EP71: How To Save Your Child

Interview with Kevin Olmsted / Author and Advocate for Anorexia Awareness

HOSTED BY PAUL SULLIVAN

Kevin Olmsted wrote the book "Scared Dad Feeding: How My Daughter’s Anorexia Took Me To Hell and My Guidebook for How I Got Back" about his family's experience. But he was moved to write it to help other dads get through what his family is still navigating: helping a child who lost 30 pounds in 60 days and is still working through the mental health struggles of anorexia. To get her the care she needed, Kevin left his career in the wine business and became a Lead Dad who devoted all of this time to his family. Listen to what he learned and how it can help Dads in a similar situation.

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Transcript

00;00;05;26 - 00;00;25;26
Paul Sullivan
Welcome to the Company of Dads podcast, where we explore the sweet, silly, strange, and sublime aspects of being a lead dad in a world where men with the go to parent aren't always accepted at work, among their friends, or in the community for what they're doing. I'm your host, Paul Sullivan. Our podcast is just one of the many things we produce each week at the Company of Dads.

00;00;25;27 - 00;00;45;10
Paul Sullivan
We have various features, including the lead dad of the week. We have our community both online and in-person events. We have a new resource library for all fathers. The one stop shop for all of this is our newsletter, The Dad. Sign up at the company of dads backslash The dad. That's the company of dads. Dot com. Backslash the dad.

00;00;45;13 - 00;01;13;07
Paul Sullivan
Today, my guest is Kevin Olmsted, author of the new book “Scared Dad Feeding”. The subtitle is “How y daughter's anorexia took me to hell and my guidebook for how I got back”. It details his daughter's battle with anorexia, beginning when she lost 30 pounds in 60 days to get her the care she needed. Kevin left his 23 year career in the wine business and became a lead dad, who devoted all of his time to his family.

00;01;13;10 - 00;01;29;08
Paul Sullivan
His wife, Tina, who works in technology, became the primary earner. We're going to talk today about Kevin's experience, but we're also going to learn how other dads can help their children suffering from mental health crises like anorexia. Kevin, welcome to the Company Dads podcast.

00;01;29;10 - 00;01;31;06
Kevin Olmsted
Thanks for having me, Paul.

00;01;31;08 - 00;01;56;20
Paul Sullivan
You know, a story like this, we have we have the book here for those looking you online, it's it's right here. It's a it's a great read. Quick read. But a story like this, you know, has a pre and, a post, you know, your, your daughter was, was 14, when all of this began to happen, when you look back, you know, for parents listening, for dads listening, what was life like before?

00;01;56;23 - 00;02;01;13
Paul Sullivan
For your before your daughter began her, her struggle with anorexia?

00;02;01;16 - 00;02;24;12
Kevin Olmsted
Oh, she was my best. I mean, she still lives very close, but she was just this amazing, emerging type, a friendly, outgoing, people pleaser. She was an incredibly, you know, high achieving athlete. I was that dad. I did all the carpools to lacrosse and soccer games. I traveled for her club, sports. I would keep score in the high school, stadium.

00;02;24;14 - 00;02;42;23
Kevin Olmsted
And, you know, she and I were buddies, and we laughed about everything. And she let me in on all the gossip with her friends, and, and she was she I just she was just this amazing, fun girl who didn't think that dad was a bad word. She would, in front of her friends, hug me and say, oh, he's great, isn't he?

00;02;42;26 - 00;03;00;15
Paul Sullivan
It's wonderful. But but you say, you know, starting right off the bat that this all begins. You know, like any parent, you know, you unless you you struggle with anorexia yourself, you you don't have any, you know, knowledge of this. And so she, she loses 30 pounds in 60 days and, you know, were there you know, in retrospect.

00;03;00;15 - 00;03;11;06
Paul Sullivan
Right. And were there sort of, you know, warning signs that something, you know, change did something when you look back and say, boy, you know, I like to tell all the dads, like there is this moment when, when this happened.

00;03;11;08 - 00;03;32;18
Kevin Olmsted
Yeah. And you put it well, it is all hindsight is 2020 at the time, you know nothing. And at the time she'll tell you nothing. And it's taken us four years of therapy and her coming around to fessing up that she had always had those thoughts for years prior, but she was able to control them. And, it really hadn't come to a head and she could, you know, keep a lid on it.

00;03;32;20 - 00;03;48;06
Kevin Olmsted
But, you know, when I the signs I should have known right away. It's one thing to see the weight loss. It's another thing when we always had dinner as a family breakfast as a family. We did everything as a family. And then suddenly she's like, oh, I'm eating in my room, or I ate at my friend's house, or, oh, I already ate.

00;03;48;13 - 00;04;13;23
Kevin Olmsted
Well, then you start finding spit up food in the downstairs guest bathroom and you're like, well, what's that? I don't understand? Or maybe you finding paper towels to stood up, food in the garbage in the side yard. And of course, now and especially anybody who's listening, who's been a part of it would say, well, of course, duh. But at the time, if you've never experienced it or you don't understand it or you're not looking for it, you just think like, oh, that's kind of weird, you know?

00;04;13;26 - 00;04;30;12
Kevin Olmsted
But yeah, those are I mean, some of those signs. And I write about it in the book and I talk about it a lot when I counsel other parents is to look for those things, that isolation, that drastic change in behavior, food choices, you know, suddenly at 13, 14, somebody wants to just have tables and be a vegan.

00;04;30;15 - 00;04;35;11
Kevin Olmsted
And I swear I ate at my friend's house, or I eat my room. All of those are signs.

00;04;35;13 - 00;04;57;15
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. And, you know, you talk about this, this you it's, you know, 30 pounds in 60 days, but it, you know, make it. It could have been, you know, 20 pounds in, in 23 and 42 days. So what was it about that that, you know, it's in the book, but to tell the listeners. Yeah. What was it about that 60 day mark when you and your wife and your family said, wait a second.

00;04;57;17 - 00;04;59;10
Paul Sullivan
There's something really going on here?

00;04;59;12 - 00;05;12;10
Kevin Olmsted
Yeah. You know, for anybody out there who's got a teenage daughter, they kind of wear 1 or 2 things that either wear nothing or everything they wear. It looks like their college football playing boyfriend sweatshirt, you know, you get. So there's times.

00;05;12;10 - 00;05;24;25
Paul Sullivan
You go, I have an almost 14 year old and she has the college football as well. And she's and my my father, her grandfather, who is a much bigger guy than I is given her the sweatshirt. I'm like, okay, they won't fit me and they don't fit you. But yeah.

00;05;24;28 - 00;05;45;05
Kevin Olmsted
And so they're just, again, if it's not on your radar and you're not looking for it. And kids, you know, at that age, kids, girls, boys, they have a growth spurt. And then they go out and have a growth spurt and they go out. And so with that and you're not paying attention and all that, I think it really came down to there was one point early in the summer that she came out into the backyard to just get some sun.

00;05;45;05 - 00;06;02;17
Kevin Olmsted
And I mean, it's like I got hit in the face in a Roadrunner cartoon with a pan that her her bathing suit was hanging off her. And when you can see, you know, the shoulder blades and you can see the back and you can see the ribs and it just it was so shocking and it was just so stunned.

00;06;02;23 - 00;06;19;20
Kevin Olmsted
And it suddenly all just kind of hit me like, yeah, she's really been distant. She's drinking all these weird water concoctions and vinegar and she doesn't eat with us anymore. And she's starting to get angry around food and oh my God, look at her rib cage. And I think that's what it was. And just I was stunned.

00;06;19;20 - 00;06;35;06
Kevin Olmsted
And then from there, it just got because then you start to notice and you ask the questions and the eating disorder puts up a great fight of just, you know, fighting back at you and dismissing everything and then taking it out on you as a parent, as a person. So that's kind of really where it started.

00;06;35;08 - 00;06;52;01
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. And I can imagine he has three daughters. But as a father of a teenager. Come on, dad, what are you talking about? Like, you know, leave me alone. No I'm fine. Dad. What? So what was the moment where you got past that and said, you know. No. Sweetheart, you're not fine. We need to. We need to do something here.

00;06;52;03 - 00;07;11;26
Kevin Olmsted
The, You know, there was a lot of moments, and it was four years ago. And whether I can't remember, plucked it out, probably the the the real tipping point moment and I write about it in the book was when we got into an eating disorder position here in the I live in East Bay in Northern California, and there's not that many physicians who specialize in eating disorder.

00;07;11;26 - 00;07;35;07
Kevin Olmsted
But we got in to see doctor Sue Knight on a early on a Saturday morning as part of a favor to somebody. And they took her. And, you know, they whisk my daughter away into the back for half an hour to do tests and check her vitals and do these things. And is when the and when the doctor called my wife and I and talked to us, that was the that was the minute where she looked at us and says, your daughter is drastically, underfed and malnourished.

00;07;35;15 - 00;07;44;26
Kevin Olmsted
Her heart is an incredibly dangerous place right now. She has a wicked eating disorder. She needs to be hospitalized. Now. You're within a week or two of losing your daughter, so it's go time.

00;07;44;29 - 00;07;49;14
Paul Sullivan
Holy cow. And so. And she's 14 years old at this time, correct.

00;07;49;16 - 00;08;05;01
Kevin Olmsted
And even in that morning. So they take her in and they do all these tests of the heart and all these different metrics. And so we're sitting in a room with the doctor, and then the nurses bring my daughter in to sit between us. And she could read the room. She's, you know, she's she's 14, she has an eating disorder.

00;08;05;03 - 00;08;20;04
Kevin Olmsted
She's not stupid. She could read the room. She sat between us and she listened to the doctor tell her what was wrong. And she didn't fight. She didn't say anything. She just kind of hung her head and started crying a little bit. But she knew. And, she got in the car and she went to the hospital. She knew.

00;08;20;06 - 00;08;36;24
Paul Sullivan
But she had also she was in a, you know, a young elite athlete who playing lacrosse. And so without having, you know, food as fuel, had it impacted her ability to, to play lacrosse and her friend. Yeah.

00;08;36;26 - 00;08;56;15
Kevin Olmsted
What it came down to, she was healthy enough through the end of her freshman year, up to about the end of April. But that's when after the season ended, with a lot of high school teams, you go to your club team right after the high school season ends. And so we started playing these tournaments and Illinois and Oregon, I think we went to Colorado, and I just see her maybe getting a little thinner and a little bit leaner.

00;08;56;20 - 00;09;15;20
Kevin Olmsted
But to answer your question, I'll give you the, the hindsight's 2020. She wasn't refueling or refueling enough. She was losing strength. She was losing speed. She was going back to her hotel rooms at night, lightheaded and not able to move. And of course, she's hiding all of it from me. Though it drastically affected her and and also accelerated the weight loss.

00;09;15;20 - 00;09;33;20
Kevin Olmsted
And it accelerated, you know, that that that that spiraling down into the, spiraling down into health. I mean, it probably accelerated. And I read about it in the book that I was a flipping idiot. I mean, I would just you're so blind to it and you're like, I guess we'll just go to the next tournament. And yeah, in retrospect, dumbest thing I could have done.

00;09;33;23 - 00;09;54;23
Paul Sullivan
But look, as you said, hindsight, it's always easy to beat yourself up after the fact. I mean, that you you got her and you got her help, but, you know, you I can't imagine you expected that when you went to see that tonight, that she would say, okay, you would go to the hospital. As of now, you're or you're in a week, you know, within a week or two of actually losing your daughter, you know, and that's a kid has, you know, cancer or something like that.

00;09;54;26 - 00;10;17;16
Paul Sullivan
You know, you don't imagine we're going to lose our kids, you know, that young. So that's when it becomes it was obviously already a crisis. But that's when it becomes clear to you that it's a real crisis. And and describe a bit of what happens. How does because I'm sure life starts to speed up at that point. What happens is she gets hospitalized, you know, starts this, you know, long road of treatment that, you know, she's sort of four years long now.

00;10;17;16 - 00;10;20;21
Paul Sullivan
But, you know, it did begin that that day.

00;10;20;23 - 00;10;39;25
Kevin Olmsted
Well, what what it begins is we're all on the same page and we're all honest, and we've all been shown the light together. And at the same time, there's no longer. My wife and I was green, like, what is she doing? Or what should we do? And her hiding it? It's all of us in the room together saying it's real and this has to be treated and let's go.

00;10;39;27 - 00;10;55;12
Kevin Olmsted
And, you know, you ever heard the expression of building the plane while you're flying it? You have to learn this while it's happening. There's no day off. You can't take a rest day or cheat day. Get her into the hospital. And the hospital is not where you treat anorexia. The hospital is where they bring you back to medical stability.

00;10;55;15 - 00;11;13;09
Kevin Olmsted
They get your heart rate, your blood pressure. They get everything out of the red and back into the black. She's on movement restriction. She's on an IV tube, she's on a heart monitor. And that's also where you learn how you have to feed a kid six times a day and watch them like a hawk, and they can't purge it up or hide it afterwards.

00;11;13;12 - 00;11;30;10
Kevin Olmsted
So again, it's really being thrown in a foxhole with no training. And then they offer you as is. The hospital says, okay, you are now medically cleared and healthy enough to leave here. You're not cured. You're nowhere close to the end of this, but you no longer need to be here. Are you going to a residential program starting today?

00;11;30;10 - 00;11;44;21
Kevin Olmsted
Are you going to treat them at home, or are you going to go to an outpatient program? What is your insurance? Have you read up on all this? What are you going to do? Cause and in that first week that your kid's in the hospital and you're not sleeping and you're trying to understand what's going on, and you've tried to learn all that and that.

00;11;44;21 - 00;12;12;08
Kevin Olmsted
Thanks. Thinks your insurance, it's really overwhelming. And, you know, one of the things I'll say now that the book is all about and I've said a thousand times the whole reason that I wrote the book and that you found me and I'm here is I've stuck my hand up in my community. I'm not going to cure anybody's anorexia, but for everything I just told you, I put my hand up to say, hey, I'm kind of a first call while you're spinning your wheels and you're in the hospital and your kid is struggling, you don't know what to call me.

00;12;12;10 - 00;12;28;16
Kevin Olmsted
Let me walk. Let me understand what's the crisis? And let me kind of lay out a roadmap for you. Let me be your first, you know, somebody to go to for an answer. Again, I'm not going to cure or sit or give everybody the light, but at least let me be that first road marker to say, try this, try this, try this.

00;12;28;19 - 00;12;32;02
Kevin Olmsted
This is going to be hard. This is going to be terrible. I wish I would have had somebody like me for.

00;12;32;02 - 00;12;35;17
Paul Sullivan
Years that I was going to ask, did you have somebody like that to be your gut? No.

00;12;35;19 - 00;12;53;09
Kevin Olmsted
That's the other big tenet of the book is so much it's so pervasive. Nobody talks about eating disorders. There's so much shame and secrecy and control around it. And I understand parents, we all want to be private with our kids and our family. There's shame around it. I'm loud and proud and screaming from the mountaintops that. Don't be.

00;12;53;09 - 00;13;09;18
Kevin Olmsted
You have to find help for your kid. You have to find help for yourself. You have to find community. And as I've done this, a couple of other parents and fathers have said, yeah, I'm going to get the same thing. I'm going to kind of be out there in my community for people to call and ask questions, too, because in any crisis you go to, you need help.

00;13;09;18 - 00;13;16;27
Kevin Olmsted
You can't do everything on your own, and you kids read about it. You need to call somebody and say, hey, this is my problem. God, what? What do you suggest? How what do I do?

00;13;16;29 - 00;13;53;10
Paul Sullivan
But in some ways, you know, you know, anorexia is not, you know, Covid in March of 2020, you know, we know it exists. It is existed for a long time. There have been famous stories of celebrities who who battled, anorexia. Why isn't there, you know, more of, a roadmap to to come back to what you said about the, the sort of shame and privacy I would I would think that as an outsider that it would be something like, okay, this has happened and now do the following, 17 things as it would if you were diagnosed with something else.

00;13;53;11 - 00;13;54;22
Paul Sullivan
It's fairly common.

00;13;54;25 - 00;14;14;06
Kevin Olmsted
It's hard to say. You know, people take pride in saying that they. Oh, I'm an alcoholic. I'm getting treatment. Oh, you know, you know, if you're going to get cancer, think about it this way. They've done so much research and so many resources on breast cancer. The NFL wears pink cleats once a year. I mean, breast cancer is ready to treat if you get it.

00;14;14;12 - 00;14;38;07
Kevin Olmsted
The treatment and the resources and the modalities are all lined up. Eating disorders are mental disorders, and mental disorders are hard to put a leash on and lead to a cure because there is no one pill or cast or or treatment that says if this then fixed, because it's all so individualized and so variable. You know, I've, I've met so many parents where their daughter or son had an eating disorder, but really came out of it in a year or two.

00;14;38;07 - 00;15;04;24
Kevin Olmsted
And, or some of them go on for ten years. My daughter's at year four and some kind of getting better, and some kids relate to treatment better than others. Some kids, it's just so variable. It's so hard. And even now, we're seeing new modalities, pop up, new treatment ideas, new courses all the time because everybody's, again, kind of building the plane as we fly it, all the traditional stuff of, oh, just go to a psychologist, you'll be fine.

00;15;04;24 - 00;15;13;15
Kevin Olmsted
Oh, just eat more. You'll be fine. Go to residential program. You'll be fine. They're still peeling back the onion to really kind of find what the cause is. And that's why it's so nebulous.

00;15;13;17 - 00;15;30;23
Paul Sullivan
You know, as a parent of teenagers, teenage girls, you know, you don't really want to say, hey, you know, why are you eating that? Why are you doing this? It's in our minds incorrectly. Because this is a mental health, issue, not a it's a beating issue. But in our minds, like, okay, maybe we don't bring it up.

00;15;30;23 - 00;15;46;16
Paul Sullivan
We don't want to give, you know, our child to a complex like this, but but in this case, as you said, you're all on the same page. And so that means I think that you're able to talk about it. But how does that, you know, conversation go is there, you know, resistant? As you said, it's a four year process.

00;15;46;16 - 00;15;49;26
Paul Sullivan
And she's still she's still in it with with peaks and valleys.

00;15;49;28 - 00;16;18;01
Kevin Olmsted
So one of the things about eating disorders, at least anorexia, which is their, you know, refusal and restricting food and over exercising is every time somebody with anorexia is in the presence of food, stress is incredibly high, resistance is high and emotions are high. And so you do very little discussing with a child, with an eating disorder in the presence of food, you simply reinforce this is this is what's best for you.

00;16;18;04 - 00;16;37;29
Kevin Olmsted
This is enough food for you. This is the right thing for you. Yes. You got to make sure you eat it all. You can't debate it. You can't nuance it. It really isn't away from food. The stress level goes down. But at the same time, you can't get into an argument with an eating disorder because they're always going to try to they'll they'll find a way to excuse it or find a way not to eat.

00;16;37;29 - 00;16;56;01
Kevin Olmsted
So I guess maybe I'm getting really, really specific on your question. Even though we're all on the same page, you can't negotiate and debate an eating disorder. You just have to slowly move the rock uphill, which is means with to my daughter in the room, like, yes, we're out of the hospital now. We're checking you into a residential program, and she's going to hate it, but I'm like, get in the car.

00;16;56;01 - 00;17;10;12
Kevin Olmsted
We're going, yeah, or hey, that didn't work. We're going back to the hospital. Get in the car. We're going in. As you and I talked about before we started recording, even up until a year ago when my daughter was three years into treatment and had a bad relapse, we had to check her into a program at UC San Diego.

00;17;10;15 - 00;17;26;18
Kevin Olmsted
And at that time, she's 17. And we had to say, get on the car, get in the car to go to the airport, to get on the plane, to go to the facility. And she didn't want to, but she did it. But that's what it means, like out in the open, you're not sneaking it. It's like you you need by.

00;17;26;18 - 00;17;40;08
Kevin Olmsted
And, you know, at some point she can just run away and refuse. But that's what it means. It's like you're all talking about together because you can't treat it in secret. And you can't just give her a pill. You've got to have her by and to eat the food, to go to the program, to talk to the psychologist.

00;17;40;10 - 00;17;53;22
Paul Sullivan
You know, it's obviously been an ongoing process over four years of treatment. But when you talk about it, you've talked about, you know, inpatient, outpatient. How many times has she gone to different, treatment facilities over the four years.

00;17;53;24 - 00;18;18;11
Kevin Olmsted
She has been in Stanford Hospital twice. She's been at UC San Francisco. Benioff once she did an outpatient in Northern California for about two months. And then we moved to San Diego for about three and a half, four months last summer, where she did an outpatient program at UC San Diego. And then the treatment at home for two and a half plus years of just me feeding her.

00;18;18;13 - 00;18;39;11
Kevin Olmsted
So, Oh, and there was one at the time we had hospitalized her overnight, but that was just more to get some hydration in her. But, yeah, those are. And I'll tell you something. I rattle that off like it's nothing. I just want anybody out there to understand there's a whole other conversation around. This is a privilege to be able to treat an eating disorder.

00;18;39;18 - 00;19;01;10
Kevin Olmsted
Because if you don't have the insurance, if, you don't have a spouse who can quit his job to stay home full time, what if you're a single parent? What if you're working two jobs? I mean, medicine and therapy and residential and hospitalization costs a tremendous amount of money and time and effort. And, again, I feel just grateful that we have the luxury to do it for so many parents.

00;19;01;10 - 00;19;04;22
Kevin Olmsted
It's not it's not reasonable. It's not tenable.

00;19;04;24 - 00;19;07;29
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. Does your daughter have any siblings?

00;19;08;01 - 00;19;13;23
Kevin Olmsted
Yeah. Her older brother, our son is, 21, is about to graduate from University of Oregon.

00;19;13;26 - 00;19;15;15
Paul Sullivan
3 or 3 years older than her.

00;19;15;15 - 00;19;25;22
Kevin Olmsted
Is that. Yeah. He took off to college as she went into her first residential program. So he's been away for most of the four years that we've been going through this.

00;19;25;25 - 00;19;38;00
Paul Sullivan
Oh, I see okay. Because I was going to ask, you know, there's you and your wife and your daughter, but how has your son been part of this, this process. What's the impact been on on him?

00;19;38;02 - 00;19;56;27
Kevin Olmsted
We're a very close family. And you know, even though he's away at Oregon, we talk to him, text him all the time, we visit, and we go to football games. We have not been able to spend as much time with him, like, hey, let's go see our son at college. And there were times we go a week where you forget the column because we're still underwater, but we've come to.

00;19;57;04 - 00;20;13;26
Kevin Olmsted
But we're very close to him. He's a really bright kid, and we've come to learn. I don't want to say some secrets, but we've been told and shown some text and comments that he's made to a lot of other people in his friend group and in the community, sticking up for his sister, getting in people's faces who joke about anorexia.

00;20;13;29 - 00;20;21;18
Kevin Olmsted
He gets it. He's a smart kid. He loves his sister, and he's for she wasn't physically here, but he understands what we've been through.

00;20;21;20 - 00;20;38;18
Paul Sullivan
You know, you say in the book that that you're no expert, on this, your dad who's who's gone through this, but obviously you've learned, a tremendous amount. You think things that probably no parent ever wants to learn. But you have this, you know, knowledge, you'd mentioned before you started recording about this network that you're, you're part of.

00;20;38;18 - 00;20;48;10
Paul Sullivan
How are you, you know, sharing that knowledge and how do you look to help, you know, other other dads or other parents, who have children with, with anorexia?

00;20;48;12 - 00;21;10;26
Kevin Olmsted
It's really been, a really, cathartic kind of, all these kind of things coming together at once. I self-published this book in the beginning of January, and then about last September, I joined a group for anybody. As a parent, going through this feast is a great organization. Beast hyphen ed.org is all about caregiver support for parents.

00;21;10;28 - 00;21;32;11
Kevin Olmsted
And, within feast. A few years ago, a couple of dads realized we need to have a dad group, and so they joined and created something called the Men of Feast. And every two weeks on a Thursday, dads from across the US, Canada, in the UK, if you're on that zoom call, you want to be on that zoom call, you need to be in enriches you, it supports you.

00;21;32;13 - 00;21;50;11
Kevin Olmsted
And it's curated by a guy named Kevin Dunn out of Sacramento. And, it's always very educational, but it's a forum where dads show up. Either they're one month into it, one year, ten years into it. Dads ask questions, dads cry, dads look for advice, dads give advice, and you're not forced to be there. If you're on that call, you want to be on that call.

00;21;50;14 - 00;22;04;13
Kevin Olmsted
And that is I just I really found my community. I found my tribe. You know, I've been in personal therapy for about a year and a half, just, you know, unpacking my own stuff. And then I join a couple of parent groups based out of UC San Diego from last summer that I'm with once a month, once a week.

00;22;04;16 - 00;22;23;15
Kevin Olmsted
And now that meant a feast. You know, all of that therapy community, and connection started to really help and, and allow me to express and understand things about myself. I published the book and through my website people can contact me. So I'm doing a lot of counseling with parents and people from all over the country and all over the world have never met before.

00;22;23;18 - 00;22;43;18
Kevin Olmsted
And as I counsel and I talk and I get interviewed by people like Paul, the more I talk about it, the more I do go through counseling and group therapy, the more I come to learn how to express and understand how I feel about it and why it hurt me and why it didn't hurt me. But I'm a big believer in finding that community and finding your peers and finding your tribe.

00;22;43;18 - 00;22;45;03
Kevin Olmsted
You can't do any of that stuff alone.

00;22;45;06 - 00;23;00;09
Paul Sullivan
Yeah, and when you go into that, when you say you're come become better at expressing, you know, how it hurt you and how it didn't hurt you. I mean, how how did it, you know, is other fathers who are listening to this, you know, when you look at what what's the impact been on you.

00;23;00;11 - 00;23;30;18
Kevin Olmsted
As a person, maybe especially as a male in, in, in, in a first world country, you've just got to, you know, let your ego go. But allow yourself to be vulnerable. Allow yourself to have a curious mind or a beginner's mind. Ask questions, admit faults, admit your emotions. It's it's awesome to just break down and cry. Rise up for for ten minutes when when the stuff hits you, you know, you don't have to go in the backyard and scream at the barbecue or pound of beer.

00;23;30;21 - 00;23;56;18
Kevin Olmsted
You know, it's okay to cry and it's okay to let people see you cry. I've let my daughter see me cry a lot. And once you kind of let that out, and once you again, I go back to the idea of just, you know, it's a short life and it's a small planet. And if you just admit you're, you're vulnerable and you're scared and you're sad, it's amazing how many other people it is amazing how many other fathers, other men will see that and say, man, I agree with you.

00;23;56;18 - 00;24;01;14
Kevin Olmsted
You're right. I feel the same way. What do we do? I mean, that's really the key.

00;24;01;16 - 00;24;32;17
Paul Sullivan
You write in the book about and you mentioned here in the book how, you know, your daughter needed to eat, you know, 5 or 6 times, a day. And so that becomes a bit type of schedule, but you sit in between, in the book that you would take walks with her and sometimes you, you know, like any teenager, sometimes she'd open up and tell you all kind of different things, and sometimes you would just walk, talk a bit more about the importance of those, you know, walks for you, but for her, but for the whole family, you know, healing in and recovery process.

00;24;32;19 - 00;24;55;24
Kevin Olmsted
You know, it's it's it's weird how a space can define an emotion. Like, I love my house, but behind the front door and under the roof of my house is where all of that went down for four years. And just moving, getting out of a space that's associated with something that's traumatic. A walk is neutral. A walk is slow, you know, it's almost, meditative in a way.

00;24;56;01 - 00;25;12;24
Kevin Olmsted
You know, get rid of the earbuds. And especially if you're with somebody just looking at the trees every day, like, oh, the leaves are coming in more. Oh, look, somebody planted their garden and let things happen organically. A lot of the time, even if my daughter and I weren't talking, it was an admission between the two of us that we just enjoy each other's company.

00;25;12;24 - 00;25;30;10
Kevin Olmsted
We wanted to just be away and moving without my daughter, and my wife and I would walk in. That became a safe space where we had to communicate, and we had to be very clear that, hey, are we in this on the same page today? Are we in the same book? Are we in the same bookstore? But how did snack go?

00;25;30;14 - 00;25;45;11
Kevin Olmsted
Who's going to take dinner tonight? Are we going to start incorporating cheese next week? That again, it's a safe, slow, very nice way to communicate, to move. And again, it's kind of meditative for me to just that kind of movement.

00;25;45;14 - 00;25;50;20
Paul Sullivan
How hard was it to stay on the same page, you know, with, with your wife?

00;25;50;23 - 00;26;13;23
Kevin Olmsted
That's okay. There's probably a whole other book on that. And so many conversations I've had with fathers and even wives is an edict treating a child for a mental disorder or any kind of a sickness will exacerbate the slightest sliver of light between. You can become a chasm because we all come at this differently. You know, maybe somebody is rule oriented, somebody is more emotional or oriented, and maybe during a crisis.

00;26;13;25 - 00;26;50;03
Kevin Olmsted
I wanted to handle it one way, and my wife wanted to handle it another way. And there is. But I do believe there's times especially when it concerns your kids health. You got to be on the same page. But I've learned that it's okay sometimes to just be in the same book, maybe sometimes just in the same bookstore together, because you're not always going to agree on everything, but is there's a you really do have to communicate with your spouse or your partner, whoever you have, don't let the treatment or the emotion around trauma with your kids come between you, or at least the same way I talked about going to therapy.

00;26;50;05 - 00;27;11;00
Kevin Olmsted
Go to your partner, be honest, and say, I didn't like the way that you handled that with me, or I probably let you down. This is all about her or him. Let's back off and make sure that we're okay together, because I would talk about caregiver support, caregiver support is also making sure that if you, as parents are going into this to treat it together, you can't let this thing wreck the two of you.

00;27;11;00 - 00;27;15;05
Kevin Olmsted
Because like any trauma, this can rip apart a marriage. No doubt.

00;27;15;08 - 00;27;39;09
Paul Sullivan
You know, your daughter, you said, is 18 now. You know, go off to college next year. You know, every parent, particularly and, you know, as you said, first world countries, you know, affluent areas, you know, you sort of think you're preparing your kids to go off to college and from college to go on to do, you know, whatever you're going to do, in life and obviously you're is going to go to college next year, but it has to be more, you know, fraught for you.

00;27;39;12 - 00;27;58;03
Paul Sullivan
You know, if she she goes off to college, we all worry about our kids and what may, you know, go wrong. You know, do they drink too much at a party? Do they not do well in school? Does something else happen? But but your daughter's going into brand new. We'll go into a brand new environment, with, you know, the knowledge that she has a serious eating disorder.

00;27;58;03 - 00;28;10;08
Paul Sullivan
That is an ongoing process of of of battle. How do you, you know, how have you prepared her? But also how have you and your wife prepared yourself for her going off to college next year?

00;28;10;10 - 00;28;36;29
Kevin Olmsted
So a year ago and she was a senior in high school and we're treating her at home. We so, a lot of the treatments have to do with contracts. You write up basically write out rules and contracts with kids about hitting weight goals, attaining weight goals, going through different things. And we had told her back in late 2021, we said, if you're not at your healthy target weight by March 1st of 2022, and you don't hold that on your own through the fall of 2022, we will not send you to college.

00;28;37;02 - 00;28;52;07
Kevin Olmsted
And there was a lot of bluster and there was a lot of threats and a lot of, you know, doing you're going to we're going to ruin our lives. And we kept her home because she couldn't hit that weight, and there was no way if we'd sent her last fall and I looked at her, I said, you'd be in the hospital in a week.

00;28;52;09 - 00;29;12;04
Kevin Olmsted
So she stayed home this whole cycle, and now she has hit a weight, just this last month or two. And she's holding it right now. Same. It's the same goal is we used first of all. So to answer your question specifically, got to get to a healthy weight on your own. And you have to exhibit behaviors, beliefs and habits on your own between now and August.

00;29;12;04 - 00;29;30;28
Kevin Olmsted
And that maintains that weight. And all of your vitals are fine. And all of your menses are on a regular basis. And that shows that you can feed yourself and act in accordance. We also been up to her college a couple of times. We'd gone into the dining halls and we practiced. We said, okay, go get a tray, go make sure you put enough on that plate.

00;29;31;00 - 00;29;46;26
Kevin Olmsted
You'll find a place to sit. Try it. See if you can do it. We've been in touch with the the health center up there. And the health center at her college, thankfully has an eating, some sort of an eating disorder specialty group that we've been in touch with, that they know what to say and how to handle where my daughter will go and do a monthly, weekly weigh in.

00;29;46;26 - 00;30;03;29
Kevin Olmsted
And she'll do vitals once a week. And they understand how they do that. And then probably my wife and I, it's about a two hour flight, but we're probably going to take turns every two weeks. Line up walking in and hanging out with her because I can walk in and immediately kind of look at her. No. And she and if she knows we're coming to watch and hang out with her, she knows she's been held accountable.

00;30;04;02 - 00;30;08;22
Kevin Olmsted
So those are all the kind of thing ways we led up to it. And those are the ways we're looking at it going forward.

00;30;08;25 - 00;30;12;26
Paul Sullivan
How is she spent this, this gap year between high school and college?

00;30;12;28 - 00;30;28;24
Kevin Olmsted
Well, we didn't get back from the program in San Diego until mid to late September. She had a great job locally at a place that she's worked for years that she really, really enjoys. But it was dark. It was not fun. She took it out on us that all of our friends were gone, and she was missing out on everything in life, and that she hated us.

00;30;28;24 - 00;30;53;16
Kevin Olmsted
And it sucked, and I nothing to do. She stood. She took a couple of, community college courses just to get, you know, some basic prereqs out of the way. She worked. She spent a lot of time in her room hating us. But then I think I mentioned earlier, we brought in kind of a new treatment team, last October, and it was something really the first thing that she'd really ever, that resonated with her.

00;30;53;18 - 00;31;11;18
Kevin Olmsted
And she really enjoyed and really kind of vibe with that team. And it was a very intimate and intense, thing that we did with her from about November through the end of March. That's really kind of brought her around. And then so she kind of went back to saying, okay, it's now March. Most my friends will be home in May, June, and I'm going to go away in April, August.

00;31;11;20 - 00;31;22;02
Kevin Olmsted
You know, the horrible death year is almost over, and I'm going to enjoy my job and and try to keep myself healthy. And, it's kind of what she's been up to. Yeah.

00;31;22;04 - 00;31;44;00
Paul Sullivan
Kevin Olmstead, author of the new book, Scared That Feeding. Thank you so much. I always give my guests a last, word. If you could give any advice to a father, who is listening to this and suspects that his his daughter or son, may have anorexia. What would that advice be?

00;31;44;02 - 00;32;06;15
Kevin Olmsted
If you suspect the very first thing that matters the most is the health of your child? The psychological work will take years. All the different treatment options will come and go, and you'll probably go through all of them. Step number one is you have to get that kid to a doctor. Now drop everything you're doing and hopefully a doctor that's got a history of data, history.

00;32;06;18 - 00;32;29;16
Kevin Olmsted
There's no one data point tells the whole story. But if you look at trends over time of BMI and weight, heart rates, blood pressures, and, you want to look for, bone density in girls, loss of menses in the bone density of boys, get them to a doctor, have them evaluated immediately, and just make sure that heart is not in any danger or blood work's not in any danger.

00;32;29;18 - 00;32;46;08
Kevin Olmsted
And once you've established a baseline of what their health is, then you can start to understand and decide what courses of treatment you're going to take. But first and foremost, it's that health. Like when I went to Doctor Knight and she said, it's a good thing you've got here now, you know, waited a week or to be over.

00;32;46;08 - 00;32;59;03
Kevin Olmsted
So if you suspect anything, just get to a doctor who knows what they're talking about, what you need, disorders. And then after that start looking up some resources. Start looking online, email me. I'm happy to just give you some advice.

00;32;59;06 - 00;33;05;12
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. Thank you again for being my guest on the Company of Dads podcast. I really appreciate your time and insight today.

00;33;05;15 - 00;33;09;17
Kevin Olmsted
I appreciate you having me follow was a real pleasure to talk to you.

00;33;09;20 - 00;33;34;29
Paul Sullivan
Thank you for listening to the Company of Dads podcast. I also want to thank the people who make this podcast and everything else that we do at the Company of Dads possible. Helder Moura, who is our audio producer Lindsay Decker, handles all of our social media. Terry Brennan, who's helping us with the newsletter and audience acquisition, Emily Servin, who is our web maestro, and of course, Evan Roosevelt, who is working side by side with me.

00;33;34;29 - 00;33;52;20
Paul Sullivan
And many of the things that we do here at the Company of Dads. It's a great team. And we're just trying to bring you the best in fatherhood. Remember, the one stop shop for everything is our newsletter, the dad. Sign up at the Company of dads.com backslash the dad. Thank you again for listening.