Our daughter is living at home with us after finishing college last year. She's 22. Publically she espouses a vegetarian diet (we do not), but primarily late at night or during the day when we're at work and she has an evening work shift, she chews and spits almost anything she can find in the kitchen, vegetarian or not. If we ask her not to eat something because we have future plans for it, it makes no difference. It all disappears, and we find the masticated food in the trash, sometimes uncooked and straight out of the can/box. It is apparently an obsessive/compulsive behavior.
It's gotten to the point where, if we wish to make food for ourselves at home rather than the more expensive option of eating out, we have to buy only what we can manage to eat for dinner each day or we'll go bust financially trying to keep food on the shelves - she consumes 4-5 times what a normal person would eat and digest. We've explained to her, non-confrontationally, that there is body of evidence that points to chewing and spitting as a harmful practice, and voiced our concerns about the financial and other hazards of the behavior. She seems to be in denial, refuses to talk about it and is unwilling to open up whenever we broach the subject or suggest a course of action.
We suspect that depression may be the root cause of the behavior, as there is other evidence that she has a low self-esteem and doesn't much care for her life. We are on good, loving terms with her, are supportive of her plans and do not charge her any sort of rent for staying with us, in the expectation that she's setting certain plans in motion that will allow her to move to the next level of her life. But she refuses to entertain the notion that she has depression, and won't admit to the chewing and spitting.
How common is this? Is there a link between depression and eating disorders? And what should we do that we haven't already done?
This discussion is related to
Chew and spit.