Hello everyone. I’m coming here today because my boy has disordered eating, and I don’t know what to do. I know I will sound dramatic, but I’m at my breaking point. I’m desperate for a way to help him that doesn’t make him fall into a deeper pit with relation to food— because I myself have been there. I know firsthand what it’s like. He overeats, he’s one of the biggest kids in his class, his self control when it comes to pastry is bare none. He’s been stressed with school and other kids, but as those troubles went away, the disordered eating stayed. I try my hardest to teach him not to eat the bad things in excess, but this negative reinforcement gets me nowhere. I applaud him for healthy food choices, but he still will choose to eat the fritters I made for our entire family all through the night while everyone else is asleep. I feel like I’m at a loss. I would never want him to know what it’s like to not be allowed to eat something, to have food physically locked away. To feel guilt for enjoying to eat. But I feel as if I’m running out of choices. Baking sweets is something I have always loved doing for my family. To stop doing it, at the expense of our other family members who do ask me to bake as well, seems too unfair a punishment for my failure to teach him a healthier relationship with food. I feel so frustrated. There are good examples of healthy eating all throughout the household. Leftover suppers ready for him to snack on have always been a healthy and delicious variation of vegetables. There’s also eggs, which he knows how to boil. There’s fruit as well, but he’s also quite picky. I don’t want him to be orthorexic. But in this desperation and fear for his health, I feel like I must introduce something to help him expand his palette beyond peas and corn. So that he does not choose fried fish or plain porridge as his only food for an entire day. He ate a variety of foods as toddler, and he does have food allergies as well, but 99.999% of everything in the kitchen is edible for him. I don’t want him to be a child who hates his body later on. When we talk about healthy food, he sucks in his stomach. It breaks my heart. I remind him time and time again that his shape is not the issue— it’s the foods he uses to fuel it. We discuss healthy options. That lesson is forgotten the moment he decides to eat 2/3rds the tub of ice cream in the middle of the night. I encourage exercise and always invite him to work out with me on the Nintendo. And he does. He’s great with active play, and loves the park… with his friends. But this can’t be fixed with physical activity anyways, can it? What could I do? He has other health problems as well. I fear more to come if this gets any worse. He cried the other day because he knew the severity of his allergies. I feel stuck. Any advice on how to approach his dietary habits would be greatly appreciated. Any critiques on my parenting here, anything. I need someone to tell me what to do.
I’m hesitant to introduce him to a program or nutritionist because that became part of my problem when I faced this struggle. I along with those like me at that age, watched each other as our eating became a long term problem while we went from correcting our eating to correcting our bodies. When your mind is in that place, no amount of outside support can fix that. For an otherwise mostly healthy boy, introducing another party solely for this purpose would make him extremely self conscious about it, and it’d only get worse if there were no instant results.