Eating through my daughter

[rachelsroses]

I was desperate for my daughter not to have my disordered eating that I’ve made her overweight by buying her all the things I don’t eat.
I have orthorexia and I buy all my forbidden foods for my daughter and now she is overweight.
I eat a healthy meal while she is at school and make a plate of my forbidden food for her for when she gets home.
I know it sounds ridiculous but I’ve only just realised what I’ve been doing and now I don’t know what to do because I don’t want her to have my restrictive diet but I also don’t know what is normal eating.

Btw my son weighs 7 stone 3 also, is also 10 and is 5 feet tall. That's not overweight.

I have known a few anorexic feeders. I have two friends who do it and also someone at work. I try to avoid too many food situations with my friends. My colleague is a bit relentless with it and it upsets quite a lot of people.

It will be incredibly damaging to your daughter, so you need to stop now. You also need to get help so that you don't start doing it again. Ideally your husband would take over your daughter's meals, but it sounds like he has his own issues.

In your OP you say you eat a healthy meal when she is at school, but later you say you eat nothing mon-wed and then the rest of the week it’s cheese/nuts or a tin of tuna. At what point does the healthy meal come in? I’m not trying to point out contradictions to be mean, I’m just trying to help you see that at no point are you eating a healthy meal.

Please go and see your GP, for both your sake and your daughters. You need specialist help which hopefully will improve the situation with your daughter too. If you carry on this way things will just get worse for you both and could lead to resentment.

Best wishes.

No it’s not overweight at 5 ft or 4’11”. It is at 4’10” and below.

Go and get help OP for your daughter. Breakfast - give her options of porridge/ wholemeal toast and scrambled eggs/ Greek yoghurt and berries.

Lunch - wraps or jacket potatoes
Tea - find 5 normal meals and make them in rotation . Limit crisps , biscuits and sweets

Her weight 'sounds' fine? How can you possibly know that when the only information you've been given is that OP took her to the Dr and she was measured as clinically overweight?

I get you're trying to raise concerns about OP's perceptions but making up stories about her DD's weight is unhelpful.

You don’t need to do anything about your daughter’s weight. Being overweight isn’t actually the emergency Mumsnet pretends it is.

what you do need to do going forward is stop over feeding her, now you’ve recognised it. Do you think you can do that?

I think any help you seek needs to be centred around how you bring your daughter up and the attitude you show her to food.

I don’t mean to be unkind but OP you know recovery rates from EDs are desperately low and yours is very serious and life long.

I fear that trying to deal with it at the same time as solving your attitude to your daughter will just be too much and neither will be successful.

Yes I agree. Chances are the OP has been feeding her quite a lot of junk and she actually is overweight. I get the sense the dad is overweight. 7 stone 3 (46 kilos) is not a common weight for a 10 year old girl unless that 10 year old is particularly tall for her age. Average height for a 10 year old girl is around 4’6” and she’d really be quite overweight if she was 7 stone 3 at that height.

Op exactly how tall is your daughter? At 10 she may be just 4ft or almost 5ft. The variance in year 5/6 is huge.

People are saying seven stone is normal - surely that depends on the exact height- one of my girls at ten was 4ft 0.5 inches (so also over 4ft) - if she had been 7 stone that would have been worrying. She was around 24kg (20th centile) 3stone 10 ish.

You are not being ridiculous - you have a condition that destroys any rational view of eating and your body, and it's your condition that is driving you to overfeed your daughter.

If you are willing and able to, please seek some professional support for your ED so that you can one day have a healthy relationship with your body, as well as have a healthy relationship with your daughter's eating.

You are not a bad mum, your decisions are being made by a horrible disease that takes over any rational thoughts of your own ❤️

(For context, my mum has had/still has anorexia since being a teenager, she always did all of the cooking for us as I think that was her way of eating through us. I developed anorexia also in my teen years, but had help and eventually recovered - it is an incredibly awful condition that isn't always understood by others, and I can absolutely wholeheartedly say that although recovery was really tough at times, I have no regrets whatsoever about recovering from an ED... even though your ED will tell you you don't need tl recover!)

Sending lots of love to you OP xxx

My heart breaks for your poor daughter. This kind of abuse is hidden and insidious. Please, for her sake, get help.

Consider eating as a family, all sitting down together and having the same meal in the evening.

My mother managed not to pass on her eating disorder to me.

It is possible not to. Get help so you don’t.

Agree that you need professional help - please go to your GP as soon as you can. Hopefully you’ll be referred quickly - if not have you got the means to go private?
How old is your DD? Could you describe what meals you’re giving her?

Your whole family has disordered eating.

There are excellent cultural and psychological reasons for sitting down to eat a single home-cooked meal as a family and your goal should be to get your family do this. Obviously it's not going to happen overnight! But since you like rules (orthorexia), maybe you should look into the rules around a balanced diet for a whole family and try to at least think about how you might apply some of those.

You must be painfully thin on this diet which najes ne wonder if your dd is actually overweight. Are you making meals for your dd?

OP you do NOT need to do anything about your daughters weight. Controlling your daughters diet is only going to end up with her repeating this same cycle. All YOU need to do is reach out for help and support from your husband, GP, family member and sort yourself out, thats the best and only thing you need to do for your daughter.

People need to stop discussing the daughters weight and diet on this thread, it is feeding the OPs illness and instead insist OP gets help for her own eating.

She should absolutely stop overfeeding her junk food if she is overweight and give her a healthy balanced diet. She may well be quite overweight depending on height and no, that’s not “nothing to worry about”. She deserves good healthy nourishing food. Not her anorexic mum getting some sort of pleasure watching her wolf down half a tub of Ben and Jerry’s.

Recovery rates are not desperately low.Can we not terrify struggling parents who will be reading this thank you.

Eating disorder recovery rates generally range between 40% to 70%, with full recovery being highly achievable.

We don't even know what OP is feeding her. We know nothing other than the mother is living on a few hundred calories a day, and often goes days with no food at all. She needs help or she will die soon and thats the truth. Noone needs to be discussing the childs weight and diet, it's not helpful for OP.

⬆️ Exactly this. OP, I’m so sorry - you have obviously been suffering and struggling on alone for so long.

This realisation you’ve come to about your daughter will I think one day be a point you look back on with great relief, as the day that everything changed for the better.

Today can be the day you reached out for help. First to the aunties on Mumsnet, and then to real life support which can gently guide you to health and freedom. You don’t have to struggle on your own any more.

There is lots of great advice on how to do that in this thread, so I just want to encourage you and say that you are brave to be so honest and unflinching about recognising your patterns of behaviour. 💪🏼 It takes guts to do that.

And to say that we believe in you! You CAN overcome this. And one day, your story will become part of another Mumsnetter’s survival guide. CORAGGIO. ❤️

As others have said there’s every chance that your daughter isn’t actually overweight. Check on the age/height development chart.

Get yourself help first and foremost .

Almost 5ft is very tall for a 10 year old girl so she may be quite a bit shorter. My tall son was only about that at 11 and he was pretty much the tallest in the class (and grew to 6ft3). Idk how much he weighed but he was slim - def nowhere near 7 stone though. I’ve just looked at a photo of us when he was 11 and he’s nowhere near me (I’m just over 5ft3).

Go to your GP and tell him/her all this -- and if they seem disinterested go to a different one. This could affect your daughter's whole life, like it does yours, if you don't get this sorted out.

But we don't know what the OP is feeding the daughter other than it is not food she allows herself. Given she eats next to nothing, including no normal meals whatsoever, the daughter's diet may not actually be too bad. NB she was weighed for the purpose of ascertaining drug dosage, there is no suggestion that anyone at the surgery was concerned by the weight.

@rachelsroses you need to tell your DH what is going on. For some reason he seems to be blind to the whole situation. His diet doesn't sound nutritious for other reasons. The whole family food dynamic needs a reset.

You eat nothing for 3 days?
Don't you feel faint?

Do you work or do anything outside of the home?

Impossible to believe you do as you must be exhausted with no food for 72 hours.

It also sounds as if your husband has an unhealthy relationship with food too.

I agree you need to contact BEAT, your GP and ask for counselling to overcome this.