Are there any hidden' physical clues to anorexia?
Absolutely. "I ate my whole lunch, mom, today." You know, they'll take their lunch to school, but they won't eat any part of it. But when mom asks, "So, honey, did you finish your lunch?" "Of course I ate all my lunch." A lot of defensiveness. There will be a lot of exercise in the room. They'll be exercising in their room. They'll be hiding food. They'll often hide food and sneak it away and not eat the food. When you find the child starting to have a lot of preferences for what they want to eat or they don't want to eat. So, all of a sudden, you know, they may cut out a whole food group. They may just stop eating a certain food group. That's a huge clue. I will often tell family members, it could be spouses, where I'll say, "Gosh, you know, your wife kind of turned vegetarian, are you wondering about why she may have turned vegetarian?" So, when there's a huge, radical shift that occurs with their food preferences, you kind of want to be on the alert for an eating disorder, for anorexia. And also there are physical clues, and the physical clues that we would see would be the hair would be dull and lifeless, or nails would be brittle. They'll suddenly have bruises all over their body, and they'll be taking them to the doctor and the doctor's not able to explain where these bruises are coming from. And those bruises are bruises form malnourishment. And they won't have color to their skin. And so what you'll find is a sudden dull kind of lifelessness to their looks in some ways. But also then you'll notice after a while their energy levels start to drop and they want to not be doing as much, and they'll start to want to sleep a lot or different things like that.
