Now I understand that toddlers are fussy eaters and can go fairly long stretches without eating much, but older children aren't in that crazy growth mode so I don't know how it works.

My older child for the past week has decided she "hates" absolutely everything we are cooking. Tonight it was just ridiculous - we had a garlic roasted Lilydale chicken with roast potatoes and sweet vegetables and it was done to perfection and orgasmically delicious. Offspring had maybe 2 mouthfuls of chicken and a bite of potato, leaving her 2yo little sister to clean up - so I had a toddler eat almost half a chicken, huge pile of potatoes, veggies, all while going "yum yum yum" yet I have this sullen child at the other end of the table whining about how much she hates the food. Yesterday while she was doing the same with a different dinner (patties) she was telling us how much she hated patties but loved roast chicken.

This has been going on for about a week. So Child Elder is eating loosely 1 piece of toast for breakfast (plain with a tiny scraping of butter), a very small glass of chocolate milk, maybe a piece of cake for recess if she remembers, a peanut butter or nuttella sandwich on one slice of bread, small glass of chocolate milk when she gets home and maybe a mouthful of dinner if we are lucky. Today she skipped the cake and just had one slice of bread for lunch. FWIW she has wholegrain bread, not that that is much of an improvement. Wholegrain bread is about the only thing she doesn't hate at the moment. She likes the cake we always have in the house but constantly forgets to eat it.

We told her she's not eating enough and she asked us how long it takes to die of starvation eating what she's eating. I've been sending her to bed straight after dinner the last few days on the grounds that if she doesn't eat, she must be sick. She goes without objection.

Is this much food seriously enough to keep a 30kg, 9.5yo girl alive? She says she is very hungry before dinner but then refuses to eat because she "hates" our food. Its driving me nuts. She is quite good at self-denial, the worst she's done to date is decide not to drink for a few weeks other than a few sips of water at dinner and gave herself pretty serious dehydration, which I should have picked up earlier but it is rather an odd thing to do to yourself - I picked it in the end because she was complaining about stomach cramps and her classmates teasing her about her "cold sores" because her cracked lips were so bad. It took 2 days of arguing to convince her she actually needed to drink. I still need to remind her to drink or she simply doesn't do it, while my other child just helps herself to water all day.

I don't doubt that she can keep up this not eating for quite some time and I don't want her getting sick from malnutrition.