How the whole Asperger's thing can be Detrimental to your Health

There are a few things about the Asperger's condition which can seriously affect the health of the individuals concerned.

This obviously won't be an exhaustive list, but it's a few things to consider.

Undereating in Children
While it is true to say that no child has ever starved itself willingly with food in easy reach, it is probably also true to say that no Aspie child has eaten healthy food when there are unhealthy alternatives available.

Aspies have a lot of problems with the texture of food as well as the taste. For some reason, the junk food manufacturers seem to have figured out a way of giving their foods fairly good textures since junk foods, such as lollies and ice cream rarely pose a problem to the aspie.

Aspie adults can take responsibility for their own healthy eating habits however aspie children need to be carefully monitored.

The other eating problem that aspie children have is that they seem to be much slower at eating than other children. This is probably a result of their susceptibility to distraction. As a result, aspie children often do not manage to eat their school lunches in time. I am not really sure what you can do to overcome this problem however I remember from my school days that I didn't eat lunch but often had six slices of bread immediately on walking in the door at home. It never seemed to prevent me from eating my dinner.

One last point about eating... Remember that the side-effects of medications such as Ritalin can sometimes worsen the eating problems by suppressing appetite.

Problems of Perfection
While perfection-related problems do affect aspie children (particularly in the later school years), they are far worse in aspie adults.

The problem is that Aspies tend to work on things until they reach a level of perfection that they are comfortable with. This means that they are often working harder and longer hours than their colleagues.

Obviously this can lead to workplace injuries and in particular overuse injury. I have first-hand experience of this because I work in the computing field and do so much keyboarding and mousing that sometimes my arms ache for weeks. Since so many aspies work with computers, it's a common problem.

Ignoring Pain
I plan to do a full post on how aspies can ignore pain so I wont go into a great deal of detail here. What I will say is that ignoring (or being able to ignore) the human body's signals of pain can result in longer term injuries. Sometimes, we aren't even aware that we are blocking pain out. This can be quite dangerous.