Disordered Eating and Anxiety: Break the Link to Eating Disorders

Why are we talking about disordered eating and anxiety?

You’ve probably seen in the news the endless rise of anxiety disorders in children and young people. Some will show as eating disorders. Some will not yet be so. But disordered eating is also prevalent, if not yet an official diagnosis.

You’ve probably despaired at the rise in eating disorders and felt powerless to stop it.

However, disordered eating is something slightly different – and something we can intervene in and have some influence over in our children.

So – let’s differentiate first between those two terms.

What’s the difference between disordered eating and an eating disorder?

You’ll be aware of most eating disorders by name:

• Bulimia
• Anorexia nervosa
• Binge eating disorder

You may not have heard of these two:

• AFRID (avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder) due to fears/anxieties about consequences of eating the food or difficulty with swallowing etc, and
• Pica (eating non-food things if they’re not of an age when this is common - eg toddlers chewing on anything at all!)

However, disordered eating tends to precede those eating disorder diagnoses, although it can lead into them if not tackled early on. 

Disordered eating might show up in your child as any combination of

• problematic eating that constantly rears its head at meal times,
• a toxic relationship to food – eating that has little to do with variety and nutrients and shows a damaging relationship to the whole business of food intake,
• comparing themselves with others in class,
• obsessively following sleek influencers on their devices,
• obsessing about how they look, perhaps checking in mirrors, rearranging clothes to look a particular way, or
• unduly picky eating that threatens to leave them short of essential nutrients on an ongoing basis.

What’s the link between disordered eating and anxiety?

So if you see those signs and feel they might be symptoms of your child’s eating becoming disordered, consider if there are links to anxiety. There often are.

Let’s face it. What do we tend to do if a seriously worrying problem crops up? Reach for chocolates, a drink, or the remote! Whatever your own coping method is.

Your child may have picked up this way of coping from you, of course, and that’s another topic. But either way, we’re human and we prefer to NOT feel worried or anxious. So we do anything we can to ditch the feeling asap!

If your child is experiencing disordered eating and anxiety, they may have chosen food as a way to 

• regain some control after feeling powerless to deal with the anxiety direct,
• swamp unbearable feelings with anything that removes them from sight temporarily,
• distract themselves from the problem that’s causing them such anxiety

This might be more food, selective food or no food.

And the anxiety might be about any of the things we discuss on this website, including bedtimes, transitions, school, bullying, impending divorce in the family etc.

So we need some ways to deal with the food issue, yes, but also the root cause of the problem that's forging the link between disordered eating and anxiety

You'll most likely have to juggle dealing with both the food and the causes at once so as to

• provide positive examples on food but also
• help your child cope with life-anxieties and find a way through.

What’s at stake is managing to STOP the disordered eating turning into a full-blown eating disorder.

These eating disorders can be overcome, certainly, but they also lead to lasting health problems way into the future. Preventing that is the thing to aim at.

So here are three tips to help your child on their way to

• a healthy relationship with food and
• unlinking disordered eating from the daily anxieties that are a natural part of being alive.

Three ways to help your child break the link between anxiety and disordered eating

1 Make meal preparation a joint activity

This helps in a number of ways – despite it sounding like a sticking plaster solution. The reasons go like this:

• You are with your child on a shared activity that gives opportunity for talk (about anything). You’ll be surprised what’s confided while chopping spuds or pouring out frozen peas!
• It removes food from the realm of being a comfort fallback – food is for nutrition and enjoyment to fuel activities.
• It limits food intake to meal times (or your family’s allowed snack times) – which both guards against “no food” and “too much food”.

Note that we’re still talking about a family way of tackling a possible, growing problem of disordered eating linked to anxiety.

It’s a way of life to undertake, not a once off that will bring an instant change. Just one part of a strategy.

So – the strategy is to make meal prep a joint activity as often as possible – even if it’s just choosing, fetching and defrosting in a microwave rather than starting from scratch. Involve them!

The process is how you carry out the strategy day by day – which might need some pre-thought and planning to make sure it can happen!

2 Start a family food notebook

This is a family book, not one for your child. Equal access, equal reporting. Otherwise, they could see it as you controlling their eating – which easily becomes a battleground!

Do it together. Decorate the cover. Keep it handy.

How to use it? Get them to do their share of recording each day what you all eat. Add a sketch if they like that sort of thing.

According to who’s in the family, this will be a unique layout to suit you. Agree it together.

Again, it’s a day-by-day strategy to keep food separate to daily worries (we’ll get to that in a moment). The process is maintaining it as an ongoing tool.

How can you use the notebook lists best?

• How about coloured dots to indicate the rainbow colour of your menus?
• Or what about – with older children who learn about food at school – adding a column to note the vitamins and minerals?
• You could also have a page at the back of the journal where you all get together and investigate which foods contain which minerals and vits, so you can together check you’re getting them at some point from one food or another. 

There are always choices, and this strategy of listing food nutrients means you can subtly accommodate your child’s preferences without them missing out on essential nutrition.

Remember, choosing to make food a real family interest (within your budget) normalises the proper use of food and removes it from being a solution to worries and anxiety.

It’s the daily background to ensuring you can break a link between anxiety and the growth of disordered eating – before it gets near to an eating disorder.

So let's move on to daily anxieties...

3 Deal with underlying anxieties in your child’s life

Finally, we deal with anxieties in your child’s life.

The whole Anxious Child Help website is about that! But on a daily basis

1. be alert for what seems to be anxious behaviour, 
2. make use of some of the information and ideas on a specific tab – symptoms, types, or causes – and
3. augment the thoughts from those sub-pages with others from the strategies tab.

This, too, is a daily – or at least weekly – case for watchfulness and pre-emptive action on your part!

The aim is to make sorting out solutions to fears and worries something we all do along the way. This avoids fears and anxieties getting linked to disordered eating as a way of avoiding the anxiety.

That’s the route to a full-blown eating disorder which is devastating for parents to watch as it plays out.

We all know that anxiety grows if it’s not dealt with – and that life is never going to be anxiety-free. But it can and should be free of disordered eating. Give it a go?

And now for some food-related books...

A story about Fluffy the rabbit, written by ChatGPT

I asked ChatGPT to write us a story to go in this blog post! (You can see other ideas and examples here for helping your child address anxiety.)

Please feel free to turn some of the bot's output here into direct speech so the animals talk to each other. Most children prefer a story to come alive like that. Or you can read it "as is" for a bedtime story.

To adapt it: copy it, place it in a word processor, make your alterations and then print it. Maybe leave a good margin for your child to add illustrations? 

Either way, the story can make its mark without appearing to target your child. That's the brilliance of tales!

Fluffy Scoffs Everything in Sight

Once upon a time, there was a little rabbit named Fluffy.

Fluffy was a curious rabbit who loved to explore and nibble on things, especially foods that were not very healthy for rabbits.

Fluffy would nibble on sugary treats, salty chips, and even a bit of pizza crust that was lying around.

Fluffy didn't think much of it at the time, but over time, Fluffy started to feel weak and ill.

One day, an older and wiser rabbit named Sage came along and noticed that Fluffy was not looking well.

Sage asked Fluffy what was wrong, and Fluffy confessed to nibbling on all sorts of unhealthy foods.

Sage listened patiently and then asked if there was anything else bothering Fluffy.

Fluffy replied that there were a couple of things on their mind, like not being able to find good hiding spots and not having many rabbit friends.

Sage recognised that Fluffy was using food as a way to comfort and distract themselves from their worries.

So they suggested that instead of relying on unhealthy foods, Fluffy could try other ways to deal with their worries, such as talking to other rabbits, practicing hiding, or doing things that made Fluffy happy.

Fluffy was hesitant at first, but Sage reassured them that it was worth a try.

Little Fluffy decided to take Sage's advice and started talking to other rabbits, practising hiding, and doing things that made them happy.

And over time, Fluffy started to feel better, both physically and mentally. They realised that there were other ways to deal with worries besides using food.

With a new feeling of confidence and happiness, Fluffy started eating healthier foods that were good for rabbits.

They enjoyed nibbling on carrots, lettuce, and even some tasty hay! And with the help of Sage's wise advice, Fluffy was able to live a happier and healthier life.

The end.

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ALWAYS:

Trust your instincts,
use your judgement, protect the spirit
of your child