Dear Abby advises a husband after his daughter was hospitalized after losing a lot of weight due to an eating disorder.

After several months of weight loss, our preteen daughter was hospitalized after a trip to the ER. She was diagnosed with ARFID. It’s an eating disorder we had never heard of but one in which the patient is NOT deliberately losing weight or attempting to change their body.

As a former sufferer of an eating disorder, my wife is reluctant to let anyone outside our inner circle know what is going on.

But we need to say something to the people in our lives who know something is wrong and ask what’s going on and where we’ve been. What should we tell people to preserve our daughter’s privacy while acknowledging that not everything is OK?