How to figure out eating disorders in a teenager?

When teenagers see beautiful models' bodies on TV and waists without a single fold in glossy magazines, they think that they are inferior compared to these handsome men and women. And they begin to exhaust themselves with diets. Boys begin to work out hard, buy expensive dietary supplements for muscle growth at the pharmacy... Do teenagers know that their efforts are directed against their own health? The task of parents is to recognize eating disorders in teenagers in time and gently reduce them to nothing.

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Teenager and Diet

"You're too fat," parents say and begin to starve the teenager only with vegetables and fruits or limit the child's meat and milk. Parents are guided by the best intentions, but do they understand that improper nutrition for a child can upset his entire endocrine and digestive system? And the weight may not decrease, but, on the contrary, even increase.

If the initiators of the diet are teenagers themselves, and parents do not know about it, the consequences can be even more terrible. Bulimia (the so-called wolf hunger) and anorexia (constant malnutrition) can destroy the body so much that it will not be easy to restore metabolic processes - it can take years.

The reasons for a teenager's strong desire to diet can be justified and far-fetched. Justified reasons include obesity or a tendency to it. Far-fetched reasons include the desire to look like 45-kilogram models with normal height, weight and development. The desire to fully comply with far-fetched "norms" of beauty is more typical for girls than for boys. According to statistics, girls become victims of diets 4 times more often than boys.

What should parents do?

The most important thing is to determine whether the child has a real problem or an imaginary one. Only a nutritionist can judge this with certainty. The second step is to develop an action plan to correct the situation. If the child has an imaginary weight problem, perhaps he or she needs to be taken to a psychologist for a session. The psychologist will help the teenager to realistically assess the situation. Another advantage of working with a psychologist is that in adolescence, children rarely listen to their own parents. Often, a stranger is a much greater authority for them than their mom and dad, who “don’t understand a thing about this!”

If the child really has weight problems, it will not be enough for parents to just visit a nutritionist. They will need to go with the child through the entire path (often long and difficult!) that the doctor recommends. The reasons for a teenager's weight problems are not limited to how much and what he eats. Although this is certainly not the least important factor.

Reasons for excess weight in teenagers

• Improper diet (lots of fatty and floury foods, improper eating habits, large doses of food)
• Genetics (hereditary weight deviations) - this is very difficult to deal with
• Sedentary lifestyle (the child does little or no sports)
• Depression (psychological disorders)

Each of the causes of excess weight should be eliminated in different ways. And in this, parents should not be guided by their own intuition, because in the case of, say, genetic abnormalities, sports and diet may simply not work. Perhaps the child needs to get his hormones in order, which in adolescence control weight, development, and character. In addition, the diet that was successfully tested on 45-year-old Aunt Sonya may be ineffective and even harmful for 11-year-old Anechka. It is not at all necessary to give her low-fat kefir and unsalted buckwheat to drink all week.

No matter how much you want to see your daughter Claudia Schiffer and your son Arnold Schwarzenegger, you shouldn't torture them with extremes. Especially mono-diets. Mono-diets are quick diets that involve losing weight on just one product for 3-7 days. This is simply unacceptable for a child's growing body. You will only achieve exhaustion, nervousness and fainting in class. This was hardly the goal of loving parents.

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The most common deviations in the nutrition of adolescents

There are not many of them, and if parents do not pay close attention to what and how much the child eats, you may notice when the child has anorexia, bulimia or binge eating disorder. More about these deviations, which often occur asymptomatically and require the attentive eye of parents.

Anorexia in adolescents

Anorexia is often called nervous anorexia. This disease is associated with abnormalities in the nervous system associated with the task of losing weight. At the same time, a girl or a boy is categorically unhappy with their weight, figure, height and in general with themselves as a person. Most often, anorexia develops in insecure teenagers. Since this disease does not develop in one or two days, but can continue for a year and a half, when the child is completely exhausted, parents need to be alert and recognize the initial stage of nervous anorexia in time. How to do this?

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The first bell: conversations

Listen carefully to what your child says about themselves. If they constantly think about how to lose weight and compare themselves to thin and slender models, these are the first warning signs. Looking at themselves in the mirror is normal for a teenager. They pay close attention to their “I” and their appearance. If the child is self-confident, they will walk away from the mirror with a feeling of satisfaction: “How beautiful I am (how handsome!)” or see the most advantageous features of their figure and face.

If a child suffers from his own inferiority, he does not like mirrors, his mood deteriorates after looking at his reflection, he becomes nervous and irritable. Then parents should talk to the teenager about how he is loved as he is, give examples from their own lives, show actors and singers who, despite their rather average appearance, became very successful people. And move on to practical actions: buy the child roller skates, enroll him in swimming, take him to a nutritionist to adjust his diet, to a dermatologist to select masks and skin and hair care products.

Very often, a child's dissatisfaction with his own appearance arises from a lack of attention from adults. He compensates for this deficiency with food, but it should be with joint rest with his father and mother.

The second bell: choosing diets

Children who are going to compensate for the shortcomings of their appearance begin to act. And they do it at their own discretion: they read about this diet in a magazine, and heard about this from a friend, and they will never eat these “harmful” products because they were told so on TV. Parents should be wary if their children begin to exclude some products from their diet, prefer others, and sharply reduce portions. If you skip this stage of anorexia, the child loses up to 12% of his weight, and parents attribute this to stress at school or loss of appetite.

They do not know that everything is fine with their appetite, the child tortures himself in the hope of acquiring a model appearance. It is worth paying attention to such an important detail as portions of food eaten. Rarely does a teenager manage to control his appetite at a time when nature requires normal healthy portions with all proteins, fats and carbohydrates. A teenager who is in the period of developing anorexia sometimes does not eat anything at all, sometimes suddenly pounces on food. Some children often use laxatives and enemas.

Against the background of diets, a teenager may start cooking constantly. Mom is happy: what a helper in the household is growing up! But an unhealthy love for constant cooking may be just a nervous disorder: subconsciously, the teenager compensates for the lack of food, only not eating it himself, but feeding others.

The third bell: an unprecedented love for sports

A child with anorexia may greatly increase physical activity in order to lose even more weight. This gradually exhausts their body. Their appearance also changes: a previously healthy child's facial skin begins to peel, their hair becomes brittle and weak, their nails break very quickly, they develop bad breath, general weakness and increased fatigue, and at night the teenager may suffer from nightmares. All this, against the background of weight loss, should become a guiding beacon for parents.

A visit to a psychotherapist and a nutritionist is the best thing to do at this stage of anorexia, since the digestive system is already impaired and medications may be needed to restore it.

Bell number five: time is lost

If the parents were inattentive and too busy to notice changes in the child's condition, now they should definitely see changes in his appearance. The children are very emaciated. They have a poor appetite, often have bouts of vomiting, the stomach is not in order (ulcers, gastritis). The face changes color from pink to pale or sallow, there may be spots, pimples, even wounds on the face. The hair is weak and emaciated, the nails break, the child is weak, lethargic, does not get enough sleep, he has low blood pressure.

This condition does not appear immediately, a year and a half of torturing one's own body must pass in order to bring oneself to complete exhaustion. A characteristic sign of bulimia in its last stage is a sharply negative reaction of the teenager to food. And in extreme cases, up to 40% of children die from anorexia. It is important for parents to react in time to any oddities in the child's behavior concerning food, and then a difficult situation can be avoided at the very beginning.

Bulimia or wolfish hunger

Bulimia in adolescents is another serious mental disorder associated with food intake. Bulimia is classified as a complex eating disorder that is difficult to treat, especially in later stages, when the moment of destruction in the body is already missed by parents. With bulimia, a teenager experiences brutal surges of appetite, he eats everything he sees, then experiences unbearable shame for what he ate and gets rid of the food by inducing artificial vomiting. Laxatives and diuretics are common drugs that a teenager suffering from bulimia has in his medicine cabinet. At the same time, the teenager is obsessed with all sorts of diets and tries to get rid of what he thinks is excess weight through increased physical activity.

How to identify bulimia? First of all, you need to pay attention to what and how much the child eats. If his portions are extremely small, and then too large, sometimes the teenager refuses to eat at all, hides the fact that he ate, runs to the toilet immediately after eating to get rid of what he ate - these are signs of bulimia.

Bulimia can lead to irreversible consequences: metabolic disorders in the body, malfunctions of the kidneys, liver, and endocrine system. Cases of death are very common if parents do not keep an eye on the child and bulimia progresses to the last stage. This disease does not develop in one day. It may take six months to a year before irreversible consequences for the teenager occur.

Anorexia and bulimia are closely related and very difficult to treat. It requires maximum care and attention from parents, as well as strict control over the intake of medications prescribed by the doctor and the child's diet. He should eat at least 5-6 times a day in small portions. The diet should include proteins, fats and carbohydrates so as not to de-energize the child's body and give it everything it needs for development.

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Compulsive overeating

What is compulsive overeating? It is eating a huge amount of food in one sitting. In other words, it is uncontrolled food intake, and in large doses and at once. If your teenager is prone to this terrible disease, you need to see a nutritionist and endocrinologist.

Compulsive overeating can be the result of severe stress. For example, a child has lost someone in the family or is going through a love drama. The child compensates for this loss in the most accessible and fastest way - by eating something tasty. In this case, the areas of the brain that control appetite do not work. Therefore, a teenager is capable of eating a gigantic portion of pizza or a high-calorie pie.

Conpulsive overeating should be distinguished from sudden and severe brutal hunger, which occurs in a state of stress or after heavy physical work, or after a child has played outdoors for a long time. A one-time feeling of brutal hunger is normal for a teenager. But constant attacks of hunger over, say, a month should alert parents. In order not to guess the diagnosis yourself (it is easy to make a mistake), you need to take the time and take the child to the doctor.

Compulsive overeating can also be distinguished by the fact that the child tries to hide these attacks of hunger, as with bulimia. This distinguishes the painful condition from a normal healthy surge of appetite, which is not uncommon among teenagers. And overeating in an abnormal state is characterized by mood swings. The child may have depression or a neurotic condition, which he also tries to hide.

In these cases, a psychologist or psychotherapist will help, who will suggest what activities can distract the child from obsessive thoughts that cause depression. And a nutritionist who will prescribe a reasonable diet. And an endocrinologist will help choose drugs that help reduce appetite and improve mood, because it is sometimes impossible to cope with compulsive overeating using only psychological methods, without medications.

Teen Eating Disorders Conquered. What's Next?

Once bulimia, anorexia or compulsive overeating are nipped in the bud or defeated at any stage, you need to calm down and continue living happily. Right? Of course not. A teenager who once turned to experimenting with food as a way to compensate for something may do it again. Therefore, parents should not forget about controlling the diet and mental state of the child.

Any disease that concerns conscious undereating or overeating has psychological problems at its core, often deeply hidden. It could be a lack of love, attention or too low self-esteem. It could be the loss of a loved one, which the fragile psyche of a child is unable to bear. Therefore, the slightest change in the child's behavior, aimed at changing mood, desires and habits, should not go unnoticed by parents, even the busiest ones. And then the eating disorders of a teenager will not be able to affect the quality of his life. And yours too.