AIBU to worry my daughter may be developing an eating disorder?

[ShouldIworryornot]

Sorry, long, head not in right place right now, can’t work out what’s relevant and what’s not 😥.

My 18yo daughter left home for uni in September, she’s loving it, doing well academically and enjoying the newfound friendships as well as hobbies and societies. Up to Xmas, all perfect.

Then a long stretch came of 3 months when we didn’t see her other than online and not much. I did notice she looked slimmer in the very odd pic she’d sent thru.

Then at the end of March she called me crying her eyes out (for over two hours), very anxious (never ever been anxious before), saying she’d been eating little since Xmas and running lots and lost 7kg in 3 months, (claimed 1,400 kcal, only 2 meals à day) and that it had been really hard she was very worried she’d gain the weight back if she stopped and how to avoid that happening.

Luckily she was coming home 3 days later, when we went away skiing, whereupon I could see she was avoiding calories as much as she could, would choose a lunch of salad w feta despite it being cold and skiing 4 hours a day. Would then play pádel after that on 2/5 days, and went running before skiing on another one. She ate normal dinners which I cooked at least, and the odd pudding.

Back home now and she continues to run every day and eat as little as she can get away with, although not alarmingly little but I suspect underfuelling; I wake up thinking about this, torn between trying to gather more data and rushing to do sth about it asap. She confirmed she did not gain any weight while away, unsurprisingly.

She’s 165cm tall and has gone from 59kg to 52kg. Says 51kg would make her underweight and she doesn’t want that. She looks slimmer that she used to, obviously, but not unwell; apparently hated being “not big but with a tummy”.

Today she walked 10k steps and run 7k. she ate 2 eggs for breakfast, no bread; pea soup w à slice of bread for lunch, 2 kiwis as she says she’s constipated; 6 Itsu gyoza w undressed salad for dinner, insisting she’d snacked on chocolate before dinner and wasn’t hungry, tho no one saw that.

For all I know, I could be staring at a huge ED developing in front of my very eyes. But she says she’s v happy and I mustn’t worry because weight matters 7/10 to her but health matters 10/10 and she is not ill.

YABU: she’s is just working out how to be slim n fitter than ever like she’s working out a lot else right now.

YANBU: get her help NOW (but what? Psychologist? Psychiatrist?)

If anyone has been thru this, please tell me honestly if you think EDs are in fact stoppable? One friend confided recently she saw EVERY sign in her daughter from day 1 and was still unable to stop it, child now in hospital due to low weight.

OMG for background I have always been overweight to obese, and worried about health with a horrendous perimenopause that has rendered me prediabetic. This is all absolutely my fault. I’ve always said to her I didn’t know that being overweight could make me so unwell and was naïve to ignore it until my 50s. I thought I was helping her avoid my fate, but instead I’ve given her an ED, haven’t I?

OP I feel for you. I have seen anorexia in a couple of older relatives and it is bloody awful. Women can sometimes live with this for a surprisingly long time but luck does eventually run out. In woman 1, she thought she could control it but pushed restriction bit too far, got an infection and died of sepsis- she didn’t want to die and knew she’d basically done it to herself . Woman 2 is being peg fed and is bedbound due to extreme frailty. She still thought she was fat. There is nothing more frustrating that hearing someone say they just want to get out of hospital, knowing the answer is to just bloody eat and seeing them refuse.

I would be wanting to watch your daughter very carefully. She’s clearly on a path of disordered eating and I suspect she’s showing you what you want to see so she can go back to uni and not eat. She may well not yet have anorexia but she does seem disordered. If anorexia does take route it is powerful and defies logic. It makes people lie and manipulate.You can’t really reason with someone in the throws of anorexia sadly.

So we saw the GP this morning who confirmed the bloods and ECG all look normal and what one would expect from a young runner, said physically all is well but it's my DD's mental health we will be watching closely. Explained how she's free to run on the basis that she's been eating more but always fueling sufficiently and never underfueling, and how a friend of her from uni had to drop out of her medicine degree at Cambridge, which she'd worked so hard to get into, with anorexia.

It is, fortunately, only a 6 week term, and I am going to visit halfway through that. As the GP said, it is over to my DD now and we have to hope her good sense will prevail.

Btw DD has now put on 1.5kg.

I do not think this is the end of this matter, but we shall see.