Hands on @ArseInTheCoOpWindow have we got the same daughter?
Actually my DD is 19 now but looking back I could have written your post when my DD was 11-17yo. As a small child (5-7yo) she had sensory issues. She was gregarious, liked by the adults, less so by her peers, but always sociable. She was a bit unfocused and not as good at concentrating as her peers.
I always remember she started year 5 as a slim girl but she became somehow, over that year, obsessed with food though it must have started before. She got fatter and fatter. I tortured myself about whether To say nothing and try and manage it by making sure our choices were healthy, she got plenty of exercise etc, or whether to gently say something. The world is full of women (and it is women) saying “my mother (and it is mothers who are blamed mainly) commented on my weight and it’s damaged me” but there’s an equally loud chorus of people saying “I wish my DM had intervened”. None of those people are wrong but it makes it very hard to know what to do for the best.
At 15 my daughter had enough freedom to buy rubbish food on the way to school and if we removed pocket money her friends would buy rubbish and she’d eat that. She was by now around 14 stone and 5”7’. She was lazy and completely unwilling to exercise. She was moody and stayed in her room, sensitive to anything she felt was criticism. Her school work was iffy, homework rushed and things often lost. She was distant and dreamy. Her room was a tip and I’d find loads of wrappers under her bed. She seemed depressed and I concluded she was eating to manage her emotions. This is a bit of a potted history but that’s the general flavour.
Through all this I was quietly at my wits end. I was so worried about her. The compromise to her physical and mental health. The negative feedback at school. The lack of interest in school and its potential effect on her later choices. She was ambitious but her hyper focus on some of her dreams were not matched by her effort. I was worried about her sleep too which she really struggled with. Pushing 17yo she must have been around 15 stone. I felt ashamed and judged, as if I was a bad mother incapable of bringing up a happy, healthy child and that I’d allowed her to get so fat. None of my other children had had such a tricky time so what had I done wrong with her? I felt so terrible and that I was letting her down but she wouldn’t let me near her.
It came to a head when I found cannabis in her room. I decided to try and yet again initiate an open conversation and she told me that the only way she could manage all the stress was to smoke and it was the only way she could sleep. I started to think about her sensory issues, her compulsive eating, her interest in food, her insomnia, her moodiness, her history and every time I research these things as a cluster I came up with ADHD.
I’m not trying to armchair diagnose or label but it may be worth ruling out. ADHD tends to manifest differently in girls and women, they tend not to be quite so hyperactive and tend to fall into the inattentive and/or impulsive (inattentive ADHD was referred to as ADD). The problem is that this is far harder for people to recognise. One of the problems of ADHD is the way the brain uses dopamine. The ADHD brain doesn’t do this well. The scientists think that this accounts for some of the risky behaviour and the compulsions; in my daughter’s case the eating was all about trying to produce that hit of dopamine. The laziness wasn’t laziness, it was the same problem, so was the sleep (“inefficient” dopamine). My daughter was assessed (3 hour assessment) by a psychiatrist who was an ADHD Lead in the NHS. We had to pay though and go privately as the ADHD provision is very slow). It was an in-depth assessment, looking at emotional, social, familial, educational, hormonal aspects and looking at the co-morbidities (ASD, depression, anxiety etc). I learned about rejection sensitive dysphoria and how this maintains the behaviours that develop etc etc. My daughter has had treatment, she does have a stimulant medication and she’s had coaching. It’s changed her life. She is no longer chemically craving good and she is able to manage other areas of her life much better. In the last two years she’s lost the weight and is at a guess around 10st. But more importantly she’s so much happier. It turns out she wasn’t a “fat, lazy self-sabotager”.
Sorry this is such a ramble. I’m not saying this is the case for every moody teen of course but I’m just putting this out there because I wish I’d spotted it sooner and just maybe someone else will find it helpful.