“Girls Become Lovers, Who Turn Into Mothers – So Mothers Be Good to Your Daughter’s Too” (John Mayer)

Denise was sitting at the dinner table with her family. Her 8yrs old daughter was describing the going’s on at school that day -  Girls still teasing each other over what they are wearing and all the usual “girl stuff.” But then the conversation made Denise uncomfortable, and say to herself, “OMG, where did this come from?” Her daughter was depicting how the girls were tormenting another girl for being “fat.” Denise tried to offer a life-lesson to her daughter. She told her daughter that it’s not nice to tease another girl for her weight or how she looks – and it’s not very fair either. Her daughter looked at her mother puzzled – and then said, “But Mommy isn’t fat bad? Isn’t it the reason you say we eat like we do, and it isn’t it the reason you go to the gym every day?” Isn’t it bad to be fat, mommy?” All Denise could think to herself is “How did we get here? – and – What do I say to this?”

Seems Denise’s daughter had been a pretty keen and astute observer of her mother’s behavior and attitude – so how did we get here? And what are we going to do about it now?

Well, allow me to extrapolate, and I hope you will share this editorial with others who have daughters, or who may in the future.

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We live in a society where weight is both a form of prejudice and a form of social-control. And these biases imprison women far more intensely than men. And it starts in childhood. Eventually girls learn to “fear” puberty for how their bodies may change and Lord-forbid, “get fatter.” Girls are taught from a young age, not to embrace their bodies but to enslave them to the pursuit of thinness/leanness at all costs. And of course, the “logical” way to do this is to promote “diet” and “dieting” as a means and vehicle to achieve female success, validation, and attention. It’s no surprise Denise’s daughter said what she said – It’s not that kids say the darndest things, but that they sometimes reflect their reality in very scary and illuminating ways. Let’s look at the research for a minute here.

Distorted body-images have been reported in girls as young as 7-9 years of age. Recently a mother lit up the blogosphere after she found a piece of paper with a starvation diet on it that her 7 YRS OLD daughter was trying to live by. Body-image issues that begin this young seem to only intensify with age. For instance a study by Mellin et al showed that 31% of middle school girls between the ages of 9-10 were afraid of being fat, and this percentage vaulted to a whopping 81% in 10 yrs. olds – just a one year difference to internalize the cultural beauty doctrine. Furthermore, 51% of 9 and 10 yrs. old girls reported feeling better about themselves if they were on a diet. And of that number almost 10% were already reporting purging behavior or attempted purging behavior. The main point here is that the Mellin study was done in 1986 – these young girls are therefore likely mothers themselves now. Did they solve these issues and free the next generation from such ridiculousness? - Obviously not. These numbers are even scarier today than ever. Another study by Johnson et al 1989, showed that of 1268 adolescent girls – 52% reported they began dieting before the age of 14. And just quick research into the sociological studies of girls and dieting illustrates this has not changed much since the 1980s. So it should be no surprise that an outraged mother finds a scrap of paper with a starvation diet on it – that her 7 yrs. old was handed at school. So, the question becomes, aren’t you tired of it? Do you want to keep handing down these cultural psychic straight-jackets from one generation to the next? Many of you ask, well what can we do?

Well first stop shaping questions in the form of helplessness. Imagine the power of one outraged gender speaking with one united voice. Think in terms of healing rather than in terms of counter-resistance. To relieve young girls of these ridiculous burdens requires a loud voice of thousands, even millions of outraged mothers to challenge the prevailing assumptions and values of this culture – and promote a deeper understanding of the issues involved. It means exposing commercialization of female exploitation through diet and weight-control – and focus on raising female consciousness to encourage young girls to know and develop competence and confidence outside the realm of appearance first. And I’m sure there are even programs for this that are not being tapped into at all.

What is necessary to change the conversation – to challenge the social context – and to eventually change it is that “fat” needs to be identified and recognized as a form of cultural prejudice. Only once this is embraced by men and women, can young girls specifically, be released from all the components of cultural bigotry that lead directly to eating disorders, body-image issues and other female-centric problems that are developed by internalizing these prejudices from childhood into adulthood. Do you really want to keep handing down an intensified focus on body-image and fear of fat, from mother to daughter for generations to come? It’s time to unite and create a political agenda that stops exploiting young girls in order that they become good little buying soldiers when they reach adulthood. And you can only counter-act culture when you challenge it politically. And of course it can be done. Let’s look at history for a minute.

African Americans learned over time to stop internalizing racism – and in the 60’s the “Black is Beautiful” movement began a campaign that has been empowering African Americans ever since. It doesn’t eradicate racism, but it provided an empowering alternative. Jewish people have similarly done the same – and stopped internalizing targeted anti-Semitism. And look at the gay movement for a more modern example. Gays and lesbians banded together to stop internalizing the cultural homophobia. Coming out the closet, led to “gay pride” and now “gay pride weeks” celebrated all over the world. All of these examples illustrate there are alternatives to just accepting and internalizing cultural biases, cultural prejudices, and cultural oppression. Isn’t it time to do so about weight-consciousness? Once this is embraced on a cultural level, the pressure on 7 yrs. olds to internalize beauty and weight stereotypes and body-image pressures – can finally be lifted. And young girls can be freer than ever to be kids again – and develop a free-spirit of consciousness from a place of empowerment – instead of a place of passive acceptance of cultural bigotry and oppression over weight, fat and female body-image.

The question is - are there are enough mothers out there, strong enough, and angry enough to take a stand – and be a voice of reform? – Not just reform but reclamation – Not just reclamation but revolution. I say there are! Just as targets of bigotry - of race, ethnicity, and sexual-orientation can be taught they don’t have to internalize prejudice – this frees them from binds of hostility and shame and a sense of isolation. And just like these prejudices, cultural bigotry about weight and body-image should also be challenged politically and on a cultural level – otherwise the cultural agenda of bias against “fat”, especially “female fat” continues. And it is unlikely to ever be countered on an individual level. Mothers, it’s just time to stand up and be counted.

Kids are learning in school at young ages, all about anti-racism, anti-homophobia and other cultural prejudices – religious and otherwise. Is it really so hard to imagine that children can also be taught an anti-weightism message as well – taught to internalize that body-shape and image truly do NOT matter. Can you imagine the empowerment for future generations of women by starting now? Or we can just continue to intensify these disturbing research numbers that I mentioned above, by doing nothing.  If boys and girls in first and second grade can be taught it is wrong and hurtful and unjust to exclude someone because of race, religious background or physical challenges – is it really such a stretch to teach kids that “weight” and “fat” prejudice can be equally as damaging? Imagine if “fat-bias” was linked to other forms of prejudice, bigotry, and chauvinism taught in schools. Do you not think this would then have a transfer effect to young girls being “allowed” to feel ok about their bodies at ages as young as 7-9 yrs. old?

All any of the modern reality of pre-adolescent age girls dieting reflects - is that female cultural oppression is alive and well and being internalized and accepted at an alarming rate. Do you not think teaching weight and bodily acceptance and not vilifying “overweight” can go a long way to countering this modern “superwoman” ideal – that thinness, youthfulness, and facial appeal – are all that matter – or should matter to female rites of passage? A 7 yrs. old with a starvation diet and worried about being fat – is just more illustration of how penetratingly exploitative is the diet-industry. Do you really want your kids to continue to be raised by corporations, when it comes to notions of worthy ideals to embrace and aspire to?

Young kids are impressionable and passionate. Imagine enlisting them to resist the beauty doctrine instead of passively being allowed to have it infect them at such young ages. It can’t be that hard to institute an educational agenda that would challenge weight, fat, and body-image biases that are right now crippling the female gender. Imagine if grades 1 thru 12 – taught and reinforced the ramifications and consequences of weightism, fat-prejudice, and the beauty-doctrine. Imagine the dent this could put in future generations of maturing females to avoid eating disorders, weight-problems, and mental issues like depression and anxiety born of cultural pressures on girls to look a specific way – and ONLY that way. Imagine being the generation that sets them free of all of it!

Imagine teaching “acceptance” of a broader definition of the concept of “normal” body weight, body size – and normal eating associated with empowerment – rather than rigid ideals of perfection. Imagine teaching young girls the difference between physical and mental and emotional self-determination, self-definition and self-acceptance on the one hand – vs. self-rejection, self-hate, and body-obsession on the other hand. It’s just a matter of organization – maybe first at a community level. But it’s time to recognize and undertake an ethic of self-care of personal connection – and teach it in a way that overrides corporate cultural agenda that makes girls as young as 7 – feel fearful about their bodies. Imagine just a little maternal thinking, feeling, and behaving – but at the political and educational level. 

Imagine getting past just accepting that women’s real job is to look good – and to stop pretending that ISN”T the message they are getting bombarded with every day. Imagine tapping into female strengths – strengths that are currently undervalued, underused and underpaid. Imagine teaching empowerment skills of personal growth beyond the mandate of dieting, shopping, and cosmetic surgery as “answers” for dealing with the world. Imagine an educational agenda that challenges cultural pressures that diminish and degrade female self-esteem. Imagine if young girls were pressured less to losing weight – then imagine the empowered weight they could throw around and change things.

I use the word “imagine” a lot above – and it’s on purpose. But it’s also sad that these cultural changes are something we can only first “imagine” in order to affect change. It’s time to create a political agenda that counteracts the cultural pressures that lead to “fat” prejudice and all the ramifications and consequences it leads to – particularly among females. Imagine – As John F. Kennedy said, “Some people see things as they and ask, why? I dream of things that may never be, and ask, why not?” Well why not?” Why can’t we change this ridiculous cultural agenda that has 7 yrs. old girls “worried” about their bodies and “dieting” to do something about it? Imagine growing up free from internalizing those kinds of pressures and values.

 

Your Kids and The Diet-Mentality: Be Careful What You Think You Know: Part 2

In Part 1, we began discussing the ramifications of the modern diet-mentality and body-consciousness emphasis when it is absorbed by children. Young minds are not the same as adult minds and the impressions left on these young minds are often not what you may intend as an adult or a parent. Moreover we need to work so that we STOP handing down the diet-mentality and the modern body-obsession to each generation that follows. The damage to the kids is what allows marketing to keep doing what it is doing as these kids grow and become adults. We need to continue this conversation here in Part 2. The two main questions are, “Do you really want your children to internalize the diet-mentality and be afraid and confused about food?” And secondly, do you really want to raise your kids to be obsessed with their appearance and their bodies?” Well sometimes your good intentions often lead to counter-intuitive results.

When you impose set ways of eating and strict rules about food in your home you may think you are helping your child and even protecting her. But you are only thinking of body-consciousness by doing so – and not considering the psychological affects going on - because young minds are not adult minds. When you take eating decision and food choices away from young kids you suggest that you know their feelings and their bodies better than they do. One of the few ways kids can exercise individualism and autonomy is in the area of food choices and eating. As stated in Part 1, when you remove all eating preferences from them, you disrespect a child’s need for autonomy and to exercise and develop self-control. You also end up alienating kids from their own bodies when you always decide for them what they will eat and how much. This obstructs their natural tendency to recognize their own natural hunger and fullness cues. Isn’t that exactly what is going on in you as an adult dieter? Do you really want your kids to grow up with that same sense of alienation?

As your kids begin to grow, they deeply experience the transitional dilemma of how much to satisfy themselves and how much to please other people. When it comes to food and eating this can be trouble. Eating or not eating for others or because of someone else’s rules about food and eating can lead to disordered eating because it interferes with the development of self-awareness and self-regulation. Instead of children learning to be their own experts about their bodies and their body’s feelings, someone else is! Isn’t this the modern adult diet-mentality and body-consciousness just now being put on your younger children? Is that the kind of mindset that you want them to grow into? A child’s own body and how it functions ‘for them’ is one thing they should be free to explore and get to know. Taking that from them by insisting on “healthy food only” or body-emphasis etc. once again interferes with confident and competent self-awareness and development. And this can generalize to other areas of life and soon a young kid can feel confused, insecure, and overly dependent on what everyone else thinks – and they become afraid to make choices of any kind. Once again, this represents the insidiousness of the diet-mentality being handed down from adult to child – when you think you are doing a “good thing” by controlling their food and monitoring what they eat, and worse labeling foods as “good” and “bad.” For young kids as they grow – if they can feel they are in charge of their own food intake this is a building block to self-awareness, self-connection, capability, autonomy, and confidence. Furthermore, a child learning to trust their own appetite and body is an important step in healthy psychological development. When you try to control their body weight and their food you can dampen development that could prevent them from growing into adults who are slaves to the diet-mentality and body-consciousness and body-obsession and pre-occupation. Shouldn’t THAT be a more worthy goal?

Only adults who are under the curse of the diet-mentality think that childhood fatness is an indicator of future health issues. So many kids – all other things being normal – simply grow out of baby fat and childhood extra weight. When you make this “a problem” in a young mind you now cement this as a problem. But now the problem is not only weight but emotional attachment to weight, and self-consciousness of it as well. In other words this is now a childhood emotional issue, whether intended or not. If you do notice a child gaining or losing weight quickly it’s often a sign of emotional issues. It’s not time to control their food, it’s time to sit down and talk with them about their feelings and give them an outlet for self-expression. Just like adults, they may be eating for emotional reasons and to soothe themselves. You don’t help this situation by making it a food issue or a diet issue for them. For a child a diet is NEVER the answer.

It’s been shown time and again that it’s often family issues, family interactions, family conflicts, that are at the core of a kid’s eating issues or sudden weight flux. Lots of studies of overweight kids point to a lack of connection and communication of the family unit as major contributors to a child’s sudden weight change. As family dynamics change, there is often more distance between members of a family, less sharing, less conversation, less support for the young child. These are often at the core of a child now reaching for food to soothe something inside her she doesn’t quite understand. The answer is NOT a diet and physical activity plan to be forced on the child. The real answer often lays in addressing family issues and improving emotional expression and communication within the whole family as a unit.

Furthermore, when you think you are doing a child good by making certain foods allowed and certain foods not allowed, you can introduce emotional judgment into the family dynamic. A young child is not emotionally equipped to deal with that. Once again, a young mind does not think and feel as yours does. Your family diet prescriptions and restrictions can interfere with a positive parent-child relationship. A child who is “not allowed” chocolate or chips, or whatever their fav food may be – that child may crave these foods and then overeat them when she gets a chance – or worse eat them “in secret and in hiding” from fear of judgment. Most of you adults reading this know that eating disorders, binge eating etc – are marked by hiding and eating in secrecy and shame. And secretive eating you also know, leads to guilt and dishonesty. Furthermore, a young child may not even understand “why” but she may eat these undesirable foods simply as a way to “act out” against a controlling parent who is suffocating her with restrictive eating and too great a “food emphasis” in the house. Just because you focus on “healthy foods” – if that focus is perceived by your child as “pressure to conform” you are more likely to create food and weight issues – than to prevent them! Putting a child on a diet is never a solution for what are usually emotional triggers behind consistent unhealthy food choices and eating behaviors.

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Children are now inheriting body-consciousness at younger and younger ages. Kids are criticizing their own and each other’s bodies, striving to lose weight and fearing “fat” as early as elementary school. Eating disorders are now being reported in kids as young as 8 and 9 yrs old. Children are talking about ‘hating their bodies’ at younger and younger ages, especially girls of course. Where do you think they are learning to internalize this level of destructive attachment and disconnection from their own bodies? It’s easy to just blame media but that wouldn’t be the truth, would it? Young children who talk about hating their bodies or working on their bodies need encouragement, support, redirection, and guidance. This is not the same thing as interference. They need to be redirecting toward healthy self-esteem, self-awareness, and self-connection, REGARDLESS of their body size or shape. They do not need to be put on a diet or feel “punished” by their favorite foods suddenly disappearing from the house.

Girls are especially vulnerable; not realizing what is at stake in trying to force their bodies to be “leaner” and “fat-free” as they enter puberty. Females need at least 17% body fat to menstruate and 22% body fat to develop normal cycles. But instead of learning this – girls entering puberty are learning the faulty and f&cked-up life-lesson that their body is their most valuable “commodity” and that “fat” is their eternal enemy. This is now the modern female cultural condition. Is this the working mindset that you want your daughters to grow into? Furthermore, puberty can be a scary and challenging time. Hormones affect emotions, emotions affect environment. This can lead to a lot of identity-confusion in a young person, so feelings of insecurity, even powerlessness and frustration, get transferred to the body. The truth is these young girls entering puberty and in puberty will translate a variety of complicated emotions into the simple language of “fat.” Therefore, if they hear you say, “I feel fat” – they learn to correspond to that “ill” feeling, even though, “fat” is not a feeling at all, is it? When they hear you ask, sometimes even directly to your own daughter, “Does this dress make me look fat?” – Then they are reorganizing this into a language that knows body-consciousness instead of body-awareness – and self-consciousness and worry over appearance – instead of self-acceptance and personal empowerment. Is this what you want for your daughters – to hand down the same diet-mentality and body-obsession that torments you as an adult?

This culture fails to protect its children when it treats them as adults. It is upsetting enough, and damaging enough that adults are subjected to inexhaustible exposure to messages to change your bodies. But it is unconscionable to scrutinize your own children as they eat, adapt, and grow into their bodies. The dangers of dieting and food categories of restriction are psychologically damaging and reflect the power and invasion of the diet-mentality into the adult psyche: An invasion so strong that adults think its “healthy” to assign food restriction to kids and thereby indoctrinating them into the same food/weight/diet/body-image paranoia that you yourself live with as adults. To restrict foods to children, to label foods as good vs. bad, good vs. evil can produce more problems than it can ever solve.

Some childhood disorders turn into adult eating disorders that can take decades to overcome. And just like you, by restricting what foods you allow your young children to consume – food now consumes them - for years and years to come. And it all began in the name of watching out for your kids and keeping them “healthy.” Dieting is dieting, and it is destructive. Dieting for a sense of control, conquest, self-improvement, and “happiness” is just misguided and counter-productive - leaving all dieters feeling worse about yourselves, not better. Diets that produce self-doubt and disassociation rather than self-confidence and self-connection – are diets that are psychologically destructive – never empowering. And yet, this contradiction remains the working mindset of the diet-mentality. What a price to pay – especially for kids who may have had no choice in the matter! 

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Helpful Tips for Parents

• Pay more attention to a child’s emotional state, not their physical appearance. A sudden increase in weight, can either just be a transient state of a growth spurt, or a sign of emotional struggle.

• Never impose a diet or restricted eating on your child and never deny them of their favorite food. To do so, is YOU responding to your own diet-mentality. You are not protecting your child by doing so, you are infecting her with the diet-mentality by doing so. 

• Rather than any focus on food, try to shift attention to encouraging movement and physical activity – activities that appeal to the child, not necessarily your own. 

• Make the emphasis for your child to have them become “food aware” not “food averse.” Food is just food. Do not hand down emotional attachments to food by labeling them as good vs. bad.

• Avoid statements that seem neutral to you but may linger with them. Statements like “don’t eat that you’ll get fat” – “I only want you to be happy, are you sure you want to eat that?” – “Everyone has to watch their weight, that’s just the way it is.” – “You’re too pretty to be hiding your features under excess weight.”

• Opposite of above – make statements, frequently and often that allow your child to trust their bodies and their appetites, and to feel good about themselves.

• Let your statements of unconditional love reflect that love – don’t give mixed messages of love and concern that at the same time emphasize your child’s weight, shape, or appearance.

• Focus more on what you feed your child’s soul, more so than what you feed their bodies. They will learn soon enough and on their own how to do the latter.

• Make meal times a shared and carefree experience for the family.

• Keep food/eating/weight and body-consciousness as “neutral” parts of your lives. Do not use food to punish or reward imparting it with symbolic meaning and influence by doing so.

• Watch the ways you talk about yourself and your body in front of your young child – avoid focusing on your weight, your diet, or your dissatisfaction with your own body. Kids model more what they see and experience, over what they are told.

• Never create an atmosphere of fear around food or weight. 

• Always keep the lines of communication open between you and your child. And don’t allow food to play a part in that, unless your child initiates it.

And my hope in both Part 1 and Part 2 of this article – is that it will help you to help your child. But I suspect that as usual – some of you will get it, some of you will not.

Your Kids and the Diet-Mentality: Be Careful What You Think You Know: Part 1

For decades now, I have been studying diet, diets, diet-psychology and the psychology of how people eat. I wrote my book, “The Anti-Diet Approach to Weight-Loss and Weight-Control” to point out all the ways and means that the North American approach to “weight-control” via what I call “the diet-mentality” is flawed, faulty, and likely to have the opposite of intended effects. And what we witness now in this modern digital culture is passing down this toxic diet-mentality from one generation to the next. It’s not helping kids. It’s hurting them. And yes we know obesity rates and kids weights have been rising for decades now. This has as much to do with technological trends as anything else - less active kids. Thankfully this trend is also beginning to level off. But what about the diet-psychology involved? What about the body-image involved when young kids directly or indirectly inherit the diet-mentality of their parents or the overwhelming body-image pressures of cultural images attacking them daily. Yes, attacking them!

We know from research that kids don’t model what they are told nearly so much as they model what they see and the energy around them. Research shows that 80% of adults who smoke, had parents who smoked. No matter what the parents may have told their kids about the dangers of smoking – they modeled what they saw and the energy and “proof of experience” around them. Well the same is true of kids inheriting the diet-mentality and its closely-connected cousin of body-image issues. You can tell your kids all you want to love and accept their bodies – and appreciate food abundance. But if all they see is a parent who is “dieting” and focused on their “body” – this is the energy and experience that will likely affect them most. And this is what they themselves are most likely to model.

We also know that the main influence on any child’s imprinting is the same sex parent. This presents more potential problems for young girls – because mothers of the modern era are more likely to be on diets or chronically dieting. And whether intended or not, you hand this imprinting down to young daughters about what is important and why. The question becomes, “What message and imprints are you sending them?”

We now have kids, especially girls, as young as five years old, but typically in the 8-10 yrs. old range who are just as plagued by body-insecurities as their mothers. And then they also begin this path of dieting, over-exercising and abusing and fearing food at the same time. Therapists are now reporting in large numbers something I’ve been seeing for years as well. Therapists are now treating second-generation eating disorders – treating daughters with eating disorders who have mothers with eating disorders. And therapists are now realizing the role parents play – not just being over-controlling with food and food emphasis – but in “modeling” obedience to cultural norms of the diet-mentality mindset. When kids see a mother dieting, starving, denying food, and always commenting negatively about their own bodies – THIS is what they will grow up modeling, beyond anything they are told. Are you even aware of your eating behavior around your kids or the ways you talk about your body around them as well? Together -> these two elements of a child’s intimate surroundings can set them on a path to eating disorders or body-image issues, inherited from well-meaning parents.

When traditional values of self-acceptance come up against modern demands  of contemporary beauty-roles and the constant bombardment of ideal female beauty roles of “youth, face, thinness” = beauty – Then these contemporary forces and images win – out of sheer infinite exposure of the young girls to its message: A message of cultural pressure that beats in their brains like a drum. And what is becoming increasingly evident is that eating disorders now represent as much a social formation as they do a personal pathology. And we need to explore the personal, the individual, as well as the cultural ramifications of second generation food/eating/dieting/weight and body-image issues. I’m going to do that here. This blog maybe several parts since there is so much ground to cover. 

Two things are going on here we need to address – the diet-mentality and child perceptions of food/eating/diet/weight and appearance. Here are some sad numbers to consider. One study showed almost 50% - half – of 9-11 yrs. olds reported they were sometimes or very often, on diets. 82% of kids in this study reported that their whole family was sometimes or very often, on diets! The number one wish in a study of girls 11-17 is to lose weight! How heavy a mental and emotional focus that must be, if it is a number one wish! Another study of 4^th grade girls showed that 80% of them had already dieted. And on and on it goes.

Parents and Mothers

Parents think all these outside forces and beauty images of ideal thin models hawking every item known to man, is just too great a force to contend with at home. Most parents simply don’t know what to do or say – and most of them live under the same diet-mentality and chase modern cultural ideals of beauty as well. This is where the real danger exists. But communication is power. What you may be saying or not saying is communicating to your child how to interpret all these outside forces. What you say and do as a parent can always counteract cultural forces if the communication is personal and intimate and believed and internalized by your child. Simply addressing these cultural images in casual conversation can go a long way to deflecting the messages of the modern diet-mentality and the one size fits all beauty images.

It’s time for an adult gut-check moment here though. If you want to avoid unintentionally or carelessly contributing to your child adapting the modern diet-mentality and modern body insecurities – then you need to examine and check your own feelings and prejudices first. Most of you lack the tools to do this. We will be exploring this in future articles. You should be able to share with your children what you have learned. It’s important that YOU model for kids a healthy attitude about food and eating. The goal is to get kids to be “food aware” not make them “food adverse.” You shouldn’t be branding any food as “bad” or “not in my house.” This is the diet-mentality. It creates all sorts of unintended emotional attachments to food and then on to the kids themselves. This does not help them. 

And let’s get real about getting real here. The truth is that diets and dieting and the diet-mentality is such a heavy emphasis in this “appearance = substance” obsessed society – that some kids are born already having been on a diet – in utero! Too many to count pregnant clients have come to me using “eating healthy and exercising for my baby” as an excuse to restrict eating during pregnancy to retain their figure and avoid getting “fat” (in their own words) And their baby is born having already been on a diet – born more than likely “hungry.” Research abounds on this! An expecting mother who is weight and body-obsessed jeopardizes a baby’s health right from the start – but all in the name of “caring” and “fitness” and “setting a good example” of course. This can lead to feeding a baby inconsistently, overfeeding sometimes, underfeeding other times – all reflecting the mother’s overall emotional attachments and concerns with food, calories, weight-control, body-consciousness and the like. And the mother’s don’t even realize they are doing it. Feeding the infant is often injected with the same emotional issues the mother has with food, eating and weight – rather than simply being “nourishing your baby’s growth.” Fat and cholesterol are necessary for infant’s growth and most infants will triple their weight and double their height in their first year. There is no way to determine an infant’s need for calories other than to trust their natural mammalian instincts that they will eat when they are hungry and stop when they are satiated. Parents who become concerned about their baby’s chubby cheeks and chunky legs – are already attaching your own body-image issues to an infant or toddler who couldn’t care less – nor need to.

Let’s get something else straight here as well. Mothers are not “to blame” in all of this. This is not about blame – it’s about understanding. Mothers too, are also just “children” of these same cultural pressures of ideal body-images and the destructive nature of the diet-mentality. There are tremendous “change” demands for any woman to go from womanhood to motherhood. Her role is now challenged to embrace learning to feed another rather than herself – emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and literally. This isn’t something that just “comes naturally” for so many women. 

And of course everyone wants the best for their children. Some parents over-reach and mistakenly encourage dieting, because you think it will help your kids succeed in life – teach them commitment, discipline and be thin in a world that judges and rewards it. This seems logical enough. Every parent feels bad about “the fat child or infant” they see in the mall. They automatically think this reflects on “proper parenting” as well. This is how deep into the human psyche the modern destructive diet-mentally penetrates. Some parent’s biggest fears are that their own young child ends up in “fat camp.” What does this tell us about our cultural priorities? The point is, that as parents, you must consider the fact that you may be projecting your own body dissatisfaction onto your children. Again, a mother who “dislikes” or worse “hates” her body is likely to foster that same imprint onto her daughter. Parents who criticize each other’s bodies or diets, or constantly compare themselves or each other to “thinner” people they know or celebrities they see – you are just “drafting” your own kids into the army of the generation of the diet-mentality and body-consciousness over body-awareness.  

But there is more to consider here as well. Adults who live and think and feel under the influence of the diet-mentality do not trust your own body’s urges for food. You’ve lost the ability to appreciate the self-regulating function of human hunger and appetite. Think about it. Babies instinctively stop eating when they’ve had enough – turning their heads away from the spoon and closing their mouth. This is the natural instincts and harmony of the body in action. And if you just “allow” this instinct to flourish, then as the baby grows to infant then to toddler etc – she will just “naturally” eat an appropriate amount and variety of food – “if” given the opportunity to do so! But parents who distrust their own appetites tend to mistakenly distrust their children’s appetites as well. Your diet-mentality compels you to become over-involved in your own child’s eating patterns – trying to make them eat this or that, and in particular portions. Imposing ‘your own’ set ways of eating is not the best idea psychologically-speaking, because it suggests that you know more about your child’s metabolism, hunger, appetite, and the feelings that accompany these things, than they do. This is an error in thinking. There is more at stake here than weight-control. This kind of imposed-eating on your child ignores the importance of children finding out their own individual preferences and their desire for overall autonomy and self-control. You dampen this natural process when you impose your own diet-mentality on to your kids this way. And in the same way that you are now owned by the diet-mentality and body-consciousness over body-awareness and respect – you alienate your children from their own bodies – just as societal pressures have alienated you from yours. And metabolically now – just like you – the result is that your child also can now no longer recognize their natural hunger and satiation cues. Is this what you want to instill in your children? 

I know there is a tremendous amount to think about and consider here. I hope you will take the time to do so. I also know there will be a tendency and desire to want to emotionally “defend” or “react” to a lot of what is written above. Just try to “consider” this objectively for the time being. I will continue this very important subject in part two next month. But it’s time to have this conversation – as hard as it may be to do so. And it’s time to work to eliminate the modern diet-mentality and get back to something far more compassionate. Otherwise, all of us, will continue to hand down self-destructive notions and imprints of food/eating/weight and body-issues for generations to come.

As usual, some of you will get it

Some of you, won’t want to

Part 2, next month.