Anxiety. It often goes hand in hand with an eating disorder and may even make your child more likely to develop one. According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, two out of three adults with eating disorders struggled with anxiety when they were children. These feelings may be the most obvious in situations involving food, but Brown first noticed her daughter's angst while on a bike ride. She writes in Brave Girl Eating that about a half a mile into the ride, for no apparent reason, Kitty began to cry hysterically. "It was the kind of thing we did all the time, and suddenly there was a child so anxious she couldn't bike for five minutes without falling apart," she says. In the days that followed she began paying closer attention to her daughter's anxiety. It became clear rather quickly that it wasn't just a teenage mood swing; obsessive thinking was infiltrating her daughter's everyday life. "The bike ride was the day the red flag went up," says Brown. "I just didn't know until later what it was signaling."
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