The past few months we’ve been waking up everyday to slay a dragon. It’s name is Anorexia Nervosa.

That dragon analogy I learned from another parent in the eating disorder clinic where we’ve been spending 20-25 hours per week since early December.

Shocker right? My daughter doesn’t “look” like she has anorexia. (and if someone utters those words we understand it’s simply coming from a lack of education and awareness.) Forget all your preconceived notions form photos of Angelina Jolie in the grocery checkout line.

Also, please don’t say things like “She just needs to eat.” or “Can’t you make her eat?”

After keeping this sneaky and secretive disorder to ourselves for the past 3 months, my daughter is finally at a stage of her treatment that it’s ok to share. In fact, sharing with everyone now is easier than figuring out to whom we’ve already explained the complex eating schedule, lack of participation in sports and missing school days.

It’s timely too since this is officially Eating Disorder Awareness week.

So first of all, some education. Here’s an official website full of info: https://www.eatingdisorderhope.com/information/anorexia

You want the short shocking version? It could have killed her.

Her body was in the process of shutting down. Anorexia is slow suicide. We were clueless. And it has a lengthy, regimented recovery protocol that Maya may need to follow for the rest of her life.

Here’s my short official version:

• Anorexia is a brain disorder.
• It is not something a person chooses.
• It has genetic and personality ties primarily which are pushed by environmental triggers (everyone wants to know “why” and that’s the best answer)
• It’s defined simply as any restriction of food of any kind and / or excessive exercising
• It does not define the person. We still have our Maya but sometimes it’s the eating disorder talking to us instead of her.
• It’s a disorder of the brain that is curable, especially when treated aggressively in adolescents

Here’s what our life has looked like the past few months:

• Structured meal plans, 6 times a day, from a licensed dietitian
• Me making and serving ALL of her food because any contact with food prep / grocery shopping even, is an unhealthy trigger for the noisy thoughts in her brain
• Monitoring all meals and food intake, because eating disorders are so sneaky and will try to convince her to hide, discard and lie about what food she has / has not eaten
• Encouraging her to eat food that literally does not taste good to her (the disorder changes the taste buds)
• Teaching her digestive system to accept food again (think of painful your muscles are when you haven’t used them in awhile and start to exercise again. Same thing but her stomach muscles instead.)
• Enforcing “supplements” and other consequences (bedrest) when food is not consumed completely and in the timeframe required
• Endless appointments at the Children’s Hospital Eating Disorder clinic since December 6th. (partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, psychiatrists, medical doctors, therapists, dietitians.)
• Inability for her to sleep through the night.
• Making sure she isn’t secretly exercising at night.
• Reminding Maya over and over that it’s the eating disorder telling her lies about her body, her weight, her talents and gifts in this world.
• Navigating broken friendships, careless words from people who don’t understand and figuring out who will be the “safe” people in our life we can trust during this sensitive time.

How did we get here?

(Everyone wants to know why.  So do we but truly, we may never know.  Fact is we are here, may be forever, and so we take this trial and look for the blessings in it.)

All summer we admired and praised Maya for her work ethic and discipline around her work outs and healthy eating as she reached for her goal of making the high school soccer team.

(Looking back, you know we questioned how we missed this and if we were part of the problem.)

At points, I felt she wasn’t eating enough, and her brother noticed as well, and we tried to educate her on proper calorie intake for the amount of exercise output. She appeared to be complying. And she took an extreme interest in shopping for and making her own food. She also became very interested in very work out techniques, strength training and fitness equipment. Her dad beamed for having a girl who wanted to be strong. Awesome right? Nope. A sure sign of an eating disorder I now understand.

I knew something more serious was going on around late October when Maya confessed to me her obsessive thoughts about food and calorie counting. She was scared. She didn’t like that she couldn’t stop these thoughts.

Naively I thought we could fix this by reading a couple of books, praying and getting into a counselor.

By the time we finally found the clinic at Children’s Hospital and had our assessment on December 6th, here’s what was going on with Maya physically:

Her body was shutting down. She had been restricting herself to 500-800 calories a day since June. She was constantly cold because her blood was focused around her core organs. Her heart rate was only 50. She’d been light headed and passed out a couple of times. Her digestive system was not working (I’ll spare the details but how would you feel with only 3 bathroom events in over a month?). Her female cycle had stopped. Her hair was falling out. One by one her body systems were shutting down. And she had been playing soccer in this condition as recently as a couple weeks prior. She was severely malnourished and her brain was affected as well because it simply couldn’t function.

We could have lost her to heart failure. Or suicide. That’s how serious this disorder can be.

Now here we are, 3 months later and part way through the battle and ready to share. This article is therapeutic for me, and approved by Maya. Because, for me as the mom, how did we miss this? How many other parents are missing this? (I *need* to reach you all!)  How did her coaches miss this? (multiple athletes from our school system are receiving treatment at the same clinic.  I don’t blame.  I just *need* coaches to know.)

I’m good and angry at it now. There are not enough tools. It was barely mentioned in her freshman health class this past fall. And her AP Psych teacher told me she is going to add some resources I shared to her curriculum. None of the parent meetings for all the expensive travel sports we play have EVER mentioned this is a risk and something to watch for in people who are intensely focused on athletics.

The therapists at the clinic are desperate to get the word out to pediatrician offices – who are so quick to treat for food allergies (encouraging the fear of food, deeming it the enemy). Or to simply medicate for depression and miss this completely.

I am convicted to get this information into a nutrition program for all middle and high school coaches to share with athletes and parents.

If there’s one thing you all need to take away from this, it’s how we talk about food.

All food is good food.
(in the right moderation)

We need to stop labeling food as “clean” or “dirty” or “toxic”. Yes yes I know things have changed and I’ve done this before. But it’s being taken to an extreme that manifests in full on eating disorders.

Food is her medicine. A healthy well-rounded meal plan that includes milk (gasp! dairy?) and oreos (gasp! gluten and processed sugar?) and even fries and coke. Because that’s a normalized life…..in the right moderation.

To all my fellow moms who are obsessing over your bodies with instagram selfies and diet shakes, I’m still using duct tape so I don’t unfairly snap on you. I don’t have the right words yet except to know that what WE are doing in the name of “self-care” and “healthy lifestyles” can get so far off track.

Learning to control our urges in any direction (too much or too little) is imperative. (For those of you ready to argue with me about the all food is good food fact, please read more about Orthorexia (https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/learn/by-eating-disorder/other/orthorexia) and reflect on your own habits a bit. I say this because I’ve been there myself and I care about you. We all hate that idealistic B word – balance. Yet there’s wisdom in it.

Every body is beautiful. All food is good food in the right moderation. Restriction is only a short term fix. (Note that on the flip side of anorexia are other eating disorders resulting in obesity that are equally damaging to the body. That’s not what I’m here to share, nor am I versed in it but if that’s you, please check out more resources here. https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org)

{Short note to my clients who work in the fitness space, my experience is going to produce some breakthrough thinking for your marketing. We HAVE to look at things differently to get better results. You will get attention when sharing these counter-culture messages and your business will grow.}

So what does treatment and recovery look like?

At our intake visit, I pushed back sobs as the doctors told us they were debating sending her straight to the hospitalization program. For a few reasons, they decided to let us start in Intensive Outpatient treatment. They handed me the schedule and I cried again. These treatments require a lot of hands on from the parents. Because when you treat this aggressively in the adolescent years, you can change those neuropathways in the brain and basically beat the disorder into submission with structure.

So we immediately began. On her 15th birthday. With 8 hours of appointments, orientation and treatment.

Phase 1 is simply getting the body re-nourished again. Food is the medicine. It took us about 10 weeks to get there. Until then, there was little reasoning with that malnourished brain being led by eating disorder lies. We were living with an incredibly moody, unhappy teenager (don’t we all? but this was so different. so extreme. so scary in ways I can’t even put into visible words yet. scary in the worst ways you can imagine as a parent.)

Next, after the body is functioning from a nourished state again within an expected body weight range, you move into a phase where you fight those thoughts. And it’s a long one and requires still the constant vigilance with meals and eating. I’m anticipating another 6 – 12 months of this vigilance assuming we don’t have a relapse. (Yes, I’ve adjusted my 2018 business activities significantly and unapologetically and truthfully, guilt free. Nothing is more important right now.)

There is absolutely ZERO exercise of any kind allowed during treatment.

Some kids sneak in exercise in their rooms at night. For some time periods of treatment, you literally need to be with them 24/7.

We are not yet back to a point to reintroduce any exercise. In fact, even extra walking for example at the mall or an event, requires additional caloric intake…..or to be pushed in a wheel chair to not expend that energy….necessary especially when your metabolic system is trying to reset in crazy ways.

School becomes a secondary priority and for 5 weeks, she did not attend at all. (Praises to her awesome teachers for assisting thru all of this.)

There are new medicines, new ways to talk about food and eating, and a new bond with my daughter that is a beautiful blessing in the face of this challenge.

But why?

Still that question.  I understand.  I’m wielding it from family members over and over.  Many of you have thoughts in your own minds about this. Likely uneducated judgments. I used to be there too.

For a minute, I did blame myself for not seeing it and potentially encouraging bad food behaviors – calling a shake breakfast and a protein bar lunch. Working to eliminate the “toxins” from our food and eat more “clean”. These CAN be contributors with people at risk for an eating disorder.

Ultimately, it is “just” another mental illness, which some people are more genetically and / or environmentally predisposed to. 50-80% of the risk for anorexia and bulimia is genetic. (Trace, S. E., Baker, J. H., Peñas-Lledó, E., & Bulik, C. M. (2013). The genetics of eating disorders. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 9, 589-620.)

We crave to know more of the why naturally so we can get to that root cause and eliminate it right?

Here’s one more shocking (I’ve used that word 3 times in this blog and I’ve maybe never used it before in anything I’ve written) fact for you:

Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.

(mink, F. E., van Hoeken, D., & Hoek, H. W. (2012). Epidemiology of eating disorders: Incidence, prevalence and mortality rates. Current Psychiatry Reports,14(4), 406-414.)

It’s aggressive. And so sneaky.

Did you know there are actually instagram accounts and forums where people with eating disorders will help each other with ways to HIDE anorexia?

(I won’t even share the names but if you suspect your child is struggling, message me and I’ll give you some ideas of what to look for in their instagram account.)

What parents should look for…. (I’ll share a few interesting unhealthy eating behaviors)

• Dresses in layers to hide weight loss or stay warm
• Is preoccupied with weight, food, calories, fat grams, and dieting
• Refuses to eat certain foods, progressing to restrictions against whole categories of food (e.g., no carbohydrates, etc.)
• Excessive use of napkins
• Micro-chopping of food
• Focus on eating only “clean” (right? some of you are going to lose your mind when you read this!)
• Refusing sweets
• Reasons to skip meals
• Skipping breakfast
  • (innocent…we all do it but do you know if they’re eating lunch? Maya was only eating a reasonable dinner with us on many days…and only on days we actually ate dinner as a family which is approximately twice a week.)
• stomach aches
  • (you know my first thought? oh you must have a gluten or dairy allergy. what should we cut out? Wrong. So freaking wrong. Don’t get me started.)
• Maintains an excessive, rigid exercise regimen – despite weather, fatigue, illness, or injury
• Withdraws from usual friends and activities and becomes more isolated, withdrawn, and secretive
• Seems concerned about eating in public
• Has limited social spontaneity
• Fainting
• Feeling cold
• Hair loss
• Depression, self-harm and high anxiety.

The full list of symptoms is here: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/learn/by-eating-disorder/anorexia/warning-signs-symptoms

That list may scare you. Perhaps it even triggers some warning signs for your own unhealthy relationship with food? I saw it too late. In hindsight, she was doing so many of these things and we chalked them up to “normal” teen behavior.

Here’s what I’ve learned after 12 weeks and counting of being at the eating disorder clinic on average 4 – 5 days a week.

Us parents are in this battle together. I’m grateful for the bonds we have inside the clinic that are confidential, raw, vulnerable and exhibiting parenting strength we never knew we could muster.

Good things can go bad in kids who are prone to eating disorder. For example, training hard out of determination to make the high school soccer team. Then, being around a bunch of calorie-counting upperclassmen that have a stronger influence than they realize with their words.

Or starting a work out program with a team mate to gain muscle. The team mate does great. But your child’s obsessive thoughts become an eating disorder monster from following the identical routine.

The Eating Disorder convinces these kids they are not skinny enough (and if you ask them what their goal weight is, they irrationally don’t have one because they feel they will never be skinny enough).

Eating disorders thrive in smart, high-achieving, perfectionistic students and athletes.

There is no stereotype of course but runners, soccer players, dancers, gymnasts, etc, have surrounded us in this program. Straight A students, some of them already committed to collegiate sports.

It takes a good thing – a desire to achieve and perform well – and twists it into completely irrational thinking.

If you have 10 minutes, this TED talk is the best description of what an eating disorder biologically does to the brain.

Support for coaches…..

I want to help you. A few of Maya’s coaches don’t even know this yet. They don’t know they coached her through complete seasons where she was barely eating.

I’m working on some resources and a plan to circulate them through our school district at a minimum.

How has this changed my view on our diet-obsessed culture?

Mostly I’ve bit my tongue and kept my hands away from the keyboard. The nicest way I can say this is that we’ve got some serious issues and I’ve been right there in that race with you all (bullet proof coffee, paleo diets, the vegan green smoothie phase, Shakeology and yes an advocare regimen of countless pills.) In case you wondered, now is 1000% not the time to come at me with why your pink drink or other magic potion is “different”.

I believe we’ve all been fed a pile of lies. And this post is not big enough to dig into that.

Where do we go from here?

A few requests straight from the heart of the one fighting this battle head on, my daughter.

• Don’t give me “pity eyes”. I’ve got a curable sickness and want your support.
• Don’t talk about food and dieting around me. (And please clean up your own eating habits.)

And requests from this mama who’s weary but stronger now as a result:

• Catch this when they are young. Before they are on their own in college and beyond. (It’s considered “curable” in adolescents.)
• Reach out to me if you need support. Please don’t hesitate. Support groups seem few and far between even in a large city like we live.
• Reconsider your own views around food, dieting, exercise and what it means to be “healthy”. We are setting examples for those around us.

Now, for those of you who normally hang around here looking for online business advice, entrepreneurial wisdom or to start or grow your own work from home business….. you need to hear this.

To support my daughter, I had to cut my work back to 15-20 hours per week. What does that even look like and do to a business?

The message out there is hustle.  Find the time.  Your business grows as much as you put into it.  (I don’t subscribe to all those philosophies anyhow.  It’s always been a family first thing for me.)

How do you navigate your business when facing a family crisis like this?

A few reflections (because we are still in the trenches)

 1. A whole new level of Flexible

Virtual professional / freelance work is rather flexible.  You can flex not just work times but also flex the type of work and clients you take on and don’t take on. I intentionally did not take on certain types of projects and clients in this season.

2. Pick good clients

From the start pick good clients.  Most of my clients are other parents.  Most of them are Christian believers and we pray for each other’s businesses and families.   So when crisis comes, we adapt and adjust with grace and understanding.  (Since we are coming out of the darkest valley, I do now have 2 client spaces open for March & April)

3. Do only the essentials (you’ll figure that out quickly)

Drop the “shoulds”.  Stop following other people online who don’t have children (and stop comparing yourself to them!)   This is a big chant of mine anyhow that’s become so apparent in this season.

4. God will provide.

Plant seeds throughout your years of business. They will bring a harvest when you most need it.

5. Follow a financial system (I like Profit First).

Have a game plan where you have back up savings in the event you are unable to work for a season.

6. Drop the guilt and be with your family in need.

It could be easy to mega-stress load and try to keep up with everything.  But what your family needs most is the BEST you.  Calm, confident, caring and on top of it.

7.  Don’t stop self-care.

The #1 cause of relapse for eating disorders? Parent burn out. We are simply exhausted from the treatment protocol and begin to cut corners. The eating disorder sneaks back in wherever it can.

8. These seasons bring insights that can be game changers for your business

One bright light through all of this is since my client load is smaller, I’ve been able to really pour into my How She Quits Community and launch a new membership community.

B-School launch happened throughout this time period and I intentionally set a small amount of marketing I’d do for that (some emails and posts, no ads, no lives, etc.)  And still, the right people were there and ready for it.

Having this break in “normal” work has given me perspective on what I truly enjoy the most in my business.  I am certain I wouldn’t have had that perspective if I had stayed in my normal flow of client work (even though I sincerely enjoy all of my clients!)   This is good news for my clients too because I come to them refreshed and renewed with these insights on our projects.

9. If I was still in corporate, this would be the second time I was fired in a year.

Last year we found out my dad had a cancerous brain tumor and we lost him in 10 weeks.   I spent so much time with him and mom – which is the only way I wanted it to be.  6 months later I’m in eating disorder h-e-double-hockey-sticks.

If I was still in corporate, the stress would have been unbearable. And quitting would have meant instant zero salary.  Instead, I cut back, delegated my team, had lesser revenue but let’s be realistic….I worked 15-20 hours a week max and maintained a 6 figure revenue business (plus a 6 figure non-profit).

Can I encourage you to have a plan B outside of the day job?

If you are new here, I teach that freelance work is the fastest path out of a day job. 

But don’t drop that dream of building a longer, slower growth online business (blog, author, speaking, online training, coaching, etc).   You can be up and running with your freelance work in 60-90 days.   That leaves flexibility to keep building your passion business on the side.

More info at “start here” and “HowSheQuits.com” or if you’re ready, join us in the Collective.

Now, set all that business talk aside for a moment.  Because you’re talking to a normal, regular, real mom who’d do anything to help her daughter through a battle like this.

For those who are walking this path, I’m praying for you.