@Rusticanella
I was like you, relieved when my 16 yo dd ate more - she was 15 when this started. But please be aware this could be lulling you into a false sense of security. 800/900 calories is nowhere near enough and it’s a one off. My dd was eating about 900 calories for a few months whilst doing a lot of exercise. I thought it was a phase and she would recover. Then she reduced to 400/500 calories with once, possibly twice a week a ‘top up’ meal totalling 1200 calories, occasionally up to 1500 and those extra calories would keep her going for a few days so to speak. It was on knife edge. She self imposed a rule of no eating before 8pm. I was doing everything I possibly could, like you, to increase the calorie intake a little. But that’s just sneaking in extra calories and very much leaving the eating disorder in control.
The brain alone needs 500 calories to function correctly. Once a person is eating this little, they body will prioritise vital organs and some parts of the brain don’t need feeding to survive. As Girlie said, your dd has trained her brain to fear food. My dd thought she didn’t need food to live. The body of a teen girl of your dd’s age needs maybe 1500 calories before any movement / exercise so even if sedentary a girl needs more than this. An Active girl would needs maybe 2400 calories, more depending on activity levels. To recover from a ED the body needs extra calories again for the necessary repair work and I have been told the brain takes 5/6 months to recover.
All this to say you are not overreacting and your GP should be putting in an urgent referral to CAHMS. The faster your dd has intervention, the less time she has had to ingrain the way she is currently eating. Getting to the point of 3 meals, 3 snacks was a massive hurdle for dd and we needed to build it up slowly as dd would not cooperate at all with me so we have needed a lot of outside help. Everyone is different on that score and some will take to it easier than others. Consistency is key.
We are on holiday atm. Two days before we went, I put the 3 plus 3 in place. Dd was told the day before that that was the last day she’d be able to eat as she had until then. The following day she was presented with 8 am breakfast and told if she didn’t comply to 3 plus 3, we wouldn’t be going on holiday and we meant it. Dh and I would have cancelled the holiday. We slowly worked up to this point btw, introducing lunch first and upping the calories any way possible. The hurdles for dd were much smaller in the beginning. But the idea is that your dd has to want to do something more than she wants to restrict her eating. So if she wants to go out with a friend, she has to eat a good meal before she goes.
We went out to lunch today and dd knows she has to eat snacks and meals. She now is at a point, where she defers to me. She asked me if she had to eat her croutons because they weren’t nice whereas before she just would have not eaten them and wouldn’t have eaten any carb at all. I said she didn’t have to because she had chips and the bun from my burger (gluten makes me ill) with her salad. But had I said she needed to, she would have eaten them otherwise we’d have had to go straight home. It sounds really controlling but right now dd doesn’t have yet have capacity to make healthy choices.
As for sports, I was also terrified of removing sport. My dd wasn’t depressed. She was subdued as the brain wasn’t being fed, like a different person. We didn’t stop dd from dancing but she was doing her GCSES and it was a difficult time. Had we removed sport, I feared she’d be hospitalised, which for her due to her medical condition and anxiety around all things medical would be catastrophic. We did stop her at half term when she’d sat the bulk of the exams. Dd was shredding weight by this stage. Almost a kilo a week. But it was actually her dance school and I, who jointly decided this so dd couldn’t blame me and she knew I was going to talk to them as it was time.
I was told on this thread that dd was probably doing so well despite when exercising several hours a week and eating such a tiny amount because she is sporty and therefore has or rather had a lot of lean muscle tissue. As she lost weight, she slowly ‘ate’ her way through her muscles. And please remember that the heart is also a muscle. All this to say, we took a risk with dd and she is ok. But it could have been rather different and because she refused all medical obvs we didn’t know her state of health. In the end, she was given two choices at a CAHMS meeting, agree to BP, pulse and oxygen sats or be admitted under the mental health act.