@unbuckle
So the history is dd dropped lunch at the start of year 11 and slowly reduced. She’d gone vegetarian by the end of October 2023. Then March 2024 she basically all but stopped eating for a fortnight. This was GCSE year. Then came the Easter holidays. Her friends rallied and took her to dinner on a sort of rota or to the cinema as she would also eat there. This was all before we got help.
After Easter, the HOY helped me to get her to eat a sandwich on school days… Although she later admitted to only eating one of the 2 and not the crusts. Once a week or so she went to the cinema and took ‘treat’ food. Doritos and sour cream and chive dip.
I got CAMHS involved and took her there in half term so still during exams period. They didn’t really give any advice. The day after she finished her GCSEs, so mid June 2024, we took her to see the ED coach. Dd at this stage was eating the same thing every day and now that school had ended the rule returned to nothing before 8pm. The coach told me to monitor her intake and slowly increase it by an imperceptible amount every day. This worked wonders and her calorie intake slowly rose. After a couple of weeks maybe, she told me dd had to be kept at home if she didn’t eat any lunch. As dd was eating more calories (maybe 700 in the one meal), she was a tiny bit more amenable and complied.
After another few weeks of slow intake increase, the coach got me to try getting dd to eat breakfast. Rule being no going out until she’d eaten that. And dd struggled, breakfast was ridiculously late, often 12pm as dd procrastinated. We then had a session 3 days before going on holiday at the start of August. The coach said that we should put our holiday on the line and if dd would not agree to eat like this then we were cancelling the holiday and mean it. We agreed a meal plan with the foods dd would eat and I made a spreadsheet from that. The next day I collected her from a friend’s house and as I was bringing her home, I made a call with dh and we talked with her about it. She was fuming, screwed up the meal plan. I was absolutely scared witless and decided the best course of action was to go and see the friend we were taking to break the news we weren’t going away. Dd kept on asking where we were going. About 2 miles away the penny dropped and a mile later she agreed to the terms. And that’s how we got onto 3 meals, 3 snacks.
As for how we kept her there, that’s been tough. It’s involved her trying to climb out of windows, running off in the night, her calling the police on us and lots and lots of love and giving from me and lots of anger and hatred from her… interspersed with love.
Dh hates any kind of confrontation and it’s all on me to be strict. And it’s hard to maintain that level with an almost adult. So things are tend to get too lax and that’s how relapses happen. But actually these need to happen as I said upthread so that dd can learn because she staunchly independent. We grounded her for almost a week when she was at the brink of relapse a few weeks ago. Her attitude stank. She’s upping the anti again and I can feel it’s time to rein it all in again. I’ve just had some minor surgery and that hasn’t helped.
She now thinks she’s going to live away at university in September and it increasingly looks unrealistic. She can’t even prioritise feeding herself over doing her makeup.
As for how to get dd to eat, the key has to been firstly to only serve her food she will eat so in the beginning that was the same food every day. Breakfast 2 long life croissants (later added an apple), snack pack Belvita (later added fruit then added a slice of cheese as well - trying to front load the day), lunch egg sandwich and crisps, snack Belvita, dinner carrot sticks and houmous (later added pizza), evening snack her choice as she is able to do this. She is currently eating a bit more flexibly than this and dinner is a choice of 3 meals now. But over a year on breakfast, morning snack and lunch remain the same.
When she’s fallen asleep in the evening, we wake her up, hand her a pack of Belvita and keep waking her up until she eats snack. She complies because we have used carrot and stick. So if she wants something (eg she went away for a couple of nights with friends in the summer), we agree on condition that she does a few basic chores and of course always eats 3+3. Over time the chores she has to do have become more complex. But nothing yet about taking care of herself and she flatly refuses to make food. I use language like ‘we really want you to do x and we can see how much you want to do it too. What we are asking is that you do x, y and z consistently so that it’s going to be possible to do x.
@Spendthrifting
It is nice to see the grip loosening on food and I hope that is how things will be for you. It takes such a long time. End game for us is dd accepting her limitations and not thinking of constantly being perfect and not expecting constant perfections. Dd has always been like this to a certain extent I think I’ve cleared too many difficulties out of her way in an attempt to quash her anxiety. But actually it hasn’t helped in the long run.