AP worries

[Millarkie]

I think our new (been here a couple of weeks) AP isn't eating properly. There is no evidence that she eats breakfast or lunch, she does eat fruit (about 5 apples and a mango - and she requested we bought her a pineapple this week, but that's not touched yet) and a low fat yogurt during the day. I cook for the kids and her in the evening so she is eating then at least, but that meal is vegetarian (because ds is veggie) and she tends to eat a child-sized portion).
Now, she may have stuffed her bedroom to the gunnels with chocolate and cakes or something, but she is always freezing cold.
I have joked before on MN that our house is not warm (generally 19/20 degrees in the living room) but when I get home AP has got the central heating on and the log fire blazing and she is sitting right next to the fire wearing a fleece (and sometimes a scarf!)
I don't want her to be cold but we have gone through an extra £80 of oil in the last 2 weeks plus coal/wood for the fire which we only have on at weekends...and today I have just realised that our little fan heater is missing from the spare room so she must have taken it into her room and is using that too...so our electricity bill is going to be horrendous.

My gut feeling is that I can't do much about the apparent lack of food but I can get dh to do the meter readings now and next weekend, work out how much more power we are using and add it to the oil bill then point out to her that since an AP is a luxury rather than a necessity for us, that if she needs to be at 25 degrees plus all the time that we cannot afford to keep her... and to point out that she needs to eat in order to be warm.

(She isn't skinny but she is slender (but then so was I at 19) and it is not her first time away from home for any length of time).

Oh, heck, not sure what to do, want to treat her as an adult but I am worried that she will pass out when looking after the kids or something.

I have had two Scandinavians and both of them told me that houses are heated to much higher level in Sweden/Finland. The Swedish one didn't mind about it - she just threw a jumper on and got on with life. The Finnish one got very upset about it, and very miserable about the 'dampness' of the british weather. Finish one also could not fathom why English people would want to live in draughty old houses when they could tear them down and put up nice concrete houses instead....

Food - I would leave it TBH unless she turns skeletal. If she IS anerexic, then nothing you yourself do is likely to change it.

I nannied for a russian family and they heated there house to a much higher level, usually around 24/25C which I found unbearable, was nannying in mid winter in T-shirts! With tons of extra layers to put on for outings, so maybe something like that.

The food diary is a flag for me. I have a little experience with eating disorders and the recording and control of everything the person eats is quite common, as it allows someone to exercise off the calories or find some other way to counteract anything they don't think fits their "allowance".

For example, an anorexic girl I once knew ate 3000 calories a day but worked as an aerobics instructor and knew full well she was burning off far more than that in a 10 hour day at work. She had a chart with the hours of exercise she did and food consumed, and so on, to reassure herself that she was still in control of her weight.

I'm not trying to scare you but it does sound like this girl has a problem even if she's not visibly skeletal.

It's a good thing that she's eating the normal, balanced meal you cook for your children albeit in smaller portions. Maybe you could discuss body image in general (how the media portays women is always a good start! I never fail to be amazed that people consider Kate Winslet "on the heavy side"!) and find out whether she feels generally positive about herself. Doesn't sound like she's a flashy dresser under all those layers of fleece! Could she be coccooning herself in order to conceal her body?

At the end of the day it is a very tricky situation as the last thing anyone with an eating disorder wants is intervention, but support and someone to confide in will be very welcome. On the other hand I sympathise that this is a lot of responsibility to have towards a virtual stranger. Especially one who is technically an adult and employed to do a job rather than be a burden. Burden sounds harsh because she'd just a young girl but that's the balancing act involved with APs isn't it? sigh
It's also a right royal pain in the arse that she's using up all your oil and electricity... I'd say see how things go, only you can judge really whether it's worth your time and effort to work through what might not even be a problem! I'd definitely have a word about the added expense of heating though, because maybe she's just indulging herself when she could make do. I just bought myself slippers and made sure I did all my work in jumpers when my eco friendly boss turned off the heating during the day...