DD has an unhealthy relationship with food

[Anonymous]

DD is 13 she is large- not fat but has what would be called a pear shape and is quickly gaining weight. She has mild LD, anxiety and some difficulty with social skills. When she has a bad day she immediately wants a treat to feel better (we have never fosters this). She occasionally sneaks food. Binge eats. Gets upset when food she wants is not available (i.e. the wrong pizza order, wrong bread,etc). How do you approach this without making it worse??
I try to get her to be active but it is tough. Preference would be to read or watch TV.

[Anonymous]

She might enjoy walking while listening to audiobooks.

[Anonymous]

What kind of skills does she have to help her with the anxiety? She should have coping mechanisms to help her deal when these situations come up. Work with her on doing these when it happens. It takes a lot of practice to change a behavior

[Anonymous]

My anxious kid is the same and it’s definitely the anxiety.

[Anonymous]

Why is your preference to do things that involve sitting? Set up a basketball hoop and let her go out and shoot baskets. Go to a nearby park with a wall and hit a tennis ball against a wall with a racquet. Go for a run, or a walk. Jump rope. Do yoga.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why is your preference to do things that involve sitting? Set up a basketball hoop and let her go out and shoot baskets. Go to a nearby park with a wall and hit a tennis ball against a wall with a racquet. Go for a run, or a walk. Jump rope. Do yoga.

It’s not op’s preference, it’s her daughter’s.

Op—I would work with her on other ways to calm down when stressed. And make sure to practice when she is calm, she won’t be able to when she’s having a hard time. Not until after she practices.

Does she like to take baths? I would get her some fun bath bombs. A bath pillow. A tub tray and a few other things and show her how to draw a nice bath when she’s stressed out. It’s a lovely way to calm down without food

[Anonymous]

OP here. She started taking baths a few months ago. Loves them.
We do go for a walk each day, weather permitting. If not,!we have a treadmill and I’ll let her watch tv early if she is in the TM. And I’ll drag her to do yoga with me. She doesn’t enjoy any of the activity but she’ll do it for a short time.

Her go -to for stress is reading.

I’ll look into other coping strategies. Thanks for the advice.

[Anonymous]

Our go to for stress is exercise. There are studies backing it up. Have her do some experiments with it at different intensity levels and see if her mood boosts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. She started taking baths a few months ago. Loves them.
We do go for a walk each day, weather permitting. If not,!we have a treadmill and I’ll let her watch tv early if she is in the TM. And I’ll drag her to do yoga with me. She doesn’t enjoy any of the activity but she’ll do it for a short time.

Her go -to for stress is reading.

I’ll look into other coping strategies. Thanks for the advice.

If her go-to for stress is reading, I'd definitely go with PP's suggestion of an audiobook and a nice walk.

[Anonymous]

Also dealing with this. It's so hard to know what to say without inflicting a lot of shame. Maybe talk up the nice weather and get outside as a family as much as possible.

[Anonymous]

We do not have relationships with food! We use food to compensate for something else, some relationships with people that we are missing.

[Anonymous]

Is she in therapy or would she be open to it? She needs to learn coping skills to deal with her anxiety and stress without numbing - with food or alcohol/drugs later on. I wish my own family had helped me gain these skills at her age because I went from food to alcohol for stress-coping in my 20s and because it never interfered with my career or dating life no one thought it was a problem but I was miserable. It took a lot of therapy and giving up booze for me to finally address my actual anxiety (cognitive behavioral therapy, learning how to identify and address rumination, gratitude practices, finding exercise that I enjoyed, etc) and it would have changed my teens and 20s to have my family help me address the underlying feelings at a younger age.

[Anonymous]

Thanks PP - glad that you were finally able to find something that worked.

[Anonymous]

If she’s already sneaking food and binging, she is in fact doing this a lot more than you know. I was like this — I know. The only thing that can curb that is her having the knowledge that she can eat whatever she wants whenever she wants it and then her making the choice to control it. Any restrictions you put on will simply be things she strategized to avoid. Giving her coping strategies is good— but she has to be the one to choose to implement them. Family activities that are exercise is also good.

I’ve had some success with my DD with this. I tried to control her food more when she was young, so she wouldn’t have my weight problems, but backed off by middle school as I could see that I was causing her to sneak food. She ate what she wanted. I gave her some suggestions about what she could do if she wanted — e.g. order something at Starbucks with friends but throw away half of it; decide not to eat after 8 pm. She was overweight for awhile, but active and healthy. Later in high school, she took control herself and lost weight. She seems to not have any troubling food habits now. Good luck.

[Anonymous]

Yet another thread where someone blames the kid. But, you are the parent, Are you overweight? What do you cook? What does dad eat and cook?
How does she get to 13 and throws tantrums if there is no pizza she likes?
Here is the food honey, this is what we are eating. Enough is enough, but of course, that would entail you eating healthily and serving healthy foods!