Support thread (8)for parents of young people with an eating disorder

[myrtleWilson]

Welcome to anyone who is a parent/carer of a young person who has (or suspects may have) an eating disorder.

We're experts by experience and will share our insight - but obviously we're not medically endorsed, we celebrate all our small wins and provide a space for relief from the intensity of supporting a young person whether pre teen, teen or young adult with any eating disorder

Can I ask how you hide calories and fats?

DD is home now and is only eating the mealplan. Breakfast is cornflakes with semi skimmed milk. The snacks are things she picked off a list provided by the ED team (all pre-packed stuff like protein bars, yoghurts etc - nothing home made). Lunch is based around a sandwich so I try to sneak some extra butter in there. Dinner is a hot dinner based in carbs/veg/protein but she will not allow anything in any kind of sauce. Fish is steamed, spuds are boiled and steamed veg.

Just wondered if I am missing a trick to hide something with that sort of cooking. Was so much easier when she would eat stews etc.

Thanks.

Curly, double cream mixed with her cereal milk and maybe a spoon of ground almonds in the cornflakes. Real butter instead of marg etc in her sandwich and maybe thick sliced bread if you can get away with it. You could stir double cream into her yogurt if you can open it before she comes to the table or pretend you're opening it for her as she sits down.

Dinner is more difficult. You could fill a little spray bottle with olive oil to spritz over the food, I often spritz loads under her food. Would she perhaps agree to some gravy in a cup so she can control how much she has and you could add butter to that.

It's really difficult if she's not eating sauces, soups etc. Does she drink tea or coffee as you could get double cream in that?

If she likes bolognese (usually) you can say you're making it with mince & tinned tomatoes but you can get a lot of unsalted butter into it without it being noticeable.

If you can persuade her to have mash instead of boiled potatoes you can get better in.

Whatever you do you have to make sure she never catches you and don't add too much that she becomes suspicious. Build it up slowly. I decant the double cream in an old full fat 1 pint bottle in the fridge for 'my coffee' and tell dd the butter and almonds are for baking.

I detest the sneakiness but it's essential. Their brains need fat.

Hope Nan and DD are ok

@NanFlanders I hope your DD is safe. Mine ran off, 15 minute window of opportunity and disappeared at night for hours. We found her using her friends Snapchat which locates DD’s movements. We involved the Police who weren’t that interested, a lot of teenage girls abscond they said - I explained our DD has a serious mental illness but that did not escalate matters, only the amount of time absent is their concern.

I hope you find her safe and well.

Thanks all regards to the assurance re privacy, control and rules - and yes it was an ill informed school counsellor who raised this (we didn’t know DD was seeing one at school).

@NanFlanders so sorry to hear about your DD. I hope she has turned up now? How worrying, I would be going out of my mind.
@Curlyhairedassasin that meal plan sounds very restrictive. Is semi skimmed milk really specified on the plan? I would immediately swap that for FF, decant ff into a ss bottle if necc. Grad increase the amount of cornflakes. That breakfast sounds extremely small tbh.
What is served with her sandwich? What is in the sandwich?. I agree with PP. Thick bread. Masses of butter. Cal dense fillings (peanut butter etc). Does she have crisps with it? If so decant from a big bag and provide more than the portion of a smaller bag. Or serve with a handful of nuts and raisins. Drink of milk with it. Ff yog not low fat.
Also does the plan specific steamed fish, pots and veg everyday? If so it is not a great meal plan!
I am afraid you will have to challenge her to eat more variety of foods and pretty soon. Get the Ed team on board here. If the plan has a list of suggested dinners for instance and she is only eating one of them they need to explain that more variety is needed.
@Nomoreplease23 pls don't beat yourself up. As a parent of a DC with AN controlling is part of treatment. It is not your DD you don't trust but the ED. Don't judge this against a usual teen/ mum relationship. It isn't.
When my DD had AN a had a spy app on her phone. I followed her around 24/7 and she wasn't allowed out alone (she would run laps of our village).
Our relationship is brilliant now she is recovered. Totally back to normal.

I was also going to say that @Curlyhairedassasin DD had to have full fat milk.

@NanFlanders any news?

@Lottsbiffandsmudge @NCTDN

The meal plan isn't great but it's what the hospital discharged us with and yes, it specifies semi skimmed for breakfast and supper. I will get FF and just decant it into the green bottle I think.

I buy the thick bread but if too much butter, she will try to wipe it off. The filling is usually a boiled & mashed up egg. She is refusing (was also in hospital) FF yoghurt as pudding so they settled in a bigger pot with a lower fat amount. Hospital introduced the 'steamed fish without any butter and some boiled potatoes and some sad steamed veg' as she refused there anything else and now that we are home we seem to be stuck on that stuff. I boiled the spud and veg today in water with a big chunk of unsalted butter added to it. I hope the potatoes and veg suck some of it up in the boiling process.

Dinner says carb/veg/protein btw.

We have a few meetings with the ED team and the dietician next week so need to have a chat. She is clinging to the (very restrictive) mealplan like a safety blanket. In a way I am happy that she is eating (I guess we are managing in the 2000 cal ballpark - DD is 12). I think she needs more esp when she goes back to school but for now she is at home. She gets way too little fat right now. Carbs are probably not that bad in terms of qty.

Thinking of you, Nan. Hope you are all reunited by now.

Curly that meal plan is ridiculous and says a lot about how poorly understood anorexia is, I personally would rip it up and write your own one and manage the mass hysteria from your dd.

She will have to go through the pain barrier at some point and the longer you follow a very restrictive meal plan the longer her recovery will take.

Breakfast needs to be porridge with double cream with a homemade smoothie also made with cream.

Snacks should be home made cakes, flapjacks or toast with jam or peanut butter.

If she eats egg in a sandwich mix it with mayonnaise, use thick sliced bread, melt the butter on so she can't scrape it off.

I'd make dinners she liked pre ED and stand firm on her eating them also add in a desert.

The current meal plan wouldn't be enough for a toddler let alone a child who needs a massive amount of fat and calories to recover.

Nan I really hope your dd has turned up and you're okay.

thanks girlie, I never liked the plan and thought it was nowhere near enough esp with next to no fat. Will start to step things up from tomorrow.

Would you e.g. sneak FF milk in (via the green bottle) or be transparent. I am not sure what is better at that stage.

@NanFlanders I hope that your DD is back with you safely. If not the Police may be able to ‘ping’ your DD’s phone for a location, as mentioned above then her friends on Snapchat may be able to locate her as well - I believe it is a feature of the app.

Regards the meal plan, DD’s was four weetabix and 200ml milk plus a glass of apple juice, kind bar for snack with 200ml milk. Hot meal and dessert for lunch including juice. Snack was a chocolate bar and juice, hot evening meal and dessert plus a juice drink and supper was a snack plus a glass of milk. It was really hard but once we established this the weight went on. There was a great deal of distress but she did it and looking back I am so proud of her tolerating the anguish.

We had lots of broken plates, cutlery thrown, DH was kicked and pushed about and DD tried to climb out of windows - we pushed through this with her and slowly things improved. IMO there is no compromise, otherwise we would be enabling the ED and recovery may not have happened. Be prepared, it is so bloody hard.

We could not have done it without the support and advice from this thread - the professionals don’t live it so they have no real life experience.

I'm the early days I'd decant the milk and cream into the semi skimmed carton however pretty quickly I stopped doing that and just forbid dd to enter the kitchen or open the fridge door!! That made life so much easier in terms of being able to add fats.

I also kept her out of the way when bringing shopping home.

Once she was a bit better she could see all the double cream going into the kitchen but she never commented on it 🤷‍♀️

Hi all. Still missing. Police have been amazing - have 2 people on it and have found some images of her on CCTV, the rail companies are all looking out for her, as are all the cabbies and shops in Liverpool. Friends of ours have been scouring the streets. She has texted that she is well and not on the streets, but we're worried that she won't be eating and drinking. She had a great time at the Coldplay concert last night, but things went downhill when I tried to get her to drink a glass of water.

I agree with girlie that this meal plan they left you with is wholly inadequate. Not all calories are equal. Animal fats (red meat esp) and diary are key. I cannot get my head round why a meal plan for an ED sufferer would ever specify ss milk. Even for normal 12 year olds ff milk is normal!
I'd also agree that you will have to go through the pain at some point with all these changes and so it may as well all be at once.....
Can you speak to the dietician ahead of your meeting and check out what she is going to say. Explain that you want support with radically upping cals and including g more fat and animal protein.
Tbh a lot of this sounds like them rushing to get her discharged. It's great she is home but it doesn't seem like they had any of the battles on your behalf whilst the 'threat' of ng feeding was there. At the least I think they should have stuck to their guns with ff yog and got red meat established. Now you will have to have those battles. It makes my blood boil on your behalf. They gave in to the ED. And they are professionals. The ED inly gets stronger when that happens.
In order to gain weight my 12 year old had to eat 3500 cals a day. Doing that without ff everything and red meat would meant a volume of food that would have been for too difficult for her to cope with. Cal dense and fat rich foods are therefore very important.
I hope you now get better support from the dietician and a decent meal plan.

Sorry I just quoted myself by accident!!!!

Oh Nan you must be so stressed, I'm glad the police are being good, is it worth putting anything on social media (disclaimer I've no idea if this is advisable or not.)

I really hope they find her soon.

@NanFlanders Thinking of you. Hope you find her very soon. I’m glad you’ve at least heard from her.

@NanFlanders so sorry she is still missing but glad she has been in touch. Hope she is found soon. Such a worrying situation for you. Virtual hugs.

@Girliefriendlikespuppies. The police has put it out on social media and we and all our friends have shared. It's getting a lot of traction. Good news is that she's been in touch. She says she's safe and just wants some space. She also says she's not out in the dark and she has been using Snapchat so she must be somewhere with WiFi. Hoping a B&B. We've been trying to persuade her to contact the police and gave them her reference number, and she seems to be thinking about it.

Fingers crossed they find her very soon.

I've just realised that I shared a post earlier about a missing girl who I presume is your dd Nan x

@NCTDN If she's 17 and disappeared from Aigburth, it probably was! Thanks for sharing.

@NanFlanders glad your DD has been in contact, that’s positive. Hope that she is home safe soon.

Thinking of you Nan and I hope your girl is back with you very soon.

@Lottsbiffandsmudge Thank you. What would I do without this thread???
A lot of you made sense. She negotiated her way to low fat milk/yoghurt etc in hospital, managed to order butterless plain food every night... I will arrange a call with the dietician before we go in to see her.

I am so sorry Nan. You must go out of your mind. I hope she is back soon.

@NanFlanders I'm so sorry your DD is out and about. Such a shame after working so hard for her leave.

@Curlyhairedassasin that meal plan is a disaster. Savoury pancakes might work? They seem relatively thin and if you put them with something like smoked salmon, they'll look healthy. Then you can add double cream to the batter and swap duck egg for hens egg.

By the way, in her sandwiches, duck egg is almost double the calories of hens egg and has more fat, so that would be an easy swap.