I've messed up and need help to make it right

[mehtivation]

Lost my shit with DD 14 about an hour ago. Been worried ages about her health, specifically weight - junk food and inactivity are the problem. I have not commented on her weight, appearance or size, but more about getting good nutrition and enough exercise. I tell her she's beautiful (she is!) every day. She is about a size 18 at 5 foot 7 and nearly 15 (year 10). I cook decent meals most days and have tried to avoid a feast/famine approach to "treat food". However she has a job in a shop and babysits so earns a fair amount and I can't stop her buying crap at the shop on the way to/from school. I am struggling with hormones and have gained weight recently too - am a biggish size 12/14, for context. My older son is a gym buff. I exercise and always ask her to come for a walk. She refuses. Short of going in her room and beginning an actual fist fight with her (obv not going to) I don't know how I can get her to move.

Anyway. Today she got up after 11 (when I went out with DS2 so not sure when exactly she surfaced) and made a bacon sandwich. Was lying on sofa when I got in about 12.45. Went upstairs shortly after. At 4.20 it stopped raining and I suggested she went out on the errand she said she was going to do at her dad's about 20 minute walk away. Ignored me. Went up at 5.20 and she was in bed. Said she was getting up then. Was annoyed and I said she'd have to go to Dad's after dinner. At 6.15 sent the brother to get her for dinner. Turned up in kitchen in pjs at 6.25.

Lost my fucking shit. I know I have been an absolute bitch so please don't tell me that. I know. I said she was going to end up like the fat people you see on mobility scooters because she's going to make herself too ill to get about. She's a tendency to EBSA and I said to her that if she thought I'd support her into her 20s because she couldn't work because she's too lazy and made herself ill through inactivity then she'd another think coming. Said no meals beyond breakfast would be given to her if she wasn't washed or dressed. I know this was awful, ableist and wrong. But I am at the end of my tether watching my beautiful clever funny girl get fatter and unhealthier by the day. Her big brother had a school leavers' dance the other week and I know she's looking forward to her prom next year but she's already so self conscious about weight I'm dreading the idea of trying to find her a dress that will fit and she won't hate the sight of herself in. Clothes shopping for normal clothes is a fucking nightmare and she basically wears ugly polyester jumpers over school leggings every day.

How the fuck can I help her?

Don’t beat yourself up about the way you approached it. Yes it wasn’t great but the reality is the letting a child get overweight should be as worrying as letting a child be malnourished.
They are both a danger to their health.

Maybe you can have a chat with her this week and come up with a plan that you get healthier together?

Four things that have helped me and my one overweight child;

wearing a fitbit
doing the couch to 5k app together
all going swimming once a week
walking the dog

You could do stuff with her to help achieve this goal. Join a weight loss club with her, or a gym or do exercise classes together. I imagine she'd rather do it alongside you, with you as her role model, than be forced to do it. Asking someone to lose weight and be healthy is so much easier than actually helping them do that. So I would say actively help her.

Thank you. We can lift weights at home or walk... tried exercise classes with her before and she literally hated it and begged to stop. There isn't a gym locally that she can use until she is 16 next year, after her exams. I don't want her to diet or obsess over food, I want her to limit ultra processed crap to after meals in small amounts - not eat fuckloads of Pringles at 4pm while I'm at work and then leave 75% of the healthy dinner I make.

I've been up to see her, said sorry again and told her I love her and asked if we could talk - the answer was (as it often is) that she doesn't want to. I've said we will tomorrow. I'm going to make her walk with me. She went out for
2 hours with her friend "for a walk" on Thursday- location showed they walked about 15 minutes then sat on a bench for 90 mins. I have honestly tried so hard with activity and movement til now, hence the rage earlier.

She has a refurbished Apple Watch her dad gave her. Will try to use that to help. He is bloody useless though and we have 60:40 care so anything good I get her to do is diminished by his apathy while she's with him. It's so difficult

I am really worried by the posters saying things like "she needed a kick up the arse" and "you should force her to exercise". This is not good advice.

OP, I really understand how panicked you must be feeling but she has outgrown you being able to take charge of this for her. She knows she is overweight, she knows the links with diet and exercise, she knows that other people find fat repulsive. She sounds very depressed. She doesn't need any of this reinforced.

Please get some expert advice on how to support her, like the beateatingdisorders.org.uk website or helpline. You are much more help to her supporting her self esteem and her belief that she is worth fighting for, than you are policing her calorie intake. Sadly, it is hard to obtain and sustain a healthy weight once you have been fat. Doing this grudgingly because her mum is forcing her will not be the motivation she needs.

Good luck to you and your lovely daughter.

@mehtivation
Please don't beat yourself up!
You have apologised and u genuinely want to help.
As a mother going through similar, I fully empathise with you.
Have just come back from consoling DD who wants to try being anorexic so she could rapidly lose weight.
And yes, she spent all day sitting or lying in bed and made herself a large mug cake today and refused dinner.
There is no winning. We can have all the best intentions and use tone and words like a psychologist but at the end of the day they have to get their act together.
Until then we just have to validate when they say they hate themselves and their body and yet want to go for a salted caramel frappe at Costa to cheer them up ( and even pay for it).
Oh the life of a mum..
Xx

PCOS?

Other types of exercise that don't make her feel hot sweaty and exhausted? Like Pilates? Yoga? Chi Gong?
Or more "fun" sweating, like 5 rhythms, or any dancing tbh, or martial arts?

I've said I have no intention of "policing her calorie intake", I want her to eat real
food in the majority, that's all

I have tried, am trying, to get her to move herself. She deserves to be in good health and feel strong and energetic and capable. I am already doing an awful lot of the things posters are advising me to do - to no avail, which is why I exploded earlier on I think. She spent the whole day, bar about 2 hours, unwashed in bed. When she wasn't in bed she was on the sofa in her pjs. When I say it like that, I think she must be depressed so I will have to force her to the fucking doctors again. When she was refusing school last year I took her, they referred her to mental health on the phone and she refused to engage.

I'm beside myself for a reason

So fucking hard, isn't it? I'm sorry you're struggling too

I kind of agree with this. I got plump as a teenager and just ignored it because everyone told me I was beautiful and lovely. It wasn't until my mum sat me down one day and told me I needed to lose weight that I actually took it seriously. I was embarrassed and felt awful but I needed to hear it.
The thing is she sounds normal in the sense that loads of teenagers are very lazy and live off junk food. However, some get away with it and others don't.
It's good for her to learn to make healthier choices.

Hi OP,

I know you feel awful, no one can change what happened and it is what it is. You can only move forward.

However, I've been that fat teenager. And I can honestly say, nothing will help her in terms of changing her eating/exercise unless she wants to. And as an adult, there are so many things I wish my mum had done/helped with when I was that age.

My advice would be, just support her in terms of how she feels/what's going on with her mentally. Encourage her to use a journal if she doesn't want to talk to you. But please for her sake, drop any discussion/talks/encouragement regarding exercise and diet. Because she's probably so upset about her weight and how she looks and although you're trying to help, every time you ask her to go for a walk, or to eat something healthy, it's just going to push her further into that self hatred and eating more rubbish. The more you tell her to exercise and eat right, the less likely she is to listen. It's really tough, for both of you. And as a mother I can understand the frustration and upset of seeing her like this, but the more you push the worse it will get.

Apologies for the lengthy post but I really do feel for your daughter, it's so horrible. Every time my mum innocently went "why don't we go for a walk" my stomach would just flip and I'd be so upset and full of anger at myself for being fat, and then I'd get upset because I knew my mum was disappointed in me for being fat and then I couldn't even look in the mirror and it all just pushed me further to eat more crap and any form of exercise just felt like punishment.

I'm almost 30 and I've only just got to a point where I'm finally coming to terms with my unhealthy relationship with food and my gosh my teens-now have been absolutely awful in terms of my weight and how I feel about myself. I read a book called "help I can't stop eating, how to overcome overeating" the title was something along those lines and it has helped me immensely!! If I was given that book 10 years ago I wouldn't be battling so much mentally and physically regarding weight.

I hope you're ok, and I really hope some of what I have said helps. Apologies if it doesn't at all!! 🤦🏻‍♀️

She went out for 2 hours with her friend "for a walk" on Thursday- location showed they walked about 15 minutes then sat on a bench for 90 mins.

That's fine though, surely ... Walking 15mins is good, then a catch up chat.

I get a sense that you were bottling up all that you wanted to say for many months for fear of causing an eating disorder and that caused you to explode. It's so hard to tread the right line on this stuff in our modern world.

I haven't had quite this exact issue with my DD but we did have issues over hygiene, body hair and acne. I didn't want to shame her on any of those issues and I would have been happy if she made a considered decision not to remove body hair or treat acne (less so a decision to stink) but I was worried that either she a) hadn't noticed these issues but would get teased or b) had noticed but didn't know how to deal with them and needed my help but didn't know how to ask. On exploration it was usually b. I found there was no way to raise this stuff without risk of appearing critical and shaming but my honest motivation was to save her pain and upset. Every time it went badly at first and she was angry and upset but when we'd got past that we eventually made a plan together (Usually involving me spending money!)

When I have right royally F*ed up with losing it with my DD and I absolutely have (she's now 17 and I think we get on pretty good now) I have found a grovelling apology and being really honest about why I said what I said is the only way forward. If she didn't want to have a conversation I either said it through the door or in writing. Mostly it would not be resolved and I didn't get any acceptance of my apology but we did later seem to be able to move on once the dust had settled.

It seems as though what happened to your friends son is a big part of how you feel so it's important to share that with her. Tell her really honestly that you know what you said and how you said it was 100% wrong but it's come from a place of genuine fear for her health and well-being and that you still have that fear and you want to help. Ask her please will she let you work on this issue together as getting into a fight over it will just mean she justifies more crap eating etc. Maybe writing a carefully worded letter is the way to go?

Somehow she needs to feel you are on her side and are not the enemy.

Excuse me we as parents have a responsibility to keep our children healthy. As a parent we absolutely can insist they excersize. Whilst I'm not advocating marching the poor girl out the door dragging her, I am talking about demanding she is active and taking away her stuff for failing to do it. She is not able to make sensible adult decisions regarding her health, her mother is.

If this were me I would be very gentle with my child and say you absolutely must excersize because you are at risk of multiple health conditions. The poor girl is 14 years old and in a size 18 clothes. She's comfort eating, she's bullied because of her weight and she eats because she's bullied. I would tackle this situation from multiple angles. I would also let me child know, I'm only insisting on things because I love them and do not want to lose them. It is absolutely not bad advice. This lady needs to get her daughter to a GP regarding weight loss support and help her find a new outlet to deal with the feelings from being bullied.

People need to wake upto the fact she could lose this child way to early In life because of this problem. We have a responsibility to keep them healthy

I've had the same with My teenage son OP, regarding mental health I know how terrifying it is. All you can do is try.

I feel for you and your poor daughter. The bullying will be a massive part of the problem, my son was bullied and he has mh problems as a result.

I made him attend school and honestly now I wish I had un-enrolled him and home schooled. He failed all gcses anyway so it was all for nothing in the end and the poor boy is scarred for life now. I know you work, i do too but even a couple of hours a day home schooling would have been better for my son that how things ended up. He did get his maths gcse in college but he can't do English to the point he won't even make an effort to try now.

Its clear your a good parent OP who only wants the best for her daughter. The GP maybe able to help with weight loss there are things that can be done, I don't know what's available due to her age but you can ask. If she can break the cycle her life will completely change for the better.

When DD was 14 she gained a lot of weight very fast. About 2.5 stone in 9 months.

I asked Mumsnet for advice and was basically shamed for thinking about saying anything. I was told I'd give her a complex about food, make her feel shit, probably give her an eating disorder. So I did nothing apart from gentle encouragement around healthy habits.

Much like you I snapped after she gained another half stone. She was going through my phone after a family party and deleting all the photos she felt she looked shit in. She deleted a fantastic one of all of the family together including my very frail grandmother who we knew wouldn't be with us much longer. I said that this was what she actually looked like. 30+ photos weren't ALL bad photos/ unflattering angles/ poor lighting. She hated the way she looked but that was the new reality and she either needed to accept it and embrace it or do something about it. She cried and said I was dreadful. She sent through a load of heavily edited photos of herself where she looked "fine". I said they were edited and weren't accurate. She cried again.

Once things had calmed down she asked for help losing weight. It was awful. Losing 3 stone takes ages and is hard and it took her over a year. Just moving more and eating better would t have had the results she needed. About 6 months in she actually got stroppy with me for "letting her get so fat". Ffs. Mums cannot win.

She hates her year 11 prom pics even though she was a stone lighter. Her year 13 ones she's in a size 10 dress with her lovely boyfriend looking so happy.

I think sometimes you need to (sensitively) say something and follow through with help.

My mum says similar to me everytime she’s had a drink. It won’t help, she knows she’s overweight. I say it’s fine but I will never forgive her for what she’s said.

A gentle approach is fine and it’s good that you realise you have been horrible.

If you sometimes think she has ADHD, please do something about it.

I was a fat teenager and there is nothing that my mum could have done to help me to realise that I wanted to eat more healthily and move more. Those were both realisations I had to get to on my own. And I promise she tried everything you can think of, including paying for a personal trainer.

But what my mum could have done is help me to love my body and build a good and positive relationship with it, so that I could get to the point of treating it more carefully more quickly on my own.

And full disclosure, still fat, so if you think that's the most horrifying possible outcome a human being can ever get to then feel free to ignore this. But after a decade of undoing what my deeply loving, concerned, and worried mother did to my head, I appreciate my body, actively enjoy exercise, and have a pretty nice life.

Maybe it's the wake up call she needs to break the cycle

I totally empathise OP. Once they have their own money it's impossible to police what they're eating, and the easy availability of fucking Uber Eats, Deliveroo etc doesn't help (older teen in my case).

So how do we do that?

IMO the whole concept of 'fat shaming' while coming from good intentions, is actually so harmful in itself.

Mummy2024, of course we have a responsibility to act. But how we act is critically important as we can easily make things worse.

Small children: yes, we can control what they eat and enforce exercise. But by 14, our approach has to be different.

I have a lot of experience of this, professionally and personally. I am not asking the OP to do nothing, but to get better advice than some have offered on this thread.