14 year old had stopped eating - advice please xx

[Wolla1974]

Hi. I'm looking for advice on how to help my daughter (14).

Before the Xmas break, her teacher raised concerns about her hardly eating at school for around a week.

Over that period she had also been eating a lot less at home, coming home saying she'd eaten loads at school and wasn't hungry so didn't want any tea at all or would just eat a tiny amount later on.

As she's always eaten fairly big lunches, plus pudding and snacks at school I wasn't too worried, until her teacher told me she wasn't eating at school either.

She also had braces fitted about 2/3 weeks prior to that so had a week where she couldn't eat much, but then had been back to eating normally.

She never eats breakfast.

Over Xmas she was staying in bed till really late, and had some days where she ate hardly anything, and others where she ate a normal amount.

This week she has barely eaten anything. She didn't eat anything at school on wed/thu and only ate a tiny amount of tea. She also told me that she threw up her tea on Monday night because she didn't like the feeling of it in her body.

She had a friend over on Friday, and ate a proper tea. She had only eaten a boiled egg at school.
She ate a packet of super noodles Saturday lunchtime and hasn't eaten since. She just keeps saying she's not hungry. She is very lethargic, has a headache, and seems very angry.
I've suggested that we go to talk to the GP, but she refuses.

I have no idea what to do, or how to help her.
I've tried not making an issue and just leaving her to eat if/when she wants to.

Last night I begged her to eat her tea, and told her that if she didn't eat she wouldn't be well enough to go to school tomorrow. She got angry and told me to stop and leave her alone.

This morning she ate 3 spoons of ready brek before going to school.

I have no idea which approach is right, or what to do to help stop this before it gets out of hand. I feel totally out of my depth and helpless.
Any advice?

Get some professional support - Beat are excellent: https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/get-information-and-support/get-help-for-myself/i-need-support-now/helplines/

We had this when my goddaughter got caught up in disordered eating when she was training with the Royal Ballet. All sorted now thank goodness, but was a scary time. Good luck.

I’m sorry you and your daughter are going through this. I recommend as previous poster said, getting support from Beat - even if your daughter won’t engage, they offer support for parents/carers.

One thing I found helpful to remember when my daughter was going through similar was to separate the eating disorder to your child - they aren’t doing this on purpose.

It can feel like a really lonely, helpless place. I hope your daughter gets well soon.

Thank you. She managed a sandwich at lunch today and had a bit of pasta at tea time. We've had a good chat this evening and I've been honest with her about how serious this is and what the consequences could be.

I've discovered we have a local eating disorder team which I can self refer to, so I'm doing that tomorrow and will contact Beat too.
I let DD know that I would be doing that, and she was a bit taken aback at the words eating disorder, and said something along the lines of "I haven't got an eating disorder, I'll eat everyday if you want me to but some days I'll only have an egg". 🙄

Best of luck and good for you for seeking help and addressing it head on. I remember talking to my goddaughter because she had stopped eating breakfast - so kept fainting when in ballet school which started at 10am - she said to me: "Auntie Arlanymor YOU don't eat breakfast!" No, correct, I don't, I am never hungry before midday. But I could eat a horse at lunch AND dinner!

We kind of made jokes, but as with you, I explained that even if I only ate what she did, that I was well past puberty and the worst that would happen to me would probably be weight loss, tiredness and anaemia. Whereas she was going through puberty and could lose her fertility etc. It was a tough six months from beginning to end, but Beat helped me frame conversations brilliantly and she found it easier to talk to me than to her parents because they were so deathly scared. But we did come out the other side and Beat will help show you the chinks of light and how to make them into full sunbeams.

Sending you so much love, adolescence is a really tough time and you are totally stepping up to the plate to bat. The other great thing about Beat is they really make you feel like you are not alone - you can call them even if you are sad and upset and feeling low. Well done on being a brilliant mum.

We have been through this with our dd and had great support from BEAT. Back then they did an online course for parents which I found really helpful to understand what she was going through. They also recommended this book which I also found helpful - Janet Treasure - new maudsley method https://amzn.eu/d/ckAWApm.

I know you are thinking eating disorder OP but I would suggest she sees a GP and has bloods done.

For most of 2025 I just was not particularly hungry, and often struggled to eat a meal. One day I ate 3 pickled onions. I'm having various investigations basically looking for cancer.

I'm not suggesting that DD has cancer just that there can be other reasons.

I was going to say if this has come on so quickly I would look at a medical explanation first.

Does she want to lose weight? Do you know her weight?

It is worth seeing the GP first who will refer you if necessary xx

It’s the braces Pearl. This is something, which can happen unfortunately.

Sorry to hear this. I had exactly the same with my 14 year old. She ended up being hospitalised, it was during covid.

Get professional help as soon as you can. Hospital dietitian is your best option, don't waste time waiting for camhs.

However she is now fully recovered, living her best life with a lovely boyfriend and about to go to university.

It took a year and lots of therapy to get her back and I know how incredibly hard it is as a mum.

Good luck xxx

How thin is she? Sorry to be blunt, but this is the really important question. I was a mildly (BMI 17) anorexic teenager but my parents never suspected anything until the school nurse flagged me up as a concern. I was slightly deceitful about eating at home but basically ate. I skipped a lot of meals outside it.

I was the only one at my girls’ school of 80 in a year with an eating disorder. There were quite a few more, including two much thinner and more obviously anorexic girls, in the years around me.

I had loads of friends at school who hardly ate anything at home and were a perfectly normal weight. Their mums would worry my mum with their worries about their daughters’ eating disorders. This pissed her off later!

I also think that the disorder doesn’t really ‘set in’ until you get below a certain weight. I’ve heard it said that anorexia is actually a primitive protective reaction gone wrong — if you’re happy to double down, more energetically than ever, when you’re already starting to be slightly starving, you have a better chance in a primitive society of crossing the mountain and finding rich new pastures…

I know that when my BMI went below 19 or so I started to be much more obsessively interested in starving myself. When it went below 17 I got obsessed and carried on for a year until being briefly hospitalized and then bullied into eating by my parents. In retrospect, feeling a bit silly, and suddenly very hungry, I wasn’t that hard to persuade. Maybe if I’d been even thinner it would have been harder.

As it was, I was back to a BMI of 19-20 (unchanged 30 years later — ironically, I was always thin) by the time school started again in September. By Christmas, I had a place at Oxford and a new boyfriend and had no desire to go back to my eating restrictiveness.

I was surprised a couple of years ago when it started to rear its head in early menopause.

I know that bmi is used or weight for height for children. However, it isn’t true at all that anorexia only sets in once you dip to a certain bmi. There is such a thing as atypical anorexia, where a person may not actually be underweight or can be higher than their weight for height but they can be dangerously ill. My dd being a case in point. She dipped below a healthy weight but never down to such low bmis and she was very very ill, on bed rest, should have been hospitalised but at the time I didn’t know how dangerous things were and with the help of her friends, she started to eat again. Only one meal a day but it was something. And there are other eating disorders, such as binge / restrict, where a person may be well within normal bmi range or perhaps even higher.

How is everyone doing?