Help with my secret eater 😞

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My 10 year old son is regularly taking food and secretly eating it. Unsurprisingly it’s almost exclusively sweets, snacks and biscuits.

This isn’t a case of taking the odd treat when he shouldn’t. This is a long standing, consistent and extreme issue. We are regularly finding stacks of wrappers hidden in various places around the house.

He is a healthy weight (if anything a bit skinny probably because he hardly eats at mealtimes because of this) and has no issues that I am aware of. We’ve tried various approaches but nothing seems to change and I’m at a loss and wondering if it’s a symptoms of a wider underlying issue.

As an aside, we are not especially strict with treats (if anything I think they already have more than they should!) and this isn’t linked to lockdown as has been going on long before. We’ve tried locking cupboards, not having stuff in the house etc but we’re a big family and we’d just like to have a normal approach to food. We’ve tried talking to him about asking - and making sure we say yes as well as no, but the old habit slips back.

Any advice would be hugely appreciated!

That sounds very disconcerting

No personal advice but there is an Instagram account called Kids Eat in Colour who has posts about hoarding and sneaking food and why if it happens, as well as how to combat it

I'm an emotional eater, started in childhood. All I can think of is focusing his emotions and developing the tools to talk about his feelings

On

I understand that you want a ‘normal’ approach to food as a family, however I was similar to your son growing up, and one of the things that I am still cross that my parents did is have cupboards full of biscuits and cakes and sweets. I’m not saying that’s what you have, but it certainly fuelled my eating. I would reconsider having the food in the house.

Could it be boredom that’s causing this for him? Especially at this time.

Thanks that’s all useful advice - I’ll have a good look at that Instagram page.

@needallthesleep do you know why you did it? I think that’s what I’d really like to understand to help reframe more positive behaviours towards food. Is it the sort of thing I should get professional advice on now (before it becomes a bigger issue as he grows up) or is that too extreme? I feel a bit out of my depth with this!

I did this a lot when I was younger. For me, it was the start of years of eating disorders and I wish my parents had realised it for what it was at the time and got me help.

It’s definitely disordered eating, and probably has an emotional root. If you’re able to afford help you could probably do a lot worse than consulting a therapist or even a dietitian who specialises in disordered eating, where are you? I can make some recommendations for the south.

The absolute first step has to be to stop having this junk stuff in the house. Snacks have to be fruit or something else healthy.

At the same time, consider the advice above re counselling - you have to be very sure if there is an emotional issue behind this as opposed to just opportunism and laziness.

I had a problem with sugar at that age, and sometimes got in trouble for taking food that was meant for the whole family and eating it all (not that often but occasionally). It was usually desserts from the freezer. I would eat cheese cake half thawed, or strudel half cooked. It was very weird and disordered, always had an emotional root. I remember really trying not to think about it but having an overwhelming compulsion to eat it.

Even now my only answer to that is to not have those temptations in my house. I only buy the dessert I'm intending on having. So if I want to have trifle I buy and individual serve one not the family size. I don't stick to this on birthdays or Christmas but I do binge eat around my periods or when I'm very stressed. I think for some of us it is just so irresistible. Only one of my children is the same as me, and will literally eat food he likes until either it's all gone or he's sick. He's never seen me do it either, it's just how he was born. He did it right from weaning. Actually I think he even binged his formula milk! My other kids stop when they are full.

I'll add that I do buy treats for my family, but never things that are irresistible to me unless I have the attention of eating the whole thing.
One thing I do more now is freeze the potions I'm not going to eat then. That's helped me because waiting for things to defrost means I have time to find some self control.
But I think I was just born this way. I am a very all or nothing type person, and had to get help for problematic binge drinking (I am not teetotal). I was very addicted to smoking and could never be a social smoker (also quit smoking a number of years ago now). I overdo it with housework, exercise, I binge watch TV very compulsively. I can't put down a good book. I over work. Or I go to the other extreme as my compulsion is elsewhere. I also compulsively shop.
I'm so glad I never got into gambling.
I find moderate people incredibly interesting, because I am just not moderate in anyway.
It feels like it's in my DNA, that it's integral and unchangeable, that I can mitigate the damage but that there is a part of me that needs to binge or overdo it in some way

Could he be greedy because he has lots of siblings and he wants to make sure he 'gets in first' with the good stuff (that was my motivation when I was a greedy kid). If you think this might be part of it, then could every sibling in the family be given a named box of snacks for the week, which is theirs to decide what to do with. Then if he eats his box early or greedily, he misses out?

You need to do a lot of research to find the best way to tackle this, but I don't agree your household has a "normal approach" to the food kept on hand. All that rubbish isn't good for anyone, and it's addictive. It's no wonder he can't keep away from it.

I don't understand this post. Why would you not either stop buying the stuff or ensure it's properly locked away? Much as you'd like to be a "normal family", if it's harming your child you need to make the necessary adjustments. I'm not sure that normal families have so much junk food around all the time anyway - or at least not enough for one of them to be able to leave "stacks of wrappers" around.

I think you should seek out professional help.
Think of it like a physical injury, you would definitely bring him to physio if he sprained/broke something to stop it impacting his life long term.
Also billions of normal families in the world don't routinely have processed snack foods in their homes.
Treats are fine in moderation, but moderation for chocolate, crisps, biscuits etc is not daily unless it's very small portions.
Maybe look at having Friday movie night with treats, Ice Pops after the park or Sunday dessert.
But your while family would be better seeking a sugar hit from a piece of fruit or yoghurt then having readily available processed snacks.

Why do you buy the stuff. You don’t have to be a extreme health fanatic not yo keep junk food in the house. Who needs biscuits/crisps? I only buy stuff that can be used for meals -at what meal would you eat biscuits.

Stop buying it.

Easy,
stop buying junk or at least lock it away with a padlock in your bedroom and you can dole it out when appropriate.
He'll eat all his meals when there's nothing else at all on offer.

If you had a family member who was an alcoholic would you keep a liquor cabinet full because that's what "normal families" do? Your child has a problem. You can help him control the problem by removing the temptation. Notice I said "control" not "solve" because he will have to do that himself through developing self control and self understanding of his motivation. But for now -- get rid of the junk foods. Your whole family will benefit.

Greedy is not an okay word to use with this. It's disordered eating, and maybe compulsive. While locking cupboards can help remove immediate temptation, it doesn't address the underlying issue. Speak to a professional.

Just don't buy junk food. He cannot take it if it's not in the house.

I know lots of posters are saying don't have it in the house but I think denial and limiting foodccan increase obsesiveness about food . Saying that as someone who grew up with wholemeal health food parents. I binge ate at children's parties till I was sick.

I think its good to try and minimise impression about our emotional response to what your children eat both praise and disapproval as this adds to feelings of shame. Agree its worth exploring what is going on for your son. He may just gave a really sweet tooth. There's a good article I think its Sarah OKwell about trying to make all food just food.

As a previous poster said, I am still annoyed at my own parents for having all this stuff in the house. I was an emotional eater, it was dreadful and has taken all of my adult life to get under control.

Don't have it in the house. You seem really against that idea and have rebuffed others who have suggested it, but enough of us are telling you the same thing... maybe think about that?

Swap out crisps for rice cakes or baked crackers, sweets for fresh fruit, yoghurts and the like. Make the only snack options healthy options.

You will be doing that young man a HUGE favour in later life. I wish someone had done the same for me at that age.

OP I could have written your post. Really interesting reading the responses.
In our case it's mainly the lunchbox treats that go missing, or anything the other kids have baked.

Where would we start looking for professional help, as PPs suggested?

Some really useful responses here thank you so much for taking the time. For those who have suggested not having it in the house, when we did that he started taking money to buy snacks on the way home from school. We’ve also put a lock on the cupboard (I’m talking now we only have a couple of packs of biscuits not loads!) but over time he sneakily found out the code and got in to it.

Also I am concerned that a total denial of the snacks causes issues in itself too. I am based in the south west but if any one has any recommendations for where to get help I’d really appreciate it. We could afford luckily to see a counsellor if that is the right approach and I am concerned from some of the replies that there is something deeper psychologically than just being greedy.

To the pp that suggested snacks for the week for each kid - he’d definitely steal his siblings if he ran out I think!

If you are putting locks on the cupboards, you may as well not buy the items and you are therefore making food into a big issue.
Eating disorders in children are very hard to kick (I've had a child with one) and I found that the more we made an issue of the problem, the worst it got.
In the end, what worked for us was to buy or make healthier snacks such as flapjacks, homemade crisps, fruit on skewers, humus and veg sticks.
Getting a child to be involved with making the food, trying new food and taking an interest in what they are eating, honestly makes all the difference.
If your child is only eating sugar fuelled snacks or snacks that don't fill them up, the urge to get a quick "high" from finding more snacks is probably quite overwhelming.