Is it possible that my 7.5yo DS has an eating disorder?

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I've been at the end of my tether (it seems like forever) with my DS. Whenever I mention it to his paediatrician he says that as long as he is healthy (which he is) then not to worry too much about it.

These are my problems:-

1. When we sit down to eat he immediately starts drinking water, he completely fills himself up with water and then only eats a few mouthfuls before declaring himself full. I have tried saying no drinks til the end or just a few sips but somehow he manages to have enough water to make himself full. And if he is genuinely thirsty what can I do to deny him a drink?

1. He will regularly come home from school (we live abroad where we have two 'snack' breaks rather than a proper lunch hour) having eaten two cherry tomatoes or 2 carrots. His packed lunch will otherwise be intact and he won't eat when we get home. :(

1. He is NEVER hungry. He is so thin and it's the first thing anyone says to him (i.e me!)

1. A new thing which has started this week is gagging when he is eating. 2 or 3 times I have heard him gagging and I've run to see if he's choking and he says something (like a stringy part of cheese) has gone down his throat so he had to gag. I don't know, I just feel like this is part of something that is going to get worse :(

1. Every single meal time is a huge drama, I feel he is using it to get attention. I really, really try not to make issues about eating, to talk about it excessively etc, but it's so frustrating having spent hours cooking and getting everything on the table and he just picks at everything. I am not joking when I say he will sit and eat one grain of rice at a time until I am just driven round the bend!!!

1. If by chance he does have a good proper meal, he'll lift up his tshirt (skin and bone!!) and say look how fat my tummy is. I don't know where he gets this from, both DH and I love our food and eat well, healthily, the odd takeaway etc - we don't make a big deal of our weight or anything.

I just never feel like he has had a good meal or has enough to last him for the day. he is SO SO active so is always burning more than he is taking in - I just would love him to come running in one day and say 'mum i'm starving, ooh is that spaghetti bolognese, my favourite!' and scoff it all down.

Does anyone have any tips?
Sorry for the long post. :(

Much of this is similar to ds1.

He had undiagnosed tongue tie until I figured it out when he was almost 6yo.

It caused him problems with chewing and swallowing. He refused pretty much everything unless it was soft or sloppy. He gagged on certain foods, stringy stuff like sweet potato for example because he did not have full control of it moving around his mouth.

He drank loads of liquid. I later realised when he was able to verbalise burning in his chest and being sick in his mouth a lot that he was drinking to relieve the burning.

His stomach WAS huge after eating anything that needed a lot of chewing because he was swallowing down air when he ate. I remember him having a distended stomach as a baby after feeding, but I had no idea why. When he started doing swimming lessons, he was conscious that his tummy was bigger than most of the other kids' and he wore a rash vest in the pool to cover it.

He would take a few bites then say he was full. He was full. Full of air, not food.

Meal times etc would have been a drama if I had not let him eat the things he was happy to have. He was really good at trying new things and often, he would put it in his mouth and say mmmm, but then when he tried to chew and swallow it, he would then say he didn't like it.

You mention that your ds has an unrelated health problem. Tongue ties can and do cause all sorts of problems that you would never believe were related, such as ENT problems, sleep problems, orthodontic problems, mouth breathing to name a few. Obviously I have no idea what your ds's other problem is, but mine had a whole host of things going on. It really affected his overall health and his whole body. There are pictures of his ties and high palate on my profile.

How did milk feeding and weaning go?

The body can go into shutdown mode if they get too used to being hungry and once hunger becomes their friend there is a dangerous downward spiral.

I really agree with this. The less my ds eats, the smaller his appetite gets and so on... I am grateful for school holidays when I can break that cycle a bit.

OP, with your ds, it doesn't sound like eats little and often either. The banana cake is no surprise if he doesn't like cake!!! Why can't he help cook things he does like? Someone suggested to me watching Masterchef and I thought it was a great idea. We did watch Junior Bake Off and GBB and he did get really into the idea of baking from that.

Mawbroon sorry you went through that, it must have been very hard for both of you. It makes me quite upset when children have problems for years that go undiagnosed. What are the doctors doing, I mean really?

You're not wrong unrealhousewife it was a terrible time and made me very ill.

Nobody was looking at the whole picture. It was one consultant for gastric stuff, another for ENT stuff, a dietician, audiology, another consultant for allergies and so on.

I found HCPs who were clued up on this and thanks to them, all of his problems are now resolved.

He has recently been diagnosed with Vit D deficiency after suffering from joint pain, but since starting supplements for this has been fine, he had a lot of blood tests to get to that so I don't think he has any allergies as they tested for Celiac etc. Though sunlight intake is part of this I'm sure that not eating a lot doesn't help which makes me feel awful.

Milk feeding by bottle was fine but he refused to BF after 4 weeks after I introduced a bottle to express. He loved milk so much it was very, very difficult to wean him off it and he was still drinking far too much milk when he should have been eating. His Dr called him a 'milk baby'.

I wonder if it's all related. Very interesting about your DS MawBroon.
Thanks x

Sorry, and also awful for you - thank you for sharing x

What does he do when he leaves that table ?

My 8 yr old is a terrible eater - she just doesn't seem hungry. What I eventually realised was that she isnt interested. She just values play over food.

She wasn't eating her lunch at school as she wanted to play.

Same with dinner - she would take 2 mouthfuls, declare herself full and then run off to play.
Then at bedtime when she lay down and closed her eyes she would realise she was actually starving.

She now must sit at the table till everyone is finished - she gets a sticker for sitting nice. NOT for eating for sitting.
School say she must sit for 15 minutes so she is eating .

She is now eating better - for the first 5 mins of a meal she is talking constantly - it goes against everything but we don't respond (just hmmm or yes). She then gives up talking and starts eating - I eat so slowly deliberately to give her as much time as possible my dinner ends up cold but she will sit till I finish.

She also eats her cereal at breakfast (without milk) in front of the tv. It's funny to watch her - she is doing it completely on autopilot.

I might be way off the mark here but it's worked for my dd.

She also has a vitamin tablet before bed while I read her story - she brushes her teeth after that.

We had a situation where the speech and language therapist was saying mouth exercises were physio department, the physio saying it was OT etc. when there's a 6 month waiting list for each...

If I could sue the NHS for buck passing I would be a very rich woman.

DS1 was anaemic. I am guessing that his poor diet couple with poor gut health meant he was either not getting enough iron, or not being able to absorb the iron well, or perhaps a bit of both.

He had joint pains too, and pins and needles a lot too. I realised that he was having bouts of sleep apnoea and that joint pain and pins and needles were from lack of oxygen. The apnoea stopped when his mouth grew rapidly to accommodate his adult teeth thankfully.

DS1 was a milk monster too. I was lucky that although he was not an efficient breastfeeder, he hadn't shredded my nipples like I so often hear about from mothers of other tied kids. I think had it not been for his love of milk and breastfeeding then he too would have become underweight.

Interesting that your ds refused the breast in favour of a bottle. Milk flows much more easily from a bottle and is less exhausting for a baby who is not transferring milk efficiently from the breast.

Yes I was totally shredded for the first week or two, I bled a lot. With no midwives here or health visitors etc I didn't know what was normal and what wasn't.

Very, very insightful MawBroon, I'm going to get that checked out. thank you. x

Yes, leave no stone unturned!

Please believe me when I say that there is a huge amount of ignorance amongst HCPs regarding tongue tie and associated issues.

I don't know which country you are in, but there are a couple of facebook groups for tongue tie support. There is a UK and Ireland one, but there is another which seems to have members from all over the world.

I would suggest you have a look/read of it and ask where you would need to go to find an expert in your part of the world.