It’s rare that I’m asked to research a topic then discover I’m not comfortable producing a thirty minute podcast on my findings. The gender movement is one such topic; it’s too political and I risk too much by wading in on the subject. The other is eating disorders. Why? An eating disorder is a mental illness that even professionals struggle to manage.
Whilst it can develop rapidly, realising there’s a problem can take time. You see it’s a sneaky, stealth bomb. Eating disorders creep into our lives beneath baggy clothes, in the words of kids who say they’ve already eaten, the missing space at the table after your teen left to go to the loo, the snappy, ‘get off my back!’ that’s so, well, teenagerish. I’ve recently supported a friend through the horror maze of trying to figure out what to do and where to get treatment. Even from the sidelines it’s a confusing, stressful minefield.
To begin with, parents and schools worry that they might be overreacting and that they’ll make things worse. Schools often have ‘spies’ who monitor the amount of food being eaten and report back. They ask kids to fill in food diaries, then they worry that they’re underreacting and not doing enough.
Once you know there’s a problem there’s no clear idea of the best way to deal with it. Smoking, drugs, alcohol and porn are difficult to tackle, but at least they're all 'optional'. Food isn't. We have to eat so if they're not eating or they're eating and purging then what? What do you say to a doctor? My child has stopped eating. They feel sick whenever they eat... This is the territory of frantic Google searches and endless sleepless nights. Many parents hope that with time, love, and the right words or food, things will somehow right themselves. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they go downhill rapidly.
If a full-blown eating disorder sets in schools are supportive and will do everything they can to accommodate the child but in truth there’s a limit. As a parent you can feel utterly lost, floundering around for answers, battling a massive guilt-complex, trying to get help. Every time it comes up on Twitter I’ve seen the charity, Beat www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk mentioned. That’s why I called them for an interview and it’s where I would start, now I know what I know. I've been told that https://www.feast-ed.org/ is also great for support, and there's a Facebook group called Eating Disorder Family Support, that's also a welcome port in the storm.
I’m not going to write a detailed account here of my close friend’s experience, but she tried frantically to get treatment and what was on offer was minimal. Without the scaffolding her family so desperately needed things deteriorated and they were eventually told her daughter was too ill for help, so she ended up in hospital on a feeding tube. Twice!
Another parent with a bulimic teen who's absolutely desperate tells me she’s been told her child isn’t ill enough for help. You see what a mind-game this is?
So often, when people talk about eating disorders, they want to know why it happened. I'm going to start right here by saying that having an idea of why it happened won't fix it, and I'd argue that shame and pointy fingers are one of the reasons parents who're struggling to get help feel so isolated. In truth, our society is culpable. The pressure on people to perform to a competitive standard, to look a certain way, and eat a certain way in the face of so much marketing that says the opposite, is the backcloth that brings to life the main performers in this play.
That said, from the general research I've beein doing for this podcast, I'd say that coping with the changes of puberty and suddenly becoming acutely aware of the world’s expectations, can be all the trigger some people need. The shift from a small, gentle environment to one where the oldest kids are literally adults can feel very Hunger Games.
For me the smoking gun was my ‘best friend’ whom I hadn’t seen for a while. I’d already been through a bereavement and was dealing with trying to fit into a senior school, having moved just after the Easter holidays. Everyone at school seemed to know each other and I was the weird outsider. As I undressed my friend gleefully remarked that she used to be the fat one, but now that was me.
When I recount the story people gasp, but I was genuinely grateful at the time. Diet culture was strong in my world. My family all struggled with their weight and I didn’t want to go down that path. I have always been highly competitive so I looked at them and thought, you're rubbish at dieting. I'll show you how it's actually done. I stopped eating most things and ended up with teachers asking girls to report back on what I’d eaten. In truth, whilst I made an effort to starve myself, I ended up with disordered eating rather than an eating disorder. It still comes back when things become too stressful, but I consider myself very lucky that it’s never developed into a mental illness.
The thing is, when you’re living in a society that has an obsession with being thin whilst constantly being marketed ultra processed, high calorie food, it’s hardly surprising that so many people end up with disordered eating. It’s so toxic that my father responded to my stick thinness by saying, ‘I wish I had that problem’.
We talked about helping your child develop healthy eating without giving them an eating disorder in the second part of this episode, and the answer is definitely encouraging mindful eating:
It turns out that if one of your close relations has an eating disorder then you are more likely to develop one yourself so it’s not surprising that one of my children ended up struggling with her eating too. She moved from a cosy, tiny school to a vast place where a lot of the kids already knew each other. They were using phones and social media as a crutch, hyping up all their social contacts. They considered her an irrelevance. It wasn’t helped by the fact that they were wearing masks and being told they needed to be careful not to get Covid otherwise they’d be sent home, or worse. She didn’t stand a chance. Looking back, all the girls say that first year was awful. The first year of senior school is mostly awful for most kids.
I zoned in on the issue quickly because I was hyper-aware of the condition. I’d talked to my kids about the dangers of anorexia when they were younger. They knew the story of Carol Carpenter, yet still the food control set in. She says the best thing I did was to ask her how she was feeling and give her the chance to talk about it, but also that I threatened to remove her freedoms. I warned that she would be weighed daily and I would keep her at home. She didn’t like that. It worked with her, but it might not have done.
It’s only in the last few days that she’s finally felt ready to tell me that her key trigger was that she’d mentioned she’d like to model (her older sister has done a bit). According to her my dumb answer was, ‘you’ll never be skinny enough to be a model.’ I find it hard to believe I would have phrased it like that. If I did, I deserve every waking hour of worry that I got; particularly since I was conscious of anorexia and body issues. There’s no point denying what I said but what I meant was that it’s a nasty, abusive industry and I wouldn’t want you to be thin enough to model because your body isn’t naturally built that way. Hey ho.
I’m only writing about this because I want you to know that we all say stupid, damaging things. Who knows what I was doing at the moment she asked? Was I distracted by something? Maybe I panicked. I don’t remember. The most important thing is that we give our kids the chance to talk about the things that damage them and accept and apologise when we’ve made a massive balls-up.
In my defence, the experts say it’s not helpful to scratch in the sand to find reasons. Hadley Freeman, in her book Good Girls, is very good at explaining how good girls – and sometimes boys too – are conditioned to do things to please others. For some, there is a bomb waiting to go off. It doesn’t have to be something specific that acts as a trigger; anything can light the fuse.
My top tips? Call Beat, https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/ or any other charity that deals with this, and get some advice from people who understand the spaghetti tangle of issues involved.
Don’t focus on the food, or your loved-one’s body; focus on the wounded person inside. They’re struggling with something. They may not even know what it is. They may know but find it almost impossible to tell you because they feel so much shame, or conflicted because maybe it’s something you’ve said and they worry it will wound your relationship.
If they’re a teenager they may be feeling that they’re not normal, that things are too difficult, they’re out of control, and life is too much. For them, the only way they can contain those difficult feelings is to abuse their body using food as the weapon. Focusing on one specific issue can shrink their world and provide a hyper-focus whilst everything around them is far too noisy.
Being a teenager sucks, and anything we can do to give them a safe space where they don’t feel judged and they can air their fears without shame is going to help them to progress. Most of all, know that recovery is a marathon, not a sprint. That people do recover, and that the sooner you realise something is wrong and do something to help them, the more chance of a recovery.
