As a former sufferer of an eating disorder, my wife is reluctant to let anyone outside our inner circle know what is going on.
After several months of weight loss, our preteen daughter was hospitalized after a trip to the ER. She was diagnosed with ARFID. It’s an eating disorder we had never heard of but one in which the patient is NOT deliberately losing weight or attempting to change their body.
As a former sufferer of an eating disorder, my wife is reluctant to let anyone outside our inner circle know what is going on and risk our daughter beginning middle school with the stigma of an eating disorder. But we need to say something to the people in our lives who know something is wrong and ask what’s going on and where we’ve been.
She is advocating telling people our daughter is malnourished , but to me, this will lead people to draw conclusions that are both too close to home and inaccurate. Please advise.I wish your daughter a complete recovery. Her weight loss will be obvious to anyone who sees her. If I were doing the explaining, I’d shorten the message, eliminating the “lost a bunch of weight” to something like, “Our daughter is having stomach issues.
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