Helping Someone With Anorexia
What should I do if I suspect my daughter or son is anorexic?
Trust your intuition, and trust your gut. Go talk to an eating disorder professional, privately if you need to do that, confidentiality first. However, I would say that do it fairly soon - get that person into treatment.
What shouldn't I do if I suspect my daughter or son is anorexic?
Try to force them to eat ... wrong thing to do! If you want the anorexia to get bigger and uglier and more intense, force feeding them. What you shouldn't do is be in their face about the eating disorder, like really confront them ... "I think you have anorexia! You are lying! What are you doing in your room!" As soon as you become more controlling and more over-powering, the anorexia gets more intense, so your goal needs to be to come from a real compassionate place where you can say, "Hey hon! You know, I'm noticing that no matter how much exercise you do, it just doesn't seem like it's enough, and can you tell me what might be going on for you to where you're feeling that you need to be exercising so much."
What should I do if I suspect my friend is anorexic?
I think the same thing, I think if you have a friend who's anorexic, what you really want to be able to do, if you want to talk to them about a suspicion of an eating disorder with a friend, it's very important to have behaviors that you can describe. So you can say, "you know, when you and I go out for dinner, it seems like you just kind of push the food around on your plate, you don't really seem to eat much. And whatever we're left with,you know I eat my food, but I notice that you hardly eat anything and you always say 'I'm full' when we're done, or 'Oh my gosh I ate too much,'" or, another behavior you might be able to describe is that, you know, we set up a dinner date to go out for dinner and you tell me, oh, you got super hungry and then you ate ahead of time or something, and you end up having a cup of tea with me or something like that. Or, we spent a whole weekend together and I hardly saw you eat. So I'm just kind of worried about you and wondering if you might be struggling with some food issues. I would not say the word 'anorexia,' just say I'm wondering if you might be struggling with some food issues.
What shouldn't I do if I suspect my friend is anorexic?
Don't get in their face about it, because you're going to get denial. So expect denial and what you shouldn't do is be really, really kind of blunt and mean and direct about it, because remember when we're talking about these Anorexics, who are girls who are very conflict-avoided and they're people pleasers; they do not like to disappoint anybody, they hate letting their friends down, and so she'll feel very ashamed and embarrassed and she'll probably become more secretive with you. So you don't want to be too direct, but it's also important if you're dealing with a friend that is a person underage, that it's super important to approach their family members and say, "I'm kind of worried about Jackie because I think that Jackie has been throwing her food away at lunchtime." So if you have a friend in school and you're noticing she's not eating her food and she just seems to be getting thinner, you can go talk to her school counselor, or you could talk to a teacher, or you could talk to that person's parent, because chances are the parents are in that denial place and they're not doing anything.
Can I force my child to get medical treatment if I'm worried about anorexia?
Yes, think about it this way; if your son had an ear infection, are you not going to force them to take that penicillin that they need to take? So for somebody with anorexia, their medicine is food and their medicine is also treatment. So yes you can force them to get treatment even though, I would say at our clinic, probably half of the adolescents we see at my clinic do not want treatment. They typically with an adolescent there's resistance. So they don't want treatment but I tell parents that if your child had a fever, would you say “oh honey, do you think you want to take some Panadol today or do you think you want to wait until tomorrow?” If you child had a fever, you would give them that medicine right away. So if they have anorexia, they need to be in treatment right away. Clearly.
How should I act around a recovering anorexic?
I think that it's very important to be sensitive to the issues of weight with somebody with anorexia. So the eating disorder may not have started from, like body image or weight related issues, but by the time they've had the illness, then they've become pretty preoccupied about their body. So for example, if you have somebody recovering from anorexia and they look like they've gained some weight. The last thing you want to say to them is gosh you look so good, it looks like you've gained some weight. In their mind, they instantly translate that to oh my god I've become a huge buffalo. I have gained so much weight that people are noticing it now. I need to go back and start doing my sit-ups, I need to start exercising. So you don't want to make appearance related comments at all. If you want to say something about how well they look you can say gosh you know it's so nice because I can see the shine back in your hair or wow you've got the twinkle in your eyes or your skin looks beautiful again or something like that, but nothing related to how their body looks.
What can I do to prevent my child from becoming anorexic?
I think that parents have to look at their own body image issues. I'm really big on teaching mothers to honor their own body type and the diversity of body types we all have. The more we reject the dieting mentality, the healthier our daughters become about their self-esteem as it relates to the body. So the biggest prevention we can do, as the adults that are around these young people, is to reject the dieting mentality and just really honor size diversity and balanced eating, and activity that's just fun and enjoyable rather than "I need to burn X number of calories."
How do my eating habits and behavior influence my children?
A ton of my patients will say, "I remember the first time I thought my stomach was sticking out, it's when I saw my mom look at herself in the mirror, pull her stomach in and say, Oh my God, am I getting fat?" You have that little five year old that is observing her mother. If her mother is preoccupied by the facts of her body, and thinks that she's too fat, the child is internalizing that perspective of her mom. As a parent, what you can do to influence your child is for you to have a healthy body image.
What I can do if I suspect my mom has an eating disorder?
Well that would be such an incredibly powerless place to be at, because chances are that if you're suspecting your mom has an eating disorder, that you're picking up on lots of things, the same thing that I said that if you suspect your child has an eating disorder. If you're suspecting your mom has an eating disorder, then what you want to do is you kind of want to take a look at what has been going on in her life for the last few years, and it's very important to be able to sit down and level with her and say, "Mom, these are the behaviours I've seen that make me worry that you may be doing some behaviours that are restrictive behaviours, that you're really not nourishing your body with enough food, and I'm sensing that you may be depriving your body of food." And I would say, just sit down and talk with her in a loving, kind, compassionate, and respectful manner. And, you can say, "And Mom, I may be completely off base, because I'm in this world right now where I'm just seeing all these people with anorexia, and I kind of wondered, because when you were young, you kind of never sat down with us at any meal times, you always seemed to be so busy preparing food for us. Now I'm thinking back and I'm realizing you never really sat down. Even now you don't sit down with us and eat. You just prepare a little something for yourself on a little plate and you just kind of wolf it down and then you're done." So give behaviours, and talk about history, and talk about what you might be seeing.
