Eating disorders tend to appear when a teen is facing several big changes at once. One such time is early adolescence, when a child faces a changing body, blooming sexual feelings, and is likely graduating to a different school. This is when a teen might feel like he or she is out of control.
If this is the truth than food might seem like the one thing your child can control. Anorexia nervosa is a primarily female disorder. It usually develops between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five. However symptoms can develop as young as age nine.
One of the first signs of it is if your child starts refusing desserts. She might also start refusing bread and fried foods. This might seem healthy to you at first but the reality it is that a healthy teen normally likes to eat a great dead.
Anorexia may start with the child establishing a strict rule of no desserts. Then she may also exclude bread from her diet. She could go on to deny herself more and more foods until she exists on only celery and raw foods.
Another sign of anorexia is the presence of a lot of weight loss books around like 'The Skinny Bitch Diet.' This is a strict macrobiotic diet that is very popular with Hollywood celebrities like Lindsay Lohan.
If your child seems thin and is known to have a period and then the period mysteriously disappears then you are dealing with someone who has an eating disorder.
The alarming thing is that more and more little girls feel compelled to be on third diet. Surveys now show that many girls from the third to the sixth grade are now worried about their weight and are on some kind of inappropriate diet.
A girl that is suffering from anorexia nervosa is usually way too worried about gaining weight but will not necessarily admit it. They tend to lie to doctors as well, reassuring them that they will eat more. Then they don't. If you spot your child lying about how thin she is or how much she eats then you could be in some trouble.