Sorry if this gets a bit long, but there are quite a few facts you have to know before you can help...When we were in tenth grade, a new girl came to school. Usually you wouldn't notice because there's so many people, but she was in one on my friends classes and was soon eating lunch with us every day. Gradually, she told us that she moved from her previous school as she had been bullied. When she came, her weight was normal. Maybe she had a few more pounds on her that prevented her being classified as super-skinny. But she was not fat at all. She was happy and jolly, well just your regular teenager. In eleventh grade, she lost some weight. We just thought it was the ''puppy fat'' coming off. You know when someone just grows out of any excess weight they had been carrying around. That was okay, she didn't keep going, so we didn't think anything of it.For the past few weeks/months now she's been on a ''I'm going to loose two pounds a week'' kind of thing. Her face isn't soft anymore, it's really angular. She ''eats'' three meals a day - but she barley eats anything each time. She exercises, but she's not eating enough to make up for the amount of exercise she does. Basically, she eats enough to survive. She's not really the same person anymore either. She's extremely moody and gets angry really quickly - something meant as a joke could just make her ignore you for like a week.She is constantly shivering, even when it's warm. On Saturday night, we were at a party at somebody's house. She got really cold so somebodyw went and found her a blanket. She was all wrapped up and was still so freezing that she decided to go home. After she left, two of our friends and I went and found an empty room to talk properly about this problem. We thought of a few reasons as to why she might be doing it but we don't know how to fix it. We want to sort it out this year before we go to college - she's going to be going somewhere none of us applied and nobody there will care. We just don't know how to go about doing it. Teachers at school aren't helpful - we tried that. Please help in any way you can. Even if you've never had any contact with this sort of thing, your thoughts would be very much appreciated.
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Eating Disorder?
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Has anyone spoken to her about it, in a non-confrontational way?
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Yup, I did. It was about a month and a bit ago. We decided it would be best if it was only one of us, as opposed to some big group ambush. I was at her house, we had a report to write together, and we decided to get a pizza for lunch. She was just nibbling on it. So I asked if she'd been feeling well lately, because she seemed to have had lost her appetite. She said she was fine and told me not to push it. Then, I said she looked great last year but maybe she should stop the weight-loss thing now, because it seemed to be going too far. She said she didn't know what I was talking about. I said that obviously she knew and she wanted me to know considering the big hoopla she was making of loosing two pounds a week. She said it was because she still felt a bit round around the edges. I told her she had no more edges and that we were getting quite worried. She said that she only had a little buit more to go and that we should just leave her alone. I tried to say something else but she cut me off and told me to shut up about it. I did. When I told the other girls what she had said, we decided to leave her be for two weeks. And we did. But then she was in hospital for like a week with stomach problems. Now she's on a whole load of pills because (this is what her sister said) as she has stomach ulcer(s) and some other things wrong.Maybe I should have had conducted the conversation differently but it's hard to know what to say. I mean, I hardly expected her to open up and admit it fully. We told our health teacher a while ago that we thought that someone we knew had an issue with food. The only thing she said was to try and talk to her about it, but that didn't really work, as you can see.I was thinking about it last might, and maybe if we did a group thing this time? Or would that be wrong and make things worse? We don't want to do anything to annoy her, or she'll get angry and won't speak with us at all.
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It sounds to me like you did it well. Often all you can do is plant the seed.
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We'll see what happens. Thanks for your help.