want to eat anything else, it’s just that she can’t. She shudders at the mere mention of other food and will gag if she puts anything else other than plain pizza in her mouth.

What Claire suffers from is actually known as Selective Eating Disorder. Experts say she’s on the road to killing herself with her diet. But she disagrees. According to Claire, she keeps herself healthy by drinking plenty of water and getting lots of exercise. This doesn’t convince her GP however, who says that if she keeps this up, the lack of vitamins and minerals will lead to huge problems in the future, such as a stroke or heart attack. Claire can’t help it though, given that she’s terrified of eating fruits and vegetables. “I get so angry when people think I’m being faddy – this is a real medical condition,” she says. She does seem to have made it through 31 years on just pizza, and is still going strong. I wonder how she isn’t sick of the stuff, though.

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