Posted on by — Leave a comment

Unlock Your Child’s Eating Disorder Recovery With Parent Coaching

Parent coaching session supporting a child with an eating disorder at home

As a parent, watching your child struggle with an eating disorder can feel like standing on the sidelines of a game you desperately want to win, but you don’t know the rules. You may feel frustrated, anxious, or even guilty, wondering if you could have done something differently. Many parents find themselves waiting for their child to get motivated for recovery or relying solely on professionals to implement treatment.

But here’s the truth: you are more powerful than you realize. Instead of waiting for your child to change, you can take an active role in their recovery. Parent coaching gives you the guidance, tools, and confidence to actively support your child at home, where change truly happens. By working with a parent coach who understands eating disorders and the parent-led treatment and recovery process, parents can create measurable steps for recovery rather than just hoping their child will want to get better.

One mother shared, “Before coaching, I felt frozen. Every mealtime felt like a minefield. Working with my coach helped me set clear, achievable goals that I could actually accomplish, like serving my daughter full portions of food rather than waiting for her to ask for more. It gave me clarity, purpose, and hope. Looking back, I wish I had started working with my parent coach earlier, because focusing on changing my own approach, rather than trying to change my daughter, made such a difference in her recovery.”

Parent calmly encouraging child to eat a balanced meal as part of eating disorder recovery

Why Parents Are the Most Important Part of Recovery

Parents spend more time with their kids than any therapist, nutritionist, or doctor. That consistent presence gives you unparalleled influence. Kids still need those professionals, but every small action you take, from sitting with your child at meals to checking in emotionally, also shapes their recovery.

One mother said, “Once I started working with a parent coach who understood eating disorders and the recovery process, I started setting measurable goals about what I was going to do, like active listening and feeding her meals and snacks. I could finally see progress. It was empowering to realize that my daily efforts mattered.”

Parent coaching equips you to confidently navigate this role, turning frustration into purposeful action.

Common Challenges Parents Face

Supporting a child with an eating disorder can trigger a whirlwind of emotions: fear, guilt, confusion, anger, and even isolation. Many parents experience:

  • Feeling helpless and unsure what to do
  • Worrying that their child is slipping further out of reach
  • Relying entirely on professionals or waiting for the child to “want” change
  • Experiencing stress, guilt, or anxiety around meals and daily routines

A father shared, “I was terrified of making things worse. Every mealtime felt like a battle, and we both often ended up yelling or in tears. Parent coaching helped me change that dynamic. I realized that even small, measurable goals about how I was approaching my child’s recovery create real change.”

Another parent reflected, “I felt so alone. Learning the steps I could take at home made me feel as if I had the power to implement change rather than having to wait for her to want it. I realized that I didn’t have to wait for my child to suddenly ‘want’ recovery; it could start with me.”

Parent coaching addresses these challenges by giving parents actionable strategies, confidence, and reassurance.

What Parent Coaching Offers

Parent coaching provides guidance, practical skills, and measurable strategies that empower parents to take action. These strategies are grounded in a deep understanding of how eating disorders work and, importantly, what it takes to recover from an eating disorder. With a parent coach, parents can turn abstract hope into tangible steps for recovery.

1. Education on Eating Disorders

Understanding your child’s behaviors, triggers, and misconceptions reduces fear and uncertainty. One parent said, “I used to think every food refusal meant I was failing. Learning the science behind eating disorders helped me separate my guilt from what was actually happening.”

Education also helps parents translate their child’s behavior so they can respond differently, recognize early signs of recovery, patterns in emotional triggers, and ways to respond effectively without increasing eating disorder behaviors.

Parent and child having a 5-minute emotional check-in conversation at home

2. Practical Skills for Daily Support

Coaching teaches meal support techniques, communication strategies, and emotional regulation skills. Parents learn to set small, actionable goals that can be incorporated into daily life. 

For example, one goal might be an emotional check-in, where the parent engages in a five-minute conversation with their child every day, using open-ended questions to explore feelings. Another goal could empower parents to serve full meals and snacks without making changes based on the child’s demands or refusals, helping create consistency and support around eating.

A mother shared, “Learning to sit with my son without giving in or giving up, offering support instead of commands, and noticing small wins completely changed our evenings. It wasn’t about perfect meals, it was about progress.”

3. Guidance on Setting Boundaries and Structure

Parents often struggle with supporting their child without enabling unhealthy behaviors. Coaching helps provide consistency and safety while encouraging independence. 

For instance, parents might set goals such as having the child independently select one snack from a pre-approved list each day, or establishing limits on screen time during mealtimes to support focus and engagement. These strategies create clear boundaries while promoting autonomy, helping the child build healthy habits in a structured, supportive environment.

“I used to avoid conflict at all costs,” said one parent. “Now I can set boundaries with compassion, and my child respects them. It feels like a partnership instead of a battle.”

4. Building Confidence and Actionable Recovery Goals

Parent coaching breaks recovery into clear, measurable steps, helping parents see tangible progress. Many parents who are desperate to change their child’s behavior are surprised to discover that the fastest way to do so is by changing their own. 

For example, a parent might stop demanding that their child finish a plate and instead support them with empathy and calm consistency. Rather than begging a child to eat breakfast, a parent can set a firm boundary, such as “life stops until you eat.” Parents may also begin plating snacks and bringing them on a regular schedule, and approach emotional outbursts with curiosity instead of anger, seeking to understand and support rather than control. 

One parent reflected, “Having concrete steps to follow made me feel like I could actually help my daughter recover, rather than just waiting and worrying. Each small win gave both of us hope and momentum.” Parent coaching reassures you that your actions matter, giving you the tools to feel capable, empowered, and effective in supporting your child’s recovery.

Parent tracking recovery goals with child during eating disorder coaching

How Coaching Empowers Parents at Home

Parent coaching transforms feelings of helplessness into purposeful action. Rather than waiting or feeling isolated, parents learn to implement home-based strategies that support recovery every day, respond to behaviors with confidence instead of fear or uncertainty, and create an environment that fosters long-term positive change. 

Working with a parent coach also makes progress visible and achievable. As one father shared, “I was so deep in the weeds that it was hard for me to see when we were making progress. Having my coach point out progress, which was often invisible to me, gave me confidence and hope, and kept me going when things seemed impossible. It was exactly when things got really hard that they started to turn around. I had to stay in the game to see that happen, and that wouldn’t have been possible without our parent coach.” 

Coaching further helps parents navigate emotional challenges such as mealtime anxiety, marital tension, sibling dynamics, and guilt, making home life calmer, more structured, and supportive for the whole family.

Measuring Progress and Celebrating Wins

One of the most powerful aspects of parent coaching is having someone by your side to track progress and celebrate small wins. Working with a coach helps parents notice subtle improvements in behavior, mood, or family interactions, such as a child finishing a meal without conflict, asking for a food they haven’t wanted in months or years, showing signs of confidence and security, expressing more affection, or demonstrating trust in their parents. 

Celebrating these wins with a trusted coach who knows how eating disorder recovery works reinforces effort and builds confidence for parents, helping them stay committed during the difficult recovery process. As one mother shared, “Recognizing even one small victory each time I met with my parent coach made the recovery process feel hopeful and achievable. It reminded me that my efforts were making a difference, and that my investment in learning and growing was paying off.”

Who Can Benefit From Parent Coaching

Parent coaching is helpful for:

  • Parents of children at any stage of an eating disorder
  • Parents who feel stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure what to do
  • Parents seeking practical skills rather than theoretical advice

No matter your child’s age or stage of recovery, parent coaching can give you the knowledge, tools, and confidence to actively support them at home. 👉 Learn more about parent coaching for kids with eating disorders. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Can parent coaching really help with eating disorders?

Yes. Coaching equips parents with practical skills and confidence to create a supportive home environment, which is often more impactful than therapy alone.

What skills will I learn in parent coaching?

Parents learn evidence-based parent-led treatment, meal support techniques, effective communication strategies, emotional regulation skills, boundary-setting, and how to create actionable SMART goals.

How soon can I see results at home?

Results vary depending on your child’s stage of recovery and your consistency, but parents often notice improved communication, reduced conflict, and measurable progress toward recovery goals within weeks.

Can parent coaching help if my child resists recovery?

Yes. Coaching teaches parents how to set achievable steps that focus on parental behavior and routines rather than waiting for their child’s motivation, making progress possible even when resistance is high.

How do I manage my own stress while supporting my child?

Parent coaching includes strategies for self-care, mindfulness, and maintaining balance, helping parents stay resilient and confident.

You’ve Got This!

Parent coaching empowers you to step into your most important role in your child’s recovery. With a parent coach who understands eating disorders and recovery by your side, you can make a real difference at home, reducing stress and increasing confidence for both you and your child.

You are not alone. Many parents have been where you are now, feeling anxious, unsure, and overwhelmed. Parent coaching shows that change is possible, even when it feels out of reach. Your presence, your consistency, and your love are more powerful than you realize.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

How To Motivate When Your Child Doesn’t Want to Recover

Parent sitting with teen on couch, offering support during eating disorder recovery

Angela still remembers the moment she realized how serious things had become.

Her 16-year-old daughter, Mia, had stopped joining family meals weeks ago. When Angela gently encouraged her to eat, Mia snapped, “You don’t understand! I’m fine!” and stormed off.

Angela stood frozen, unsure whether to push harder or back off. She’d read about eating disorders and understood the risks, but every attempt to help seemed to make things worse. She felt trapped between fear and helplessness.

If you’ve been in Angela’s shoes, you know how excruciating it feels when your child resists recovery. You see the danger, but you can’t control their choices. You want to help, yet everything you try seems to backfire.

The good news? There are ways to motivate recovery that don’t rely on control or confrontation. In fact, the most effective motivation comes from connection, empathy, and gentle collaboration.

Parent patiently sitting near teen who seems withdrawn, showing support

Why “Motivation” Works Differently in Eating Disorder Recovery

When we think of motivation, we often imagine pep talks, tough love, or setting firm consequences. But eating disorders aren’t just about behavior, they’re rooted in deep emotional and neurobiological patterns. That means what looks like “refusal” or “stubbornness” is often fear and self-protection.

Food feels threatening. Gaining weight feels impossible. The eating disorder voice, the one whispering, “You’re safer if you don’t eat,” can feel stronger than even the most loving, impassioned, rational speech from a parent. So when parents push too hard, the child’s brain perceives it as danger, triggering more resistance and defiance. Recovery motivation isn’t about forcing compliance. It’s about creating safety so your child can take courageous steps toward change.

Step 1: Understand What’s Driving the Resistance

It’s natural to want to fix things quickly, especially when you see your child struggling. But the first step toward motivating recovery is slowing down to truly understand what’s behind their resistance. Instead of focusing on getting them to comply, start by wondering what might be fueling their fears. Ask yourself: What could my child be afraid of? What role might the eating disorder be playing in their life. Perhaps it’s providing a sense of control, safety, identity, or belonging?

When you approach your child from a place of curiosity rather than correction, everything begins to shift. Your child’s defenses lower because they feel seen, not managed. The goal isn’t to push them toward recovery, but to help them feel emotionally safe enough to take the next step on their own.

For example, when Rachel’s son refused to follow his meal plan, she used to argue and plead with him to eat. Eventually, she tried something different. Instead of insisting, she said gently, “Can you tell me what’s happening for you right now?” To her surprise, he began to share small pieces of what he was feeling. That simple moment of curiosity opened the door to connection, and connection is the foundation of motivation.

Step 2: Shift from Control to Connection

Control can feel like safety for parents, especially when you’re watching your child’s health decline and feel powerless to stop it. Yet eating disorders thrive in power struggles; the harder a parent pushes, the harder the disorder pushes back. The alternative to control isn’t permissiveness or ignoring medical needs, it’s connection. This means reframing your role from enforcer to collaborator, showing your child that you’re on their team rather than against them.

For example, instead of saying, “You have to eat or else…,” you might say, “I know eating feels hard, and I’ll stay with you while you try.” Or instead of, “You’re not trying hard enough,” you could offer, “I can see how scared you are. Let’s figure out what might make this step feel doable.” These subtle shifts in language communicate safety rather than threat. And when a child feels safe, their motivation to recover begins to grow from within rather than being forced from the outside.

Step 3: Learn What True Motivation Looks Like

In recovery, motivation is rarely straightforward. It’s often ambivalent; a mix of “I want to get better” and “I’m terrified to change.” This back-and-forth is completely normal and doesn’t mean your child isn’t trying. It simply reflects the inner conflict between the desire for freedom and the fear of losing what feels safe or familiar.

Motivational Interviewing, a counseling approach, teaches that the goal isn’t to convince someone to change, but to help them hear their own reasons for wanting change. As a parent, you can support this process by asking gentle, curiosity-based questions that invite your child to explore what recovery might mean for them.

Try asking things like, “What do you miss about life before the eating disorder?” or “What would be different for you if you didn’t have to think about food all the time?” You might also ask, “What’s one small step that could make things feel a little easier this week?” These kinds of questions, known as “change talk,” help your child connect with their own inner motivation. You’re not trying to talk them into recovery; you’re helping them own it.

Parent and teen embracing after difficult conversation, symbolizing repair and safety

Step 4: Repair the Relationship When Things Get Heated

No parent handles eating disorder recovery perfectly. There will be slammed doors, tears, and moments you wish you could take back. Recovery is messy and emotional for everyone involved. It brings out fear, frustration, and helplessness on both sides. The goal isn’t to stay calm all the time; it’s to know how to come back together afterward. The key isn’t perfection; it’s repair.

After a conflict, take a deep breath and acknowledge what happened with honesty and care. You might say, “I know that conversation didn’t go well. I got scared and probably sounded angry. I care about you, and I don’t want us to feel so far apart. Can we try again?” These words communicate accountability and love, showing your child that connection doesn’t end when things get hard. Over time, this kind of repair helps rebuild emotional safety, which is the foundation every recovery needs.

Step 5: Focus on the Process, Not Just the Outcome

It’s easy for parents to measure success by external milestones: calories eaten, weight restored, or therapy attendance. Those markers certainly matter, but true motivation often grows in the smaller, invisible moments that are easy to overlook. It might be the day your child tolerates a difficult meal, admits that part of them wants help, or lets you sit nearby without an argument. These are quiet victories, but they signal movement in the right direction.

When you notice and celebrate these micro-moments, you reinforce progress rather than perfection. You show your child that recovery isn’t about meeting expectations, it’s about building courage one step at a time. One father I worked with used to keep a small notebook where he tracked his daughter’s “small wins,” moments of openness, honesty, or bravery. Over time, those entries became stepping stones toward lasting recovery. His shift in focus from control to progress transformed not only his daughter’s motivation but the emotional tone of their entire home.

Parent taking a moment to practice self-care during child’s recovery

Step 6: Support Yourself Along the Way

Motivating your child’s recovery isn’t only about what you do for them, it’s also about how you care for yourself. Parents often reach a point of burnout after months or years of living with fear, guilt, and exhaustion. Yet your steadiness, not your perfection, is one of the most powerful motivators your child has. To show up with empathy and patience, you need to be resourced yourself.

Start by building a support system that holds you, too, whether that’s a therapist, a parent coach, or a support group of others who understand this journey. Practice self-compassion by reminding yourself that it feels hard because you love your child so deeply. And remember, it’s okay to take breaks from recovery talk. Moments of normalcy and connection like watching a movie together, going for a walk, or sharing a laugh, protect your relationship and remind both of you that life is more than the eating disorder.

You’re allowed to have your own feelings and needs. In fact, modeling self-care and emotional honesty shows your child that wellbeing is possible. The way you treat yourself becomes part of their recovery story, too.

Step 7: Use Evidence-Based Tools That Really Work

If you’re ready for clear structure and communication tools you can actually use, my Parent Guide + Workbook: How to Motivate Eating Disorder Recovery walks you step-by-step through the process. Inside, you’ll learn how to understand resistance, navigate conflict, and use practical scripts to stay calm and effective in the heat of the moment.

The workbook explores the psychology behind motivation, including why logic and reasoning alone often fall flat, and offers evidence-based strategies drawn from Motivational Interviewing and family systems approaches. You’ll find sample conversation scripts for moments of refusal or defiance, reflection exercises to deepen empathy and connection, and concrete guidance to help you respond rather than react.

This guide was created for real parents in real homes: no jargon, no judgment, just research-backed tools that bring calm, connection, and hope back into the recovery process.

When You Feel Hopeless, Remember This

If you’re reading this, it means you care enough to keep trying, and that’s the foundation of change. Even when your child rejects help, rolls their eyes, or shuts you out, your calm presence still matters. Every moment of connection, every soft repair, every “I’m here when you’re ready” you say plants a seed of safety that can grow into recovery motivation.

You Don’t Need To Have All The Answers.

You just need to keep showing up with love, curiosity, and patience.And you don’t have to do it alone.

If you want step-by-step tools to help you stay grounded and motivate your child toward recovery, download my Parent Guide + Workbook: How to Motivate Eating Disorder Recovery today.

You’ll gain practical scripts, communication frameworks, and the confidence to guide your child — without pushing them away.

Download the Guide Now → $29.99
Learn More About The Guide

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

How A Family Systems Eating Disorder Approach Offers Hope

How A Family Systems Eating Disorder Approach Offers Hope

When a child or teen is struggling with an eating disorder, it’s natural for parents to focus all their energy on helping their child recover. But eating disorders don’t occur in isolation; they exist within a larger family system that also needs attention, support, and healing. This is where a family systems approach to eating disorder treatment becomes essential, addressing not just the individual, but the entire family dynamic that influences recovery.

While parents don’t cause eating disorders, the family environment can play a significant role in either sustaining or disrupting disordered behaviors. Understanding and treating the family system is a powerful and essential step toward lasting recovery.

Why the Family System Matters in Eating Disorder Treatment

An eating disorder may reside in one individual, but it inevitably impacts everyone in the household. From disrupted mealtimes to strained relationships and constant tension, the disorder affects how the entire family functions. It often becomes the silent or not-so-silent centerpiece of daily life, influencing everything from holidays to homework to the way siblings interact.

Many children, teens, and adults in eating disorder treatment live with families, making it impossible to ignore the role that family dynamics play in either promoting healing or reinforcing illness. As time goes on, the eating disorder doesn’t just reflect the family system; it actively reshapes it. Arguments increase, roles become entrenched, and stress can run high. To promote sustainable recovery, the entire family—not just the child—must be part of the healing process through a family systems approach to eating disorder treatment.

What Is a Family System?

Human beings are social creatures designed to live in family groups. A family system is an interconnected ecosystem of thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and relationships. When functioning well, this system helps each member thrive emotionally and relationally. But when something like an eating disorder enters the mix, the system is disrupted.

Think of it like a garden. If one plant becomes sick, simply treating that plant without addressing the soil, water, and sunlight it receives won’t result in long-term health. Similarly, treating a child’s eating disorder in isolation without considering the family system they return to can limit progress and even lead to relapse. This is why a family systems approach to eating disorder treatment is so vital: it addresses the environment, not just the symptoms.

Family Patterns to Watch For

When a child is diagnosed with an eating disorder, several relational patterns in the family system can become obstacles to recovery. These patterns first appear as adaptive strategies, but over time, they may do more harm than good.

One common pattern involves relational triangles where family members take on specific roles such as the hero, the villain, and the victim. These roles keep everyone stuck in repetitive dynamics, and the child with the eating disorder often ends up cast as the victim or the problem. This pattern make it difficult for anyone in the family to grow or change, and it can stall recovery by reducing the child’s identity to their illness.

Another pattern is codependency and over-accommodation. Many parents, understandably, become highly focused on caregiving when their child is sick. However, without guidance, this can lead to unhealthy dynamics. Bending every rule to avoid conflict around food may seem helpful in the short term, but it can reinforce disordered behaviors. These patterns can create resentment among siblings, increase parental burnout, and maintain the eating disorder rather than disrupt it.

Finally, low emotional literacy and regulation can be a major barrier to eating disorder recovery. Emotional awareness and the ability to manage feelings are crucial for recovery. While therapists can teach children these skills, they are most powerfully learned and reinforced at home. If the family system lacks emotional tools or healthy ways of handling stress, it becomes harder for the child to practice and internalize the tools they’re learning in therapy. This is another area where a family systems approach to eating disorder treatment plays a key role: it enhances emotional development for the whole family, not just the child.

The Role of Parent Coaching in Treatment

Residential and outpatient treatment provide vital support for children with eating disorders, but these programs often overlook a key element: teaching the parents to emotionally evolve with their child. That’s where parent coaching comes in.

Supporting eating disorder recovery isn’t just about learning how to feed your child or monitor symptoms. It’s about transforming the family system to better support emotional co-regulation, identity development, and a sense of belonging. When parents engage in coaching, they learn how to show up with compassion and confidence instead of fear. They gain the skills to disrupt harmful dynamics, navigate setbacks, and build stronger relationships—not just with the child in treatment, but with all family members.

Without this support, it’s common for the child to become the “identified patient,” carrying the weight of all the family’s struggles. This creates isolation for them and prevents the family from doing its own emotional work. Parent coaching can prevent this by turning the focus back to connection, understanding, and growth for everyone.

Integrating a family systems approach to eating disorder means the entire household becomes a foundation for healing.

What Parents Can Do with a Parent Coach

Working with a parent coach gives you tools to support your child’s recovery while also nurturing your family’s well-being. One of the first things a coach can help with is establishing boundaries, expectations, and consequences that are recovery-supportive. This means setting clear guidelines that help your child feel both safe and respected. As these boundaries take shape, trust and psychological safety also begin to grow, creating an environment where your child feels emotionally secure.

In this safe space, active listening, empathy, and nonjudgmental communication become key tools. A coach will guide you in slowing down and listening more deeply, helping you respond to your child from a place of understanding rather than fear. This shift in communication helps reduce shame and defensiveness, fostering a sense of connection that is essential for healing.

Another vital part of parent coaching is helping you understand what’s really going on beneath the eating disorder. Many factors can contribute to disordered eating: perfectionism, trauma, anxiety, and family stress, among others. By identifying these layers, a coach can help you evaluate and improve the family system as a whole. You’ll begin to see how family culture, habits, and behaviors may be impacting your child’s progress, and start making adjustments that support recovery.

Additional Benefits of a Family System Parent Coach

Coaching also equips parents to respond with compassion and confidence during difficult moments. You’ll learn strategies to regulate your own emotional responses, model calm behavior, and avoid reinforcing unhelpful patterns. These new tools are especially helpful when dealing with setbacks, pauses in recovery, or events like vacations, summer camp, or the transition to college, all of which can destabilize progress if not approached with care.

Your coach will also help you build healthy habits as a family. This includes creating routines around eating, sleeping, moving, playing, and connecting. These shared experiences promote emotional safety and help the entire family function better together. Throughout the process, you’ll develop a culture of curiosity and a growth mindset, where challenges are met with openness rather than fear.

Finally, one of the most important aspects of parent coaching is learning how to care for yourself. Supporting a child in recovery is emotionally demanding, and it’s easy to neglect your own needs. A parent coach can help you recognize your stress, set boundaries, and practice self-compassion. When you tend to your own emotional well-being, you’re better equipped to support your child and model resilience. This individualized support is central to a family systems approach to eating disorder treatment, ensuring long-term growth and healing for every member of the family.

Final Thoughts

An eating disorder is not just a child’s problem. It is a family challenge. And when the entire family system is supported, healing becomes not only possible but sustainable. By engaging in parent coaching and working to shift your family dynamics, you help create an environment where recovery can take root and flourish.

Your love, your effort, and your willingness to grow alongside your child matter deeply. You don’t have to do it alone. With support, you can transform your family system into one that nurtures health, resilience, and connection for your child, and for everyone under your roof. That is the heart of a family systems approach to eating disorder treatment—healing the whole so the individual can truly thrive.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

How To Feed Your Relationship During Eating Disorder Recovery 

How To Feed Your Relationship And Really Motivate Eating Disorder Recovery 

“I keep trying to motivate my daughter into eating disorder recovery, but nothing I say seems to make a difference,” says Angela. “I need her to eat more and with less fuss, but it’s as if the more I tell her what to do, the less she listens. It’s incredibly frustrating and I don’t know what to do differently.” 

Like many parents, Angela has tried educating her daughter about the importance of nutrition and the value of recovering from her eating disorder. She wants to motivate recovery but has a feeling she needs to change her approach.

As she’s experienced first-hand, motivating a child into eating disorder recovery isn’t usually accomplished by creating the perfect argument. While food is important for treatment, eating disorders are about much more than food and are often tangled up in relational dynamics.

This is why nutrition information and speeches usually backfire. Motivating someone requires trust and emotional connection, and an authoritarian approach creates distrust and relational discord. 

A powerful way to motivate your child’s eating disorder recovery is to feed your relationship.

How can parents motivate eating disorder recovery?

Motivating someone requires trust, safety, connection, and autonomy. It begins not with telling but with listening and meeting your child’s deepest hunger for a secure relationship. 

“A lot of the parent’s role in recovery comes down to connection, the relationship, and emotional regulation,” says Rebecca Manley, founder of the Multi-Service Eating Disorders Association (MEDA), who has been working in the field of eating disorders for 34 years. 

“A child is not a behavior,” she says. “So what is beneath the behavior? Instead of focusing so much on, ‘She just won’t do what she’s supposed to do,’ or, ‘I can’t believe she’s doing this,’ let’s focus on the behavior and why it’s there. What does she need? What’s missing here? Because the eating disorder is the voice of the unmet need.”

The deepest hunger is a secure relationship

A child’s deepest hunger is a secure relationship with their parent. Feeding this hunger means being confident and attuned, providing a consistent, respectful, positive environment, and helping your child feel understood and accepted. 

Feeding your relationship increases your influence and motivates the behavior change you want. Eating gets easier when your child is emotionally and physically regulated with you. Combined with professional treatment and a good feeding strategy, your relationship can supercharge recovery.

Under every behavior is a need

When your child has disordered eating behaviors, it’s natural to think that the problem is what they’re doing with food. Indeed, we need to address their eating behaviors and regulate their eating environment as much as possible. This is what’s behind FBT and other feeding strategies.

But there’s more. Because very few eating behaviors show up in a vacuum, and most eating behaviors get a response from you and other important people in your child’s life. These responses shape the future of the disordered pattern. 

“Food is a big communicator, and how your child is eating can be anxiety-producing for parents,” says Rebecca. “An anxious parent will literally telegraph their anxiety to their kids without saying a word. And when anxiety gets telegraphed to the kid, they don’t feel safe. And if they don’t feel safe, they’re not going to eat in a regulated way.”

9 ways to feed your relationship

Here are a few ways parents can feed their relationship with their child, creating a more stable, secure connection: 

  1. Increase your emotional literacy and use emotional language with your child so they learn to express their emotional needs and ask for what they need
  2. Regulate your emotions, which creates the foundation for your child’s ability to self-regulate (your child can’t be more regulated than you are)
  3. Uphold high standards and a growth mindset, so they know you believe in their abilities and support them
  4. Maintain interpersonal boundaries, so they know you believe they can tolerate distress and builds resilience
  5. Show delight upon seeing your child so they know you enjoy their presence
  6. Be an active listener and listen more than you speak so your child feels heard and understood
  7. Show empathy and understanding of your child’s inner world and experience so they know they’re safe with you
  8. Avoid giving unsolicited advice unless it’s absolutely necessary and explicitly requested so they feel trusted and admired
  9. Control your need to control the situation so they learn to manage their own experience rather than rely on you to fix things

Build a more trusting and secure relationship

Of course handling a child with an eating disorder is tricky. “In every case, it’s a matter of tuning in and personalizing treatment,” says Rebecca. “But the common theme is helping the parent and child build a more trusting, secure relationship in which the parent can care for the child, and the child can receive that care and feel safe enough to eat.” 

When parents feel confident, kids sense safety rather than fear. When we calm down, they calm down. Of course, they may still struggle, but you can handle their feelings without becoming part of an anxious relational pattern. 

“If you think about it, the fundamental action of feeding your child is to want to meet their needs,” says Rebecca. “And when that doesn’t happen, it can feel like you were unsuccessful in doing the very thing you want to do most. Of course that creates anxiety for parents, which can be transmitted to the child” 

But when you learn your triggers and regulate your emotional responses to your child’s eating behaviors, you’ll meet your child’s deepest hunger for safety and a secure relationship with you. This will allow you to influence and motivate eating disorder recovery.

That’s what happened to Angela. “All this time I was unaware of how much my anxiety was affecting her eating,” she says. “Now that I see it, I’m feeding our relationship first. When I get frustrated about meals, I go back to our relationship and usually find the issue there rather than what’s on the plate.” 

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Transformative viewing of the Your Fat Friend film

Transformative viewing of the My Fat Friend film

The film Your Fat Friend is a documentary about fat activist Aubrey Gordon, an author, columnist, and podcaster. Gordon’s books, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat and You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People transformed the conversation about weight and health in moving yet wickedly funny ways. She’s the cohost of the podcast Maintenance Phase, which reaches millions and debunks wellness and weight loss trends with a delightful mix of fact and humor. 

The film shows us an inside look into Gordon’s path from anonymous blogger to NYTimes bestselling author and podcaster with millions of listeners. In addition to a lifetime of experiencing brutal weight stigma, Gordon was enrolled in a diet class in her early teens, which she says contributed to an eating disorder.

In July dietitian Lizzie Briasco and others in North Carolina organized a screening of the film, which provided an opportunity for eating disorder professionals and community members to gather and watch Gordon’s story in a supportive environment. Along with other informative materials, attendees were offered our Please Don’t Weigh Me Cards, which were created to counteract weight stigma at the doctor’s office.

Here’s Lizzie’s inside scoop of the event: 

How many people came?

We had 70 attendees – a full house! The event could not have gone better. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but we surpassed it.

Why do you think people came to the screening? 

People came to the screening because they were curious to learn more about the body liberation movement, find community, and learn more about sizeism/anti-fat bias through this film. 

They were looking for hope, connection, and the opportunity to feel seen, heard, and understood – and it was pretty clear they got that during both the film and our post-film discussion. By the end of the film, the whole room had laughed and cried together. It was magical to see, and very inspirational to hear people’s thoughts and insights afterwards. 

At the end of the day, we all want to feel like we’re a part of something – we don’t want to be alone. But that’s one of the biggest harms of sizeism – making people feel alone and vulnerable when, in reality, there’s a whole lot of other people struggling with similar feelings and lived experiences. To see so many people come together and realize this during this screening was awesome.

What was the vibe in the room?

The general vibe was anticipation, some apprehension, and excitement. We had a lot of resources and some activities for people to participate in which fostered some thought-provoking dialogue around people’s experiences with diet culture and sharing some of their own stories with friends and even some strangers who may have felt safer to talk with because of the atmosphere.

I observed the audience showing rapt attention, relief, grief, anger, surprise, and hope. I saw people laughing together, crying together, and friends rubbing friends’ backs. 

Some expressed frustration and anger at how much Aubrey’s family misses the mark at holiday gatherings by celebrating her work but then immediately makes negative food and body comments. I think the whole room was shocked, disappointed, confused, and hurt when we were watching the scene with the gluten-free, sugar-free birthday cake her dad got her. 

How did people feel after watching the film?

I think people felt gratitude, thoughtfulness, validation, anger, and hope. Everyone had very positive things to say about the film and screening in general. The most meaningful part for a lot of folks was someone finally saying what they have been trying to say their whole lives. 

Other things people highlighted were the very real danger that can come just from existing in a fat body, learning how cyclical (and ineffective) the diet/”wellness” industry is, and finding some relief in knowing that their bodies were never actually the issue–the messages they’ve received about their bodies pretty much their whole lives are.

Event Organizers & Sponsors

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Food Fright: How To Talk About Food With Kids And Teens

Food Fright: How To Talk About Food With Kids And Teens

Grace reached out to me with a common question, “I want to talk to my kids about food but it’s really scary with all the junk out there and my youngest doesn’t eat vegetables and my oldest is restricting; I don’t want to make things worse but I don’t know what to do.” 

Grace has two kids, and she worries about different problems with each. With her youngest, she worries about binge eating foods like chips and cookies. With her oldest, she worries about restrictive eating, skipping meals, and weight loss. She’s afraid that either or both are developing an eating disorder. And her fear leaves her paralyzed. “I don’t know what to do or say,” she says. “It seems like no matter what I say, it’s wrong for one or both of them. So I’m trying not to say anything, but that’s no good, either.”

She’s not alone in this fear, so to work through some options and ideas, I interviewed Heidi Schauster, MS, RD, CEDS-S, SEP. Heidi is a nutrition therapist and Somatic Experiencing (SE) Practitioner in the Greater Boston area who has specialized in eating and body-image concerns for nearly 30 years. Her most recent book, Nurture: How to Raise Kids Who Love Food, Their Bodies, and Themselves, addresses many of parents’ biggest concerns about raising kids with a positive relationship with food and their bodies. 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Free Guide: How Parents Can Help A Child With An Eating Disorder

Master the secrets to supporting a child with an eating disorder. Thousands of families like yours are stronger today because of these six vital lessons drawn from lived experience, best practices, and extensive study.

Get Your Free Cheat Sheet

Widespread food fear

One of the biggest challenges facing parents today is the tremendous quantity of moral judgment and fear around food. While this has been an issue for decades, the Internet and social media have amplified it. In the past, fearful food messages were limited to traditional media formats, which allowed for some gatekeeping of the message. It was imperfect at best, but there were limits on the quantity of information disseminated. 

Today, anyone can start a social media brand, blog, or Substack and share their personal and unqualified beliefs about food with millions of people. One of the best ways to go viral on these platforms is to stoke fear and confusion, then provide the illusion of certainty with a simple program or product guaranteed to bring results. Springboarding off diet culture’s proven playbook, individuals with no formal nutrition training and questionable intentions have massive audiences with whom they share alarming food messages. 

“There’s so much information out there about food and what you should eat and shouldn’t eat,” says Heidi. “We hear things like ‘This food is good and this food is bad.” There’s so much polarity. What I encourage parents to do is talk about food in a more pleasure-oriented way that centers connection. I encourage parents to make food with their kids and make mealtime pleasant because you want them to appreciate the other aspects of eating beyond nutrition.”

“In fact, I don’t think young kids need to learn much about nutrition,” says Heidi. “They have plenty of time to do that when they’re adults. More than anything, kids need to learn that food helps them get through their day and be able to focus at school. It helps them to be able to ride their bike and do all the things they like to do. And eating is a place and time where we rest, stop what we’re doing, and nourish ourselves and each other. I suggest we focus more on nourishment and less on nutrition.”

Kids learn about food by example

Diet trends go viral daily on social media, often suggesting we cut out certain nutrients or entire food groups. Parents do their best to be rational about restrictive diets. Nonetheless, children instinctually interpret food restriction as a symptom of fear. When food gets charged with fear, the risk of disordered eating, including binge eating, restriction, and purging, increases. 

“There’s so much fear around what we eat on the Internet,” says Heidi. “And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to take good care of your body and feed it well and take care of it. But fear-based messages around food for whatever reason are not helpful.”

“It’s common for parents to follow a prescribed plan or eliminate certain foods or whole food groups,” says Heidi. “Then it’s tricky to figure out how to communicate that to their kids. For example, they know their kids need carbohydrates, but the parent doesn’t want to eat them. So how do they navigate that space?”

“And my answer is you have to eat them,” says Heidi. “You do this partly for yourself because our brains and bodies need carbohydrates. But also, your kids are watching you. If you want them to eat a diverse, well-balanced diet and have an open palate, then you have to show them by example. They absolutely pick up on whether or not Mom is eating the same things as everybody else.”

Relaxing your food fear

Of course, parents don’t have absolute control over how their kids feel about food, but we are very influential. Since we are bombarded with daily messages about food fear, it’s important to model a secure, unafraid relationship with food. 

“I think being as relaxed as possible in our own relationship with food and our bodies is so helpful,” says Heidi. “As parents in this culture, we all must do our own work. We need to examine our biases around bodies and our attitudes about food so that we can be as relaxed as possible for our kids.”

“I think one of the reasons we get uptight about food is that our lives feel chaotic, and it feels good to have our ducks in a row about our food,” says Heidi. “But many times, it’s displaced control, and it’s not actually helpful. If the parent or the food environment is stressful or rigid and there’s a lot of anxiety around it, then children take that on.” 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Free Guide: How Parents Can Help A Child With An Eating Disorder

Master the secrets to supporting a child with an eating disorder. Thousands of families like yours are stronger today because of these six vital lessons drawn from lived experience, best practices, and extensive study.

Get Your Free Cheat Sheet

Managing disordered eating patterns

Parents can and should work on our own relationship with food. Meanwhile, if you’re seeing disordered eating behaviors in your child or teen, have them evaluated for an eating disorder. Beyond that, reading a book like Nurture can be very helpful. You can also work with a non-diet RD to create a meal structure and plan that works for your family. 

“I love it when families are willing to examine what they might be able to do differently in their family culture around food,” says Heidi. “I know that family culture around food isn’t the only influence on disordered eating, but it is important in the healing process to do what we can at home to create a nourishing environment.”

“This is not about saying you’re to blame if your kid has trouble with food or that it’s all about you,” says Heidi. “There are so many factors that put someone at risk for an eating problem of any type. But I think parents have influence and need support if they have a child struggling.” 

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

Posted on by

My daughter had an eating disorder I’d never heard of

OSFED eating disorder mom

This is a first-person story written by a mom who discovered her daughter has OSFED, the most common but little-recognized eating disorder with serious repercussions. Learn how she navigated finding out her daughter had OSFED and how they handle eating disorder recovery as a family.

By Serena Menken

As I waited to pick up my fifteen-year-old daughter Ellie from a partial hospitalization program at an eating disorders treatment center, a thought struck me:

“My daughter doesn’t look like the other teens here.”

The heavy, locked door swung open and a swarm of teens filed out to attach themselves to a parent. Most of the teens hid stick-thin legs in baggy sweats or pajama pants. I could see collarbones protruding and thin wrists peeking out of sleeves. The teens varied in height, in ethnicity, in gender. My daughter seemed like the only one who didn’t fit the mold for an underweight body. But she was just as sick as the rest of them.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Free Guide: How Parents Can Help A Child With An Eating Disorder

Master the secrets to supporting a child with an eating disorder. Thousands of families like yours are stronger today because of these six vital lessons drawn from lived experience, best practices, and extensive study.

Get Your Free Cheat Sheet

Stumbling on evidence

For years, I had worried about Ellie’s eating patterns. At times, she inhaled so much dessert at family dinner that she moaned in pain on the couch. Periodically, I would find bowls crusted with ice cream or the remains of frosting, hidden in her desk drawers or buried in her closet. When she was in fifth grade, we spent about six months living in other people’s homes while we hunted for a house with our realtor.

I remember stumbling upon a large stash of candy wrappers under Ellie’s bed, thinking, “We’ve only been here for a month. How did you manage to eat that much candy already and where did you get it?” As someone in long-term recovery from bulimia myself, I recognized the signs of compulsive overeating in my daughter. But I felt powerless to change her. 

Since toddlerhood, Ellie refused to eat certain foods, such as fruits and vegetables. The daycare provider blamed me: You pureed her food for too long. Even in junior high, Ellie had sensory issues around food. She loved meat but only if ketchup (the right ketchup) was available. Her two safe vegetables were canned pureed pumpkin, which my husband bought by the case, and spinach leaves dipped in ketchup. Her only fruit was applesauce. She hated the texture of all other produce.

I tried to expand her palate

I tried so many techniques to expand her palate: coaching, encouragement, bribery, putting hated foods on her plate, requiring her to take just one bite. None of it worked. I just thought she was a picky eater. I didn’t know this was another form of an eating disorder called ARFID (Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder).

In seventh grade, Ellie stopped eating lunch at school. When I found uneaten sandwiches in her lunchbox, I asked her what happened. She brushed it away, saying that she wasn’t hungry or her stomach hurt. She said that she felt anxious at school and preferred to eat at home.

When I called the pediatrician, he asked if she might have anorexic tendencies. What? I asked, dazed. No, Ellie doesn’t restrict. I even asked her point-blank and she denied it with an easy smile. I believed her. My daughter wouldn’t lie to me, right? Even when we took her to therapy, no one said that she had anything more than generalized anxiety disorder. 

Struggling and skipping meals

Fast forward to Ellie’s sophomore year in high school in Fall 2020. Ellie seemed more withdrawn and that she barely changed her clothes or bathed. I chalked it up to the stress of the pandemic, which shut down our entire city (including school) and forced us into isolation.

But when I looked more closely, I saw the truth: Ellie’s poor hygiene and isolation reflected the fact that she was struggling with depression. Ellie skipped family dinner more often than not, complaining of fatigue. Often, I woke up to find the kitchen covered in powdered sugar and cocoa powder, with a pan of brownies half-devoured on the stove. Something was going on with our daughter.

Thankfully, Ellie was ready to be honest. She shared with me that she was struggling with the desire to end her life. Months later, she admitted that she had an eating disorder. I’m thankful that we found a wise, supportive therapist who directed us, step by step, in Ellie’s recovery journey. This therapist also knew when Ellie needed a higher level of care, which brought us to an eating disorders treatment center. Ellie spent the next seven months in various programs, such as partial hospitalization, residential, and intensive outpatient.

Getting a diagnosis

The treatment center diagnosed Ellie with “Other-Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder” (OSFED), which I had never heard of. But OSFED is actually the most common eating disorder diagnosis for adults as well as adolescents, affecting all genders. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, the OSFED diagnosis “was developed to encompass those individuals who did not meet strict diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or binge eating disorder but still had a significant eating disorder.”

It is just as severe and life-threatening as other eating disorders. In Ellie’s case, her eating disorder manifests in binging, purging and restricting, in various ways. But it’s a more invisible disorder. Her body size doesn’t reveal the chaos inside her soul.

Feeling like an outsider in eating disorder treatment

There were moments when Ellie felt like an outsider because of her OSFED diagnosis. When the treatment center celebrated teens who overcame their fear of gaining weight to taking a second helping of cake, Ellie felt dissonance, knowing that she struggled with the opposite problem.

When her nutritionist tried different methods to help her eat multiple portions of dessert, Ellie felt too shy to tell her that the binge voices in her head were getting louder, not quieter. When our insurance company threatened to stop approving residential treatment after ten days, because Ellie’s weight was stable (although her disorder was anything but stable), she felt betrayed. 

Despite those moments of dissonance, the structure, support and tools of the treatment center were instrumental in helping Ellie recover. Because an eating disorder is an eating disorder.

Deception, hiding, and control

Eating disorders have similar characteristics, even when the behaviors look different. They specialize in deception, hiding and control. Eating disorders are often an attempt to conceal or manage deep pain. They result in self-hatred and shame.

It helped me to separate the eating disorder from my daughter.  I realized that in Ellie’s darkest moments, the eating disorder was controlling her thoughts and behavior, which meant that she acted out in ways that shocked and disappointed me. I could have more compassion when I understood her illness better. I remembered how I had engaged in similar dark behaviors as a bulimic teenager. 

We found our way forward by asking for and receiving as much support as we could find. For patients, the treatment center community offered classes, group therapy, exposure therapy, nutritional support, monitored meals together and social learning.

Getting parenting support

For parents, the center offered parent classes, which I attended as much as possible, plus weekly sessions with the therapist and nutritionist to learn how to support our daughter.

With the nutritionist’s coaching, I took on the role of supporting Ellie’s meals at home, through the Family-Based Treatment (FBT) model. That meant that I followed her nutritionist’s food plan to plate all meals, support Ellie in eating them (or offer liquid supplement when she refused) and supervised her post-meals to prevent purging.

Ellie both hated and needed this structure. She resented and resisted meals, so we battled it out. It took awhile for me to learn how to firmly stand up to my daughter’s eating disorder when she refused to eat. Parenting my daughter through an eating disorder became a part-time, if not full-time job, in addition to the one that I was paid for. 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Free Guide: How Parents Can Help A Child With An Eating Disorder

Master the secrets to supporting a child with an eating disorder. Thousands of families like yours are stronger today because of these six vital lessons drawn from lived experience, best practices, and extensive study.

Get Your Free Cheat Sheet

Recovery was like a rollercoaster

Ellie’s recovery journey was like a rollercoaster. She progressed, then paused, then progressed, and then relapsed into even more self-destructive tendencies. As she healed, her eating disorder fought harder. She missed an entire semester of school because she was fighting for her life in a treatment center.

Often, it felt like our lives revolved around Ellie’s needs and appointments. My husband and I wrestled with how to support Ellie’s siblings, as we worried about neglecting them in the midst of attending to the crises frequently surrounding their sister.

After seven months in a treatment center, with almost constant parental supervision (prescribed by Ellie’s therapist) for at least three months, Ellie healed enough to discharge from treatment. In the past three years, we have made Ellie’s recovery a priority in terms of our time, our finances, and our activities. Ellie still meets with an eating disorder therapist twice a week and a nutritionist weekly.

Ongoing support

My husband, Ellie and I meet regularly with a family therapist (who specializes in eating disorders) who guides us in supporting Ellie, working through conflict, and bringing challenges to the surface before they blow up. This family therapist supported us when Ellie relapsed and guided us into appropriate next steps. She helped us learn more about how to support our daughter as we uncovered other conditions like ADHD.

While Ellie still has her challenges, she knows that my husband and I are in this with her. She knows that she has a strong support team to walk her through anything that comes up. And I’m grateful that the days of binging, restricting and purging are in the rearview mirror, as Ellie keeps choosing the recovery path, one day at a time.

Serena Menken writes books and articles that capture the unique moments of gut-wrenching pain and heartfelt joy experienced by parents of teens with mental health concerns. She counts each day of her three decades of recovery from bulimia as a gift.  However, nurturing her oldest daughter through a similar disorder proved to be even more challenging and ultimately rewarding. When she’s not writing, Serena works full-time as a nonprofit leader, enjoys her three teenage children, and bikes through forest preserves with her husband. You can find Serena at her website and on Substack. 

See Our Collection of Eating Disorder Recovery Stories

Posted on by

Parent guide to how childhood trauma causes emotional eating

How does childhood trauma cause emotional eating and can parents help?

Emotional eating is a way to define a disordered way of eating, and it’s strongly associated with childhood trauma. 

That’s what led Brittany to call me about her daughter Candice. “I’m worried that she’s emotional eating,” Brittany said. “Candice has always been anxious, and she’s experienced some serious social and medical trauma. She’s always loved sweets, but lately, it’s as if she’s addicted to cake and candy. She just can’t get enough. It’s causing her a lot of pain, and she cries because she’s so miserable. I want to help her, but I don’t know how.” 

I understand. Watching your child go through this can be excruciating. Brittany has been doing the best she can by trying to limit sweets, but it’s backfiring. “The less access she has to sweets, the worse it gets,” she says. “I keep finding evidence that she’s eating them every day even though she swears to me she doesn’t want to. She keeps begging me to help, but I don’t know what to do.” 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Free Guide: How Parents Can Help A Child With An Eating Disorder

Master the secrets to supporting a child with an eating disorder. Thousands of families like yours are stronger today because of these six vital lessons drawn from lived experience, best practices, and extensive study.

Get Your Free Cheat Sheet

I know how badly Brittany wants to help Candice feel better, so I walked her through how childhood trauma can impact emotional eating and how common approaches like limiting sweets can make the problem worse, not better. Brittany changed her approach and is now on the path of supporting her daughter with childhood trauma and disordered emotional eating.

Does childhood trauma cause emotional eating?

Yes, childhood trauma is a major cause of disordered emotional eating. Disordered eating behaviors span a range of severity, from disordered emotional eating to binge eating disorder. Disordered eating is strongly associated with trauma. According to a recent study, over 80% of Americans diagnosed with binge eating disorder experienced childhood abuse, neglect, and other forms of trauma.

Many people can imagine using food as a psychological coping behavior. It’s commonly suggested that food and eating are a disordered way to soothe unhappy thoughts and feelings.

This suggests that disordered emotional eating is a mental process that can be changed with new/better education. It perpetuates the false belief that eating disorders are a choice and that someone can simply “choose” to recover from them. However, disordered eating is rarely an educable condition. In fact, most people who have disordered eating are exceptionally well educated about what they “should” and “shouldn’t” do with food.

Effective treatment must address the biological, psychological, and social causes of eating disorders. 

Food is naturally soothing for many complex biological reasons. Therefore, all eating is inherently emotionally-driven. Disordered emotional eating is rarely a simple mental issue of seeking comfort through food.

Emotional eating, binge eating, and food addiction cause a great deal of distress and are not mental choices. It’s not as simple as saying “I feel stressed, so I’ll eat,” and lacking the self-control to do otherwise. Rather, several physiological cues including hormones and brain pathways drive obsessive thoughts about food and a compulsion to eat beyond comfort. 

How does trauma impact emotional eating?

Trauma has a physiological impact on the body that can lead to adverse health consequences including disordered eating. These consequences are not due to active mental choices. They are responses to internal signals and drives outside the person’s rational, decision-making brain. 

Keep in mind that almost all the brain’s activity is non-conscious. Scientists estimate anywhere from 80-95% of how our brain functions is non-conscious. Therefore, most of our behaviors are “driven” more than “chosen.”

For example, researchers have identified a particular brain circuit that is susceptible to the impact of trauma and chronic stress, leading to its dysfunction. Additionally, certain hormones, including acyl-ghrelin, often called the “hunger hormone,” are associated with emotional eating and binge eating. These processes are completely outside of conscious awareness or choice and can’t be overcome with food rules and willpower.

How do I know if my child has disordered emotional eating?

Ultimately all eating is emotional. It’s encoded in our DNA to find food emotionally stimulating and pleasurable.

There’s a difference between everyday emotional eating and disordered emotional eating. It’s important not to pathologize kids’ natural hunger and appetite. For example, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying sugary treats, salty snacks, and other highly palatable food. It’s genetically programmed.

Likewise, it’s completely normal for people to occasionally eat more than is technically necessary to meet their caloric needs, even to the point of physical discomfort. 

On the other hand, if your child appears to be obsessed with food or feels a compulsive need to eat beyond comfort repeatedly, they may be struggling with disordered emotional eating. Obsession is defined as having constant thoughts, cravings, and fantasies about food. Compulsion means feeling as if you are out of control and there’s a disconnect between conscious choice and behavior. The key difference between intuitive eating and disordered eating is not so much what’s happening with food but how it feels. Someone with disordered eating experiences extremely high levels of distress related to food and eating.

If you’re concerned that your child has disordered emotional eating, please reach out to a trained non-diet professional. It’s vitally important that you seek someone who operates from a non-diet or anti-diet perspective to avoid adding more shame to your child’s relationship with food.

What types of childhood experiences create trauma associated with emotional eating?

Childhood experiences of trauma are highly correlated with disordered emotional eating, including:

  • Emotional neglect, emotional abuse, physical neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse
  • Victimization and shaming, including teasing, criticism, bullying, and social exclusion
  • High levels of emotional dysregulation
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
  • Elevated adverse childhood experience scores (ACEs)
  • High levels of childhood cumulative trauma and emotional abuse

The link between childhood trauma and disordered emotional eating has been largely overlooked in both scientific literature and common culture due to outdated beliefs that eating is 100% within mental control. The belief that willpower and food rules can overcome disordered eating is outdated and counterproductive.

People with disordered emotional eating are accused of poor judgment, intellectual capacity, and morality. They are given nutrition information, told to “just eat less,” and “just stop eating.” This approach increases trauma around food, eating, and self-worth. In other words, common approaches to disordered emotional eating increase trauma and make things worse.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Free Guide: How Parents Can Help A Child With An Eating Disorder

Master the secrets to supporting a child with an eating disorder. Thousands of families like yours are stronger today because of these six vital lessons drawn from lived experience, best practices, and extensive study.

Get Your Free Cheat Sheet

Rather than assuming that people who have disordered emotional eating are lazy, weak, or immoral, we should support them in getting treated for childhood emotional neglect, abuse, and trauma. As long as we continue to treat emotional eating as a moral failure, we impose further trauma upon someone who is already traumatized.

What are the symptoms of emotional eating caused by childhood trauma?

Most disordered emotional eating behaviors are driven by non-conscious processes including brain activity, hormones, and hunger cues. We must be careful not to be too focused on the thoughts and beliefs that surround disordered emotional eating since these are often an over-simplification of a complex behavioral pattern. 

Observable behaviors of emotional eating

  • Eating large quantities of food
  • Feeling full but continuing to eat anyway
  • Eating to the point of physical discomfort
  • Intentionally restricting food for long periods 
  • Forgetting or avoiding eating for long periods

Thoughts and beliefs about emotional eating

  • I’m always hungry
  • I can’t stop myself
  • It’s as if I’m controlled by food
  • I use food as a way to cope when I have big feelings
  • It feels as if I’m addicted to food
  • I forget to eat and get too hungry
  • When I feel stressed or excited, I eat
  • I want to stop, but I can’t
  • I hate myself for eating this way
  • Make sure I don’t do it by never buying that food
  • Keep me away from that food

Many times parents, loved ones, and well-meaning healthcare providers assume thoughts and beliefs are the cause of emotional eating. However, this can lead to inadequate and even harmful treatment approaches. 

For example, when providers assume thoughts are the cause of emotional eating, they may suggest treatment that limits access to food and minimizes eating pleasure. Paradoxically, this approach often increases hunger, which cues the drive to binge eat. In other words, it backfires and causes more harm than good. 

It also perpetuates the experience of trauma by treating the person as if they are bad or make bad choices.

What are the different types of emotional eating?

There is a continuum of eating behavior that ranges from intuitive eating to various forms of emotional eating. The symptoms differ in terms of severity, level of obsession, degree of compulsiveness, and how much a person is distressed by their behavior. Here is one way of identifying different patterns of eating: 

1. Intuitive eating

This is when a person eats according to hunger and appetite approximately every 2-5 hours throughout the day. They typically don’t feel either extreme hunger or extreme fullness and have a peaceful relationship with food. 

2. Mindless eating

This is when a person eats without paying attention to hunger cues but purely in response to emotional or environmental cues. For example, they may eat in response to feeling stressed or bored. Or they may eat because the food is in front of them, such as when there’s a candy jar on the counter. 

3. Restrictive + binge eating

This is when a person restricts food in an attempt to control their behavior, only to become overwhelmingly hungry and have a binge eating episode to make up for missed calories. While this may look like emotional eating, oftentimes it is a response to physiological hunger cues, though they are often below the level of consciousness. 

4. Binge eating episodes

These are when a person is not restricted and feels adequately fed but eats a large quantity of food in a short period. Research has shown that this is often in response to a physiological, non-conscious drive to eat rather than a mental choice. 

5. Binge eating disorder

This is when a person has repeated binge eating episodes. Many times these people are in a restrict + binge eating cycle. Increasingly, binge eating disorder is seen as a physiological response to restriction combined with differences in brain functioning and hormones. Binge eating disorder is strongly associated with a history of weight-based teasing and criticism from family, peers, and healthcare providers, repeated experiences of weight stigma, restrictive eating patterns, and weight cycling caused by dieting.

How to help your child who is using emotional eating to cope with childhood trauma

Your child can recover from both childhood trauma and emotional eating, and parents are key to the process. You can help your child heal from their trauma and support them in moving towards recovery from emotional eating. Here are five things to keep in mind when parenting a child who has childhood trauma and disordered emotional eating:

1. Inventory past experiences

Seek to understand how traumatic experiences have impacted your child. In addition to classic forms of trauma, look for very common but often overlooked forms of emotional trauma. For example, have they been teased, bullied, and criticized by peers, coaches, teachers, healthcare providers, siblings or parents? This is especially common if they are/were in a larger body.

2. Process your feelings

Get support if you feel guilt or shame about your child’s experiences. Parents are all doing the best we can, but sometimes our children still experience trauma in childhood. Before we can support them fully in recovery, we need to heal ourselves. Get professional support and guidance so you can process your feelings about your child’s trauma. 

3. Seek trauma treatment for your child

Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most common therapy in the United States, but it’s not often the best approach to healing childhood trauma. Seek options like EMDR, somatic therapy, trauma-informed therapy, and psychodynamic therapy, which are generally better at uncovering and addressing childhood trauma. 

4. Create a positive eating environment

Rather than try to change or fix your child’s eating behavior right now, begin by improving their eating environment. Trauma is healed in loving, accepting relationships. How you approach eating with your child can either help or hinder their care, so get some guidance about increasing and improving your child’s eating experiences with you. The less you try to “fix” your child’s eating by controlling their access to food, the greater your chance of leading them toward healing their relationship with food.  If you need support with what to feed your child, find a non-diet dietitian who can help.

5. Ditch the myths

Stop repeating popular myths about emotional eating. Most people see emotional eating as an issue of how someone thinks and what they do with food. They repeat popular myths like “just tell yourself to stop eating,” or “just stay away from sweets,” or provide nutritional facts and information. These approaches are popular and make a lot of intuitive sense, yet they are harmful and dangerous. Most people who have disordered eating are already more aware of common food rules and nutritional advice than the average person. Eating myths cause harm by increasing a sense of shame and judgment for people who have childhood trauma and emotional eating. Simple, easy fixes that have been repeated ad nauseam for decades don’t address childhood trauma and emotional eating. And they can cause more harm than good. Please seek support and guidance to optimize your ability to support your child.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

See Our Parent’s Guide To The Causes Of Eating Disorders

Posted on by

What can parents really do to help kids with ARFID?

ARFID eating disorder

Avoidant Restrictive Feeding Intake Disorder, called ARFID, is a type of eating disorder that’s characterized by many of the same symptoms as anorexia, but it differs in that the reason for food restriction is not driven by a desire for weight loss. People with ARFID are unable to meet their body’s nutritional and caloric requirements, which results in physical, cognitive, and emotional symptoms. They may also experience social anxiety and isolation, since eating with others can be difficult for them. 

There are three main ways a person with ARFID, a type of eating disorder, restricts food: 

  • Eating enough food: someone with ARFID may be disinterested, dysregulated, or disgusted by food, which leads them to under-eat even if they know they should and/or want to eat. 
  • Eating regularly: someone with ARFID may forget to eat or not notice their hunger signals, which leads them to skip meals and snacks, creating a vicious cycle of under-eating and over-hunger that sometimes but doesn’t always result in binge eating. 
  • Eating a variety of food: someone with ARFID may have a very limited list of foods they are willing and/or able to eat, which can lead to missing certain nutrients and negative impacts on their ability to eat in social settings.

How do I know if my child has ARFID or another eating disorder?

Typically a person with ARFID does not have eating disorder symptoms like a drive for weight loss or body image disruptions. However, because we live in a weight-conscious society, weight changes due to ARFID can become entangled in the disorder. For example, if ARFID results in weight loss and people praise the weight loss, the person with ARFID may develop a weight-loss mentality. In this way, a drive for weight loss can become a secondary symptom of ARFID. Other times the disorder may shift to a different eating disorder like anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder.

People with ARFID typically show signs early in life, and are frequently identified as “picky eaters.” The average age of diagnosis is 12 years old. But it has been documented in children as young as six years old. Unlike other eating disorders, the rate of diagnosis for ARFID is equal for boys and girls. 

Why does a child with ARFID struggle to eat?

ARFID is still a new diagnosis, meaning the research is in its early stages. There appears to be a link between ARFID and highly sensitive nervous systems. This includes the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch), interoception (internal organ feedback), and neuroception (the sensation of how other people are feeling). ARFID may be likely to show up alongside neurodivergent conditions like autism and ADHD. People with ARFID are also likely to have anxiety and mood disorders, which are also associated with a highly sensitive nervous system. 

Related Articles

People with ARFID struggle to eat because of many reasons, including:

  • Extreme sensitivity to the experience of eating as it impacts smell, touch, taste, temperature, appearance, and sounds of themselves eating and other people around them eating.
  • Very high sensitivity to internal cues and sensations like hunger, nausea, appetite, and fullness.
  • Extreme emotional dysregulation and anxiety around mealtimes, particularly when others are feeling stressed, upset, worried, etc.
  • Anxiety about having a negative outcome from eating like vomiting or choking.
  • Lack of interest in eating and/or forgetting to eat.
  • Chronic abdominal pain with no known cause.

Importantly, someone can have any one of these, a combination, or all of them. Eating issues are complex and layered. Beyond the food itself, eating is social and emotional by design, so relationships can both impact and maintain disordered eating. One person with ARFID rarely looks like another person with ARFID—there are countless presentations of the disorder. 

Food Refusal & Picky Eating Printable Worksheets

Give your child the best tools to grow into a confident, calm, resilient eater!

Learn More

What is the impact on families when a child has ARFID?

Raising a child with ARFID makes something we tend to take for granted, feeding our child, full of stress and strain. Most parents spend years feeling frustrated. They hope their child will naturally grow out of their picky eating habits. It can take years before they realize that there’s something more serious going on. 

Here are some of the things parents who have kids with ARFID say: 

  • Her doctor says I have to feed her more because she’s lost weight, but I’m at my wits’ end about how to do that.
  • Weight loss and malnutrition mean that I have to get my kid to eat, but he doesn’t want to, so every meal feels like a battle of wills.
  • He was always picky, but before he could eat enough to keep growing. Then he hit puberty, and his menu got even more restricted. Every meal is a battle. I thought getting a diagnosis would help, but I still feel confused by it.
  • My child never eats the same things everyone else wants to eat, so I end up being a short-order cook.
  • She refuses to try things that every other child in her class loves, no matter what we do.
  • Our family meals are uncomfortable, sometimes even impossible, because he’s so angry and resistant.
  • My child demands the exact same meal every day, and I worry that she’s not getting the nutrition she needs.
  • At most meals he gets into a bad mood. He’s rude and aggressive at mealtimes, making everyone uncomfortable.
  • My child won’t eat at school, family functions, events, or anywhere there are other people who might look at her or make fun of her for what she’s eating or not eating.
  • It seems like we can’t go to restaurants at all anymore because they almost never have something on the menu that works for his restrictive diet.
  • I feel so sad knowing that her peers don’t understand, tease, and even bully her for her food and eating choices at school.

What does ARFID treatment look like?

As with all eating disorders, the first treatment task is weight restoration if needed. Weight restoration is highly individualized and typically a trained healthcare provider should establish the goals. Professionals who typically have the most training in this are registered dietitians (RDs). They have undergone specialized eating disorder training, particularly those who have received training in family-based treatment. 

Typically but not always, weight restoration means bringing the child in line with their historical growth curve. Usually a child has steady growth along a weight trajectory before the eating disorder impacts weight and growth. For example, a child was in the 50th percentile for weight at ages 2, 4, 6, and 8. The historical weight data should drive weight restoration goals.

Beyond weight restoration, ARFID treatment focuses on: 

  • Building emotional regulation skills for eating situations
  • Eating regular meals and snacks with support from others 
  • Normalizing eating enough food regularly
  • Reducing anxiety around food and eating experiences
  • Gradually increasing food variety and/or adding supplements to balance nutritional needs

Treating ARFID doesn’t end when weight is stabilized, because it’s about much more than weight. Being underweight can increase symptoms. However, gaining weight doesn’t remove the underlying sensitivities that likely drove the disorder in the first place. 

What can parents do to help kids with ARFID?

While recovery from ARFID is hard, it’s possible. And there’s a lot of evidence that family participation makes a big difference! 

The most common method for weight restoration is family-based treatment for ARFID (FBT-ARFID). This can be done with a therapist, coach, dietitian, or DIY using books and online resources like FEAST. The parent-based training program Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions-ARFID (SPACE-ARFID) is also effective.

While parents can certainly DIY eating disorder recovery, it’s usually best to get support and expert advice along the way. ARFID, like any eating disorder, is a difficult and frustrating condition to parent through. When parents are on the frontline, they really benefit from getting help and training.

Signs of recovery from ARFID

Recovery from ARFID, like any eating disorder, is definitely possible! Your child may always be sensitive to food and eating situations. However, they can leave disordered behavior behind and learn healthy, adaptive coping methods that help them thrive. 

Here are some of the things parents who have kids who recovered from ARFID say: 

  • It took effort, and we all played a part in recovery, but today things are a lot easier for her, and she’s able to maintain her energy levels and eat socially, which is our primary goal.
  • I’ve noticed so much less stress at mealtimes, and now we’re all enjoying our time together so much more. 
  • Getting to that goal weight was so important, and I feel like in many ways I got my sweet boy back from the brink. His mood improved and his anxiety levels dropped with every month he stayed within his weight range, and things have been going really well!
  • It feels like a chicken and an egg situation! She was so resistant to eating anything, but it took eating a little more at each meal, eating more regularly, and slowly trying new things to start being able to eat like she had before the disorder. 
  • The biggest difference is that he’s so much less depressed and anxious. I thought we were looking at a lifetime of medication, but it turns out that the things we learned in recovery have turned everything around, and the future looks much brighter now. 

All types of eating disorders are hard to manage, but recovery is possible, and parents can help!

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

See Our Parent’s Guide To The Different Types Of Eating Disorders

Posted on by

How to set boundaries with grandparents about weight and eating habits

How to set boundaries with grandparents about weight and eating habits

Setting boundaries with grandparents who make negative or inappropriate comments about weight and eating habits can be a challenging task. However, it is essential to handle these situations assertively, as they can have a lasting impact on our children’s body image and relationship with food.

Katie’s story

Katie’s mother-in-law frequently mentions her son Liam’s rounded stomach. She makes it sound as if it’s a sweet joke, but everyone can feel the tension in the room when it happens. It’s not a sweet joke, but a compulsive expression of her weight stigma. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, Liam feels worse about his body each time he sees his grandmother. 

Of course Liam feels bad. Because regardless of the intention or exactly how the comments are phrased, they send the message that Liam’s stomach is something his grandmother is observing and thinking about. These comments imply that Liam’s stomach’s appearance is part of his grandmother’s love and acceptance for him. Katie knows it’s her and her wife’s responsibility to change this narrative for their children, but it feels impossible! 

“My wife’s mother is stubborn and completely stuck in diet culture,” says Katie. “We’ve tried and tried, but nothing shifts this pattern. I feel like the only option is to go no-contact, and that’s not what we want to do, because there are positive aspects to the relationship despite all the body-based comments.”

When grandparents make inappropriate comments about our children’s weight or eating habits, many of us may feel frozen, unsure of how to respond. While this reaction is understandable, we do have to address these harmful practices. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to go no-contact. It might be better for everyone if you become more assertive about enforcing your family’s boundaries.

Brody’s story

Brody’s dad has always made it a practice to scrutinize and comment on people’s food choices. “I think he’s so obsessed with his own eating and weight that it spills out onto everyone else,” says Brody. “I barely escaped his food-negative parenting practices, and I don’t want my daughter Miriam to have to do the same.” 

When Brody tells his dad to stop talking about food, he dismisses the objections by claiming he is not being critical, just stating the facts. “He thinks it’s OK to talk about people’s plates because it’s supposedly a simple observation, but there’s so much more going on,” says Brody. Like most people, Brody can sense that his father’s comments about eating habits are not driven by simple observation, but judgment and fear of weight gain. 

It’s important to recognize how a grandparent’s behavior affects your children. By placing emphasis on what and how they eat, Brody’s dad is teaching his grandkids that his opinion of their food choices and eating habits matter and is intertwined with how he feels about them. Such comments teach kids that love involves being judged on something as personal and intimate as dietary preferences. Grandparents’ opinions are powerful, and shape our kids’ understanding of love and acceptance.

Why setting boundaries with grandparents is so hard

Setting boundaries about what our grandparents can say about weight and eating around their grandkids can be challenging because despite being parents ourselves, we are still our parents’ children. This means that while we raise our own kids, we may simultaneously strive to please our parents and make them proud of us.

This desire for parental approval is natural and normal, as we all crave affection and admiration from our parents. However, when it comes to establishing our children’s body boundaries, it can backfire. In an attempt to maintain harmony or be dutiful children, we may allow our parents to say or do things with our kids that we wish they wouldn’t.

Remember that you have permission to prioritize being your child’s parent over being your parents’ child. Although this transition can be difficult, it is necessary for the sake of our children’s mental health.

How to set boundaries with grandparents about weight and eating habits

It is essential to communicate to your parents that comments about your child’s body or eating habits are unwelcome, especially within your child’s earshot. This applies to both positive and negative comments since focusing on our children’s appearance and eating habits reinforces an external perspective (what others think) rather than an internal one (what they think).

Setting boundaries with grandparents regarding how they talk about weight and eating around your children is absolutely necessary.

The most crucial aspect of establishing boundaries is to understand that you are solely responsible for enforcing them. No one else will uphold your boundaries since they are personal to you. However, just because others may not remember or respect your boundaries does not mean you are powerless. It means that you must take action.

“Boundaries are not dependent on whether the other person does what you ask. They’re really dependent on whether you follow your own boundary and do what you say you’re going to do.”

Lori Gottlieb, MFT

For example, Michelle’s mother continuously brings up Eva’s weight loss out of concern for her health. While Michelle understands that her mother worries about Eva, her weight-based chatter makes everyone uncomfortable and self-conscious. Michelle is well-informed about her child’s weight and health, and is receiving support from professionals for eating disorder treatment. Her mother’s comments, far from helping, are doing more harm than good, so it is time to set a boundary. 

This process typically involves three stages:

The first occurrence: State your request.

“Hey, Mom. Please refrain from discussing Eva’s body. Let me update you on the vacation plans we’re making for this summer…”

If it happens again: Repeat your request, emphasizing the boundary.

“Mom, as I mentioned earlier, it is important to me that you avoid commenting on Eva’s body. I understand your concern, but this is really important to me. If you mention her body again, we will have to leave.”

If it persists further: Enforce your boundary.

“Mom, I love you dearly, and our time together is valuable. However, despite my previous request, you continue to discuss Eva’s body. Therefore, we will have to leave. I will speak to you later. Goodbye!”

I understand that this may sound challenging or even impossible. Setting boundaries can be difficult, especially if you have spent your life prioritizing your parents’ wishes. Nonetheless, now that you are a parent yourself, your primary responsibility lies in safeguarding your children’s mental health.

Learning to establish boundaries with grandparents is among the most challenging tasks we face, especially if we’re parenting a child with an eating disorder. However, it is highly rewarding, particularly because our children observe and learn from everything we do. By setting respectful boundaries with loved ones, we equip our children with an essential lifelong skill that nurtures their well-being and mental health.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

See Our Guide To Parenting A Child With An Eating Disorder

Posted on by

Empowering your highly sensitive child with an eating disorder

Empowering Your Highly Sensitive Child with an Eating Disorder

It’s very common for people who have an eating disorder to identify as a highly sensitive person (HSP). While it may sound like a made-up term, this is actually a scientifically studied genetic condition. One of the notable traits is that HSPs are often more sensitive to food and eating. They may have significant differences in how they experience food and sensations like nausea and hunger. 

Many times when a parent is perplexed by their child’s eating disorder we discover that the missing piece is high sensitivity. If your child is an HSP, they need a higher level of patience, understanding, and support when eating. Once this understanding is incorporated into treatment, recovery may become easier.

Highly sensitive kids and eating disorders

Kids who are highly sensitive are at high risk of being overstimulated by food and eating. Common symptoms include:

  • Picky eating
  • Food aversion
  • Food refusal
  • Refusing to eat in public places
  • Refusing to eat with the rest of the family
  • Tantrums during meals
  • Throwing food
  • Criticizing/complaining about food and other people at the table
  • Under-eating (appetite and digestion are both affected by overstimulation)
  • Binge eating (either as an attempt to cope and/or when overstimulation has caused under-eating and the body needs a high volume of calories to compensate)
  • Weight loss/gain

What is high sensitivity?

A highly sensitive person (HSP) registers and processes more sensory information from their five senses, their internal organs, and other people’s emotional states. As a result, they often have strong reactions to things that individuals with typical nervous systems barely notice.

It’s important to note that HSPs are not being dramatic or making things up. Their highly sensitive nervous system is a biological and genetic feature. It’s found in approximately 20-30% of humans, as well as over 100 other animals, ranging from fruit flies to primates.

Being highly sensitive is a biological trait that carries both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, many inventors, explorers, artists, musicians, and critical thinkers are HSPs. 

Some notable individuals who exemplify HSP traits include Abraham Lincoln, Jane Goodall, Princess Diana, Albert Einstein, Emily Dickinson, and many more. Being highly sensitive is truly a gift that enriches not only the individual but also their family, community, and society as a whole.

However, their highly-sensitive nervous systems put HSPs are at risk of becoming overwhelmed. Eating is particularly stimulating for HSPs, so they often are picky eaters with intense food aversions and can develop disordered eating and/or eating disorders.

We live in a highly stimulating and unnatural environment, so HSPs face a higher risk of experiencing anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and substance use disorders. However, these conditions can often be managed or even eliminated when parents help HSPs learn effective strategies to regulate their emotions.

HSP traits

Here are three key traits associated with being highly sensitive that might lead to an eating disorder:

  1. Extreme noticing: HSPs have a heightened awareness and perception of the sensory information bombarding their nervous system. They notice and react to more subtle details that others may overlook. For example, they may experience intense discomfort from an imperceptible itch in a seam, be highly sensitive to certain sounds, or feel nauseated by specific sensory aspects of food. Eating, which engages all senses, can be particularly overstimulating for HSPs.
  2. Emotional contagion: As social beings, all humans possess mirror neurons that enable them to pick up on the emotions of others. HSPs have a greater number of mirror neurons in their brains, resulting in an increased sensitivity to nonverbal emotional cues. If someone close to them, like a family member, friend, or teacher, is emotionally dysregulated, HSPs often feel the same dysregulation. This heightened emotional contagion can make various social experiences, such as family dinner tables, school cafeterias, and restaurants more challenging for highly sensitive people.
  3. Overstimulation: With their heightened ability to process sensory information, HSPs are more susceptible to being overwhelmed by information from both internal and external sources. This means that things like noise, smells, light, other people’s emotions can quickly become overwhelming for them. Additionally, internal sensations such as upset stomachs, nausea, physical pain, and anxiety symptoms are intensified in HSPs. When overstimulated, highly sensitive individuals may exhibit behaviors that seem like overreactions to others, such as refusing to eat, throwing food, and extremely picky eating.

HSPs and neurodivergence

In our ancestral environment, the heightened sensory abilities of HSPs were essential for detecting threats and protecting the tribe. However, living in our modern, noisy, and overstimulating culture can be overwhelming for highly sensitive individuals.

Due to the unique wiring of their nervous systems, HSPs can fall under the category of “neurodivergent.” Importantly, not all HSPs have formal diagnoses for conditions like autism or ADHD. Nevertheless, it’s common for them to relate to some of the symptoms associated with these conditions.

It’s important to recognize that being highly sensitive is a biological trait. It is not a disorder or illness. However, HSPs benefit from developing skills that help them cope with our overstimulating environment. This is especially true if they’re struggling to eat.

How to help your highly sensitive child with an eating disorder 

If you suspect that your child may be highly sensitive, one of the most effective ways you can support them is by helping them develop emotional regulation skills. Many highly sensitive individuals express a need for downtime to rest and recover from stimulating experiences. They also thrive with clear boundaries to protect them from emotional contagion. Finally, they need the freedom to explore their rich inner world on their own terms. Here are important ways you can help: 

  1. Teach them emotional regulation. All children are born with immature nervous systems, and parents are essential in teaching kids to regulate their emotions. If you have a highly sensitive child, they need a high level of support and skill-building. You can help them learn how to regulate their nervous systems given their unique biology.
  2. Support them with eating. A highly sensitive child who has an eating disorder needs a lot of support. You can help them learn how to eat in a more regulated way. Remember that they taste and experience food differently from others. Validate their unique experience even as you insist upon eating enough food, often throughout the day. Both parts (validating and boundaries) are essential to eating disorder recovery. This is a skill you can learn and practice every day as you support your child in recovery.
  3. Accept (and nurture!) their quirks. Highly sensitive people perceive the world differently. This is a major strength and is why so many notable figures in history have highly sensitive traits. Don’t try to turn your highly sensitive child into a typical child. Instead, nurture their unique strengths and support them in finding their way in the world with (not in spite of) their beautiful differences.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

See Our Parent’s Guide To The Causes Of Eating Disorders

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Please don’t say that eating sugar and sweets causes diabetes

When parents say sugar causes diabetes it can lead to an eating disorder

3 real-life stories of women whose parents warned them about diabetes (and what to do instead)

“If you eat too many cupcakes, you’ll get diabetes.”

“Chocolate milk is like drinking a tall glass of diabetes.”

“Eating that much sugar will make you diabetic like Grandma.”

Some version of this has been said to too many children to count. It’s hard to speak with an adult from Gen X down to Gen Z who hasn’t heard some version of this warning. The parents who say this aren’t trying to cause harm. In fact, they’re most likely hoping to protect their child from a serious disease. And yet these comments are both inaccurate and cause harm every day. Sugar does not cause diabetes, and many people in eating disorder recovery cite parental warnings about the link between sugar and diabetes as contributing to their disorders. 

Note: Eating disorders have biological, psychological, and social causes, so these sorts of comments alone don’t cause an eating disorder, but they can increase risk.

What causes diabetes?

Diabetes is primarily caused by genetics. In fact, Type 2 diabetes has a stronger link to family history than Type 1. People who develop diabetes are usually not the first in their family to get it, and saying it’s caused by sugar is a massive oversimplification of how our bodies work. If sugar causes diabetes then everyone with a sweet tooth would have diabetes, which is not true. 

“Genes play a large role in the development of diabetes. We’re all born with challenges in our genetic code — as well as in our life circumstances — and this is one of the challenges you were dealt. Your body was vulnerable to difficulty with glucose regulation, and some combination of factors triggered that genetic propensity.”

Lindo Bacon, PhD and Judith Matz, LCSW, Diabetes Self Management

And yet social stigma persists, and parents everywhere continue to warn children not to eat too much sugar, something that is delicious and rewarding. This creates a deep and confusing fear of a disease that kids can’t even understand yet. It’s terrifying and creates cognitive dissonance. The idea that sweets, which they (of course!) love so much, could kill them is overwhelming for kids.

Does being fat cause diabetes?

Similarly, if being fat causes diabetes, then everyone who is fat would have it, which they don’t. About 10% of Americans have diabetes, yet about 65% of Americans are on the higher end of the weight scale. So clearly not all fat people get diabetes. And thin people get diabetes, too. 

A word about the word “fat”

The word fat can be used as a negative or a neutral descriptor. In its neutral form, saying fat is the same as saying thin, tall, or brown-eyed. Other words for fat bodies, such as overweight and obese, are currently considered to be stigmatizing. Many fat justice leaders have reclaimed the word fat as the preferred neutral descriptor for their bodies. As such, I typically use the word fat when referring to body weight as a physical feature.

However, due to our culture’s terrible history of weight-shaming, we should not call an individual fat unless we 1) are doing so kindly 2) have zero thoughts that they should lose weight; and 3) clearly have their permission to do so. And nobody should ever use fat as an insult. It’s always best to let people who live in marginalized bodies to define themselves rather than assuming a label on their behalf. And never tell a person in a larger body that they are not fat or should be proud to be fat. It’s their body and their choice to define themselves on their own terms.

In other words, being fat doesn’t mean you’ll get diabetes, and being thin doesn’t protect you from it. Genes above all, followed by lifestyle factors like stress reduction, healthy social interaction, and exercise matter far more than your weight. 

“One cupcake won’t give you diabetes and joking that it will is dangerous on two levels: It creates misinformation about this disease and furthers the stigma that acquiring diabetes is something one has control over.”

Alysse Dalessandro for Healthline

Being fat does not cause diabetes, but the fear of being fat and eating foods associated with being fat like sugar can contribute to an eating disorder. Incorrect and harmful beliefs about sugar, diabetes, and fat are all driven by weight stigma, not science.

The biggest risk is stress, not sugar

The largest environmental factor leading to diabetes is not sugar, but stress. And one of the leading causes of stress for people who are at the higher end of the weight spectrum is their weight and the fear of getting diabetes. In this way, the fear of fat and diabetes can increase the conditions most likely to trigger it.

Parents who use the threat of diabetes and fat to restrict their kids’ eating sugar mean well, but they can accidentally create a cascade of negative outcomes, including an eating disorder.

For ideas about what to say to your child if another adult says something about sugar causing diabetes to your child, here’s a great post from Zoë Bisbing, LCSW (click to view full video and post on Instagram)

Here are three real-life stories of adults who were told to avoid sugar in childhood to avoid diabetes: 

Sonja developed at eating disorder at 8 years old and is currently in treatment

My dad and his mother, who lived with us, both made regular comments that my being overweight would lead to me developing diabetes and “my feet would fall off.”  They said things like “Sugar makes you fat,” and “Being fat gives you diabetes.”

I remember feeling so uncomfortable in my body, like it was a prison I just wanted to escape. I’ve always carried extra weight and no matter how much I dieted and exercised (this was a core piece of my childhood) my body wouldn’t change. I felt betrayed by it, like there was something inherently wrong with me, and that I was trapped by a disease that was going to happen to me no matter what I did.

Comments about sugar and diabetes led to an eating disorder that started as early as age eight. I developed a very complicated love/hate relationship with food and eating that I am still trying to heal 24 years later. 

I had a very negative body image and developed body dysmorphia in high school. Because I was eating so little and exercising so much, my health was very poor. I was sick all the time and had no energy and awful moods. Now that I’m in recovery I recognize the profound health effects starvation had on my growing body and mind. I have been in treatment for 3 years now and I’m just starting to develop a healthy relationship with food and my body.

If I could go back in time and talk to my younger self, I would tell myself that those comments were based on my family members’ own insecurities about their own bodies and health, and it had nothing to do with me. I would also tell myself that scientifically we know that the best way to avoid conditions like diabetes is to take good care of our bodies, not neglect them. I would encourage myself to challenge my caregivers’ narrative and to find a professional to support me in finding my way to my own personal best health.

Andrea has struggled with body image and disordered eating since she was about 7 years old

I remember being about 7 and I wanted ice cream. My mom would use an ice cream scoop and scrape off the excess from the top of the scoop then serve it to me. I wasn’t allowed to just add some spoonfuls to my bowl without measuring it. She said, “You don’t want to be fat like Mama, right?” She lived in a bigger body her whole life. Mom would say “My Grandma died from diabetes, we can’t let that happen to us so we shouldn’t eat so much sugar.”

Hearing that “diabetes can kill you” scared me. At that young age I thought because I was fat and liked sugar that eventually that’s what I would die from. I would grab my belly rolls and squeeze them as hard as I could while looking in the mirror. I’m not sure what I had hoped would happen, maybe so I could make my fat body smaller.

At home I knew that I couldn’t drink sodas or eat sweets so I would go to a friend’s house and binge on whatever I wanted. 

If I could talk to my younger self I would say that there is no “bad” or “good” food. You are worthy and are so much more than your body. Don’t let anyone treat you like you are less than. Your body is amazing, it keeps you alive! 

Family and friends fueled my eating disorder by linking my weight and sugar to diabetes. If I lost weight it was always met with, “Wow what are you doing? You look great.” Now that I have children I want them to know that they are so much more than a number on a scale or a squishy belly. I WILL break the cycle. It isn’t always easy but I’m working on loving all of me. 

Marie has struggled with body image and disordered eating since childhood

My mom constantly commented on what people were eating, particularly how much sugar. When we would see people drinking a soda or eating candy, for example, she would comment that they were consuming so much sugar.  She said that sugar was “addicting” and that a bad diet, including too much sugar, gave people Type 2 diabetes. If someone had Type 2 diabetes, she would comment that a better diet would make their diabetes go away. 

I was diagnosed with insulin resistance at 20, which can be a precursor to Type 2 diabetes. My mom immediately signed me up for a personal trainer and would comment on my need to lose weight and eat less sugar. She would say I was “obsessed” with sugar on occasions where I would eat more than a small serving of dessert. When I lost weight (mainly due to my eating disorder), she would constantly tell me that my diet cured my insulin resistance. 

I felt a great sense of shame about my body. I had learned that only “fat people with bad diets” had ailments like diabetes. Her comments made me feel nervous. As a child, I was always concerned I was too fat and often felt tense and nervous.

I was very concerned about my weight and what I ate in front of my mom (I still am). I have struggled with eating disorders and body dysmorphia since childhood. When I was in my mid-20s, I started purging and calorie restricting, to the point where I was underweight and incredibly anxious. When I was underweight, my mom would talk about how proud she was of how I had lost weight. Now that I have gained the weight back, I still struggle with shame, but through therapy and self-guided work, I am trying to heal.

My mom cared about my well-being, but it was incredibly misguided and actually harmful. I wish I could tell my younger self that my mom’s issues do not have to be mine. I’m loved just as I am. I am enough just as I am. Food is just food – not a moral judgment. 

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

See Our Parent’s Guide To Diet Culture And Eating Disorders

Posted on by

How to handle mood swings in eating disorder recovery

How to handle mood swings in eating disorder recovery

Melanie feels worn out. Her teenage daughter Kimmy has an eating disorder, but that’s not even the biggest challenge right now. “What we’re really struggling with,” says Melanie, “are the endless mood swings. She’s up and down constantly, either yelling at me and getting in my face or slamming doors and shutting down alone in her room for hours. I’ve tried everything, and I feel like I’m out of options. What am I supposed to do with her when she gets like this? Will it ever stop?”

We’ve all heard about teenagers whose moods change constantly. Many of us assume it’s a natural phase that we must simply endure. We might think “all teens do this, so I guess I just have to wait it out.” But this thought is almost always followed by deep sadness and maybe even anger. You might think to yourself: “I hate this! I don’t deserve to be treated like this!” 

And you’re right! You don’t deserve to be treated badly. And at the same time it’s normal for teens to have big mood swings and occasionally lose their temper or emotionally withdraw. The challenge is that massive, constant mood swings are a sign of extreme distress and often accompany dangerous mental health conditions like eating disorders. This means that while mood swings are normal during adolescence, extreme mood swings that damage your family are a symptom of mental disorder and need treatment. 

Mood swings and an eating disorder

Chronic mood swings mean your child is struggling with near-constant emotional dysregulation. They almost never feel calm, confident, and curious. Instead, they’re either highly activated, either by positive emotions like joy and excitement, or by negative emotions like anger and fear. Or they’re disengaged and withdrawn, typically based on emotions like sadness and despair. 

It’s physically and emotionally draining to be emotionally dysregulated, like treading water with no shore in sight. It’s very hard to recover from an eating disorder if you’re experiencing massive daily mood swings.

Melanie’s daughter Kimmy needs her help learning how to regulate her emotions rather than being taken over by them. Working on this skill will help Kimmy feel better and improve her chances of recovering from her eating disorder. The goal is for Kimmy to go through normal adolescent mood swings, but at a lower intensity and frequency, which will indicate a greater sense of wellbeing.  

Our goal is to raise adults who yes, have big feelings sometimes, but are able to manage their emotions and behavior even when they have big feelings.

How to respond to mood swings

Melanie feels terrible because when Kimmy yells, Melanie tries not to, but often yells back. And when Kimmy bursts into tears, sometimes Melanie does, too. “I feel completely taken over by her moods and emotions,” she says. “It’s so embarrassing, as if I have no self control.”

It’s quite normal to respond to a child in this much distress with your own feelings of distress. Of course it’s upsetting raising a child who is explosive and frequently drives you to either yelling or sobbing. It’s very hard to stay sturdy in the face of a raging kid. All of us can feel blown off course when our kids are in the thick of a powerful emotional storm. 

But luckily, there are things we can do to prepare for and manage the aftermath of our kids’ mood swings. That doesn’t mean we can stop big emotions from happening, but we can reduce the damage and lower the intensity of future experiences. We can’t stop our kids from having big feelings, but what we do when those big feelings show up makes a big difference.

We can help our kids build emotional regulation skills, which will allow them to process their emotions more adaptively and without causing harm. With practice, even the most volatile people can improve their emotional regulation skills and decrease the fallout from their big emotions. 

Steps to build emotional regulation skills

Here’s what you can do to navigate your child’s big mood swings during eating disorder recovery: 

1. Check the weather

Emotional storms can seem like they come from nowhere, but usually we can map out a few reliable triggers. The more triggers you know about, the greater your chance of reducing them before the storm hits. This doesn’t mean eliminating big emotions, but helping your child experience them safely. 

2. Know what you can do—and what you can’t

When your child is raging, you can control your response, but you can’t control how they feel. This is really important and really hard to remember in the heat of the moment. But the more you focus on managing your own feelings and behavior, the better you can withstand the strong winds of your child’s feelings. This will reduce the storm’s intensity, because fighting back or trying to control your child’s emotions typically increases their intensity. 

3. Regulate yourself

You can’t ask your child to regulate their emotions if you’re not able to regulate your own. Most of us need some help learning how to calm ourselves down when our kids are having an emotional storm. So reach out for support from someone who understands how hard this is and won’t judge you. You deserve support, and the more support you get, the better you’ll be able to support your child.

4. Co-regulate

If you sense that your child is getting emotionally dysregulated, take steps to co-regulate with them. This doesn’t mean saying “calm down” (which never works) but rather validating their experience of distress and using your calm, regulated nervous system to model safety and security. With practice, you can head off many storms before they gain intensity. 

5. Hold your boundaries

You can’t control your child’s feelings or even their behavior when they’re in an emotional storm, but you can remove yourself from harm’s way if necessary. This is especially true if your child is being verbally or physically abusive. It’s OK to protect yourself from harm, and it will actually protect your child from harm, since hurting a parent increases shame, which reduces emotional regulation and increases intensity. 

6. Regroup afterwards

First, take some time to reflect on the storm with another adult who you can trust not to blame you or your child for what happened. You want to review the emotional triggers and make sense of what happened. Next, find time to calmly and compassionately review the events with your child and discuss how you can work together to manage future emotional storms. As for punishments, if your child broke curfew, you can move the curfew back for a limited amount of time. If they damaged something, ask them to repair or cover the cost of replacement. These are natural consequences and are directly related to the events, but you want to avoid punishments that are disconnected from the events that took place, as they rarely make a positive impact.

Making progress

Supporting a child with an eating disorder when they have big mood swings is challenging. It’s not something most of us can do gracefully or naturally at first. But with practice, Melanie slowly made progress with Kimmy. “It was so hard at first—it felt like juggling,” she says. “I felt like I had to keep my eyes on so many moving parts, but with practice it became more natural and now it’s almost automatic sometimes.”

Kimmy is still dealing with a lot of ups and downs, and she’s working through eating disorder recovery, but having her mom’s support is making a difference. “The other day she apologized for how she behaved a few months ago,” says Melanie. “And though she doesn’t know exactly what I’ve done to change things, she was aware that something about what I was doing seemed to be helping her calm down a little faster. She actually thanked me! I finally feel hopeful again.”

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

See Our Guide For Parenting a Teenager With An Eating Disorder

Posted on by — Leave a comment

How parents can actually make binge eating disorder better

How parents can actually make binge eating disorder better

Cyrus is worried about his son Miles, who was recently diagnosed with binge eating disorder. “I honestly don’t understand what is going on, or what we are supposed to be doing at home to help,” says Cyrus. “We’ve got Miles in therapy, but other than that, we’ve received no guidance about what we should be doing. Are we supposed to keep binge foods out of the house? Should we remind him that binge eating is not healthy? Is there a cure for binge eating disorder?” 

These questions make sense, and it’s frustrating that Cyrus isn’t getting more guidance as he faces this challenge. Binge eating disorder is a very common type of eating disorder, but it’s extra tricky to handle it in our society, where binge eating and weight gain are criticized and deeply feared. The good news is that there is a lot that Cyrus can do to help Miles recover. 

What causes binge eating disorder?

All eating disorders are biopsychosocial disorders, which means they are caused by a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors. 

For example, a child may have a genetic predisposition and traits that make it more likely they will develop an eating disorder. Specifically, there are neurobiological traits that make some people more sensitive and responsive to hunger cues, the physical sensations, and emotional experience of eating. Additionally, people who have ADHD or autism are more likely to develop eating disorders than the general population.

Psychologically, a child may have traits including perfectionism, impulsivity, anxiety, and depression, which increase the likelihood of developing an eating disorder. People who have OCD, GAD, PTSD, and other common mental health issues are more likely to develop eating disorders.

Finally, our social environment encourages eating disorders. We live in a culture in which parents, teachers, doctors, and coaches all worry about children getting fat. Meanwhile, peers tease and bully fat kids. This is not only about individuals being fatphobic; it’s the result of weight stigma, which is baked into our culture.

The outcome of weight stigma is not a thinner population, but a population that is so afraid of fat that we encourage food restriction and body shame. Counter-intuitively, both these things predict weight gain and, of course, eating disorders. 

Society doesn’t cause eating disorders by itself, but if biology and psychology load the gun, our society is standing by at the trigger, just waiting to pull it.

What is the cure for binge eating disorder?

Many people assume that the problem with binge eating disorder is binge eating. However, binge eating is the very top of binge eating disorder symptomology. 

cure binge eating disorder

Shame triggers binge eating, and binge eating triggers shame. It’s a self-perpetuating loop, which is why it’s usually best to address the other symptoms and causes rather than the binge eating itself. Trying to stop binge eating without addressing its causes is ineffective and even harmful.

Eating disorders have both physical and emotional components. Therefore, your child needs both psychotherapy and nutritional therapy. 

A therapist can support your child in understanding their unique psychology and develop coping skills. They should also address any underlying mental health conditions, especially ADHD, autism, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD. Unless these conditions are treated, it will be very hard to recover from binge eating disorder. 

In addition to a therapist, a certified eating disorder dietitian (CEDRD) can support your child in learning how to eat in a way that will minimize binge eating episodes. The biggest physical risk factor for a binge eating episode is skipping meals and restricting food. 

Many people who have binge eating disorder eat too little and/or go too long between meals. This exacerbates the problem and increases the likelihood of binge eating. The most important physical treatment for binge eating disorder is feeding the body regular meals and snacks and eating enough food throughout the day. 

How can parents help with binge eating disorder? 

Parents alone can’t cure binge eating disorder; you’ll need professionals on board to help. But parents play an essential role in recovery. Parents can help kids recover from binge eating disorder by following these five steps:

1. Feeding structure

The biggest risk factor for a binge eating episode is not eating enough food. Skipping meals and restricting food are common, particularly for kids in larger bodies who are afraid of weight gain. However, restriction sets them up for larger and more frequent binge eating episodes. Parents should take an active role in recovery by feeding kids three meals and 2-3 snacks per day. Your child should not go more than 2-4 waking hours without eating. 

Additionally, eating should be an important aspect of family life, and family meals should happen as often as possible. Binge eating is often done in secret, so it’s important to model the social nature of eating together and sharing meals. Eating is an important social and emotional activity, so pleasant family meals should be a priority.

2. All foods fit

Many parents are worried about kids’ health and weight and restrict kids’ sugar and “junk food” intake. This is popular advice, however, the evidence shows that restricting food to only “healthy” options at home increases kids’ likelihood of binge eating. Work with a non-diet registered dietitian to build your comfort with a wide variety of food. Yes, you should serve veggies and fruit, but you should also serve snack foods and desserts. A healthy diet incorporates all sorts of food. Restriction is a major trigger for binge eating episodes, so avoiding it is key. 

3. Weight is not the same as health

It’s natural in our culture to be afraid of weight gain. Many parents believe they must keep an eye on their kids’ weight and worry about weight gain. But weight is not the same as health, and worrying about weight is associated with weight gain and eating disorders. Instead of worrying about your child’s weight, learn about a non-diet approach to health, which is shown to improve health behaviors and health outcomes. This approach focuses on healthy behaviors like eating, moving, sleeping, stress management, belonging, and human connection. Unlike weight control, these behaviors improve health with zero side effects.

4. Emotional regulation

Once you have your child in therapy to address underlying mental health conditions, you need to build their emotional regulation skills at home. Whether we mean to or not, parents teach kids how to regulate their emotions from the time they are born. It’s embedded in our DNA to learn emotional regulation from parents. Most people with eating disorders lack emotion regulation skills. Luckily, due to your role as their parent, you are by far the best person to build your child’s emotional regulation. Literally nobody else can do it as quickly and effectively as you. Get intentional about teaching and modeling emotional regulation skills and you’ll make a big difference, fast. 

5. Avoid shame

Above all, you want to avoid bringing shame to the process of eating and weight. Things like telling your child to eat less, pointing out that binge eating is leading to weight gain, and locking up food can be harmful. While doing these things might make intuitive sense to you, they are not an effective cure for binge eating disorder and can make things worse. 

Food and body shame lie at the heart of eating disorders and drive disordered behavior, so you don’t want to add to it. Work on your own issues with food and weight, and talk about your fears and worries with another adult, not your child. You should never criticize your child’s eating and weight.

If you are tempted to criticize your child’s eating or weight, shift your energy to the other four steps I’ve described. They are much more likely to help your child recover.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

For privacy, names and identifying details have been changed in this article.

See Our Parent’s Guide To The Different Types Of Eating Disorders

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Helpful ways parents can improve girls’ body image

Helpful ways parents can improve girls' body image

“My body image has been terrible my whole life, and now I see the same thing happening with my girls,” says Liz. “I want to improve my daughters’ body image, but it feels impossible sometimes.”

Liz isn’t alone. Negative body image is a major issue, particularly for girls. One survey of 11–16-year-olds found that 79% said how they look is important to them, and over half (52%) often worry about how they look.

Poor body image is associated with many negative health outcomes, from anxiety and depression to eating disorders and suicidality. Given this, Liz is right to worry about her girls and it makes sense to find ways to improve their body image as much as possible.

Luckily, there is a lot that parents can do to improve girls’ body image.

How to help a girl with body image issues

To get some help with this topic, I spoke with Amelia Sherry, MPH, RD, CDCES, founder of NourishHer.com and author of Diet-Proof Your Daughter: A Mother’s Guide to Raising Girls Who Have Happy, Healthy Relationships with Food and Body. She knows personally how hard it is to navigate body image issues when raising daughters. 

“When my own daughters’ bodies started changing in preparation for puberty, it triggered a lot of emotion in me ,” she says. “And seeing my discomfort with those changes made me realize that I still had  a lot of work to do with regard to my own body image issues. I had to remind myself that weight gain, particularly in adolescent girls, was perfectly normal and perfectly healthy. ”

“As a dietitian, I knew the “right” things to say and do in terms of allowing them to eat food they enjoy and eat as much as they need to feel full and satisfied,” says Amelia. “But because of my own history with disordered eating and dieting, trusting them with food and giving them that freedom didn’t come naturally. It was challenging, and a lot more triggering and a lot more emotional than I realized it would be.”

At least as far back as middle school, Amelia remembers feeling judged and criticized about her body. “I was chubby, so I started dieting and trying to lose weight,” she says. In high school she experimented with purging, and in college she used exercise to control her weight. 

Luckily for Amelia, when she started living on her own and feeling less judged, she started resolving her relationship with food and her body. Healing her relationship with herself led her to become a dietitian who helps families develop positive, happy relationships with food.

How to improve girls’ body image and self-esteem

After helping her own daughters get through puberty with their body image and a set of positive eating skills intact, Amelia started using the same framework to help other mothers who have a history of disordered eating do the same. Here are her five  top tips for improving body image and self-esteem in girls:

1. Trust girls to eat as much or as little as they like

Encourage girls to listen to their bodies as opposed to taking information about how much to eat from the outside world. We can show our trust by avoiding commenting on how much they are eating. And if our daughters’ eating or appetites make us uncomfortable, we can look inward to ask ourselves why. 

2. Accept our daughters’ natural body size and shape

Being accepting of their appetites as well as their food likes and dislikes. That doesn’t mean we avoid exposing them to new foods or offering balanced meals, by the way. 

3. Rethink what it means to be a healthy eater

We have been conditioned to think of healthy eating as eating in a way that controls our weight. However, when we understand that body weight is not an indicator of health we allow ourselves and our daughters to eat in more relaxed, confident ways as opposed to being restrictive and fearful. 

4. Be aware of the influences and pressures our daughters are under

From social media and peers, to diet culture and health culture. Teaching them to be critical thinkers, and conscious consumers of media can help them avoid ramping up their own body dissatisfaction. We can also protect our daughters from dieting by being aware of the influences in our own lives as a parent, such as the pressure to raise a perfect eater. 

5. Keep nutrition simple

Emphasizing the importance of getting enough to eat and eating variety–more diversity means more nutrients–as opposed to focusing on complex information and avoiding foods and food groups and specific nutrients can help protect our daughters from diets. Teaching them to be skeptical of eating fads and trends as well as being aware of the dangers of dieting is essential too. 

What do you say to your daughter with body image issues?

It’s very common to praise little girls for their looks. Whether you call your daughter beautiful or cute, appearance-based praise can work against positive body image because it reinforces the idea that girls and women are valued primarily for their appearance. 

“Non-looks-based compliments boost our kids’ resilience against dieting, disordered eating, body comparison, and body dissatisfaction,” says Amelia. “Specifically, I suggest we move away from saying things like “you’re so cute” or “you’re so pretty” and instead say things that focus on who your daughter is and what she’s capable of.”

Here are some ideas for non-looks-based-compliments Amelia suggests:

  • I love that you’re not afraid to show your emotions
  • You’re really loyal to people you care about and I admire that!
  • I love that you feel comfortable enough to tell others how you feel.
  • I appreciate how brave you are when it comes to meeting new people.
  • You’re really good at being open to people who are different from you.
  • It’s awesome that you’re always willing to make a new friend.
  • I like how you choose to wear something comfortable – that was well thought out!
  • I’m so impressed that you’ve been getting to bed on time – that’s not always easy to do!
  • I admire how you listen to your body and eat as much or as little as feels right for you.

Social media and body image

Body image has always been tricky for girls in our society, but it has definitely gotten worse with the rise of social media. And while it’s very challenging to change social media usage in kids, it can make a huge difference in their mental health and wellbeing. 

Teens and young adults who reduced their social media use by 50% for just a few weeks saw significant improvement in how they felt about both their weight and their overall appearance compared with peers who maintained consistent levels of social media use, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

If you’d like some more ideas about limiting your daughter’s social media use, here are a few articles: 

Raising a diet-proof daughter

Dieting is the best predictor of eating disorders, which affect about 9% of the population and are the second-most deadly mental disorder. But dieting has many other negative health outcomes. For example, almost everyone who diets ends up weight cycling, which reduces cardiometabolic health. 

Amelia encourages families to raise diet-proof kids who will not fall prey to dangerous weight loss programs. “When you’re raising a diet-proof daughter, you’re teaching her to listen to her body, enjoy her appetite, take pleasure in food, and have a good perspective on eating and physical health,” she says. “You want her to listen to herself, honor herself, respect her body and her needs, her pleasures and appetite. If you do that, she’ll find a good balance between good nutrition and self-care.” 

“Elements of diet culture–such as cutting out specific nutrients or entire food groups–will put her health at risk, which is the exact opposite of what diet promoters and “health gurus” promise our girls,” says Amelia. “Feeding yourself is the ultimate act of self care. It’s the most basic thing, and it gets overlooked. So that’s what I want parents to focus on with their girls, making sure they are well fed–that they get enough food and that they feel good about eating. This is the best way to make sure they’re well-nourished both physically and emotionally. I want families to raise girls who are able to eat without feeling judged. There are so many benefits to that.”

With these ideas and more, parents can do a lot to improve girls’ body image.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with eating disorders.

See Our Parent’s Guide To Body Image And Eating Disorders