Shaming your children

I think I wrote last April about this mother who put her seven year old daughter on a diet. Anyway, here's the original post on The Gloss about it.

As it turns out, the fat-shaming mother got herself a book deal.

So here is an excerpt from that book.

And wow. Just... wow. The way she talks about monitoring her daughter's weight and food intake sounds like the way a person with an eating disorder talks about their food and weight. I'm not even joking. She is obsessed.

I don't object to the idea of getting her daughter healthy. That's a good and decent thing all parents should care about. What shocks me is how she is so shaming, so controlling, that she is passing on an extremely damaging attitude towards food.

The message she's giving her daughter is that food is the enemy. You can't eat too much of it, you can't eat certain things. You can't eat at certain times.

That's a bad thing. Food is fuel. Food keeps you alive.

You can't eat too much food that is bad for you, but you can eat lots of veggies and fruit. You can eat anything you want, just limit the amount and limit the number of days you eat it on. You can snack all day, as long as you stick to things that are good for you.

And the whole issue where the mother denies that she had anything to do with her young daughter's initial weight gain. Heads up, any parent or potential parent out there: you are the only person in the world who can control what your child eats. If your kid eats too much junk over good food, stop buying junk. If your kid eats large portions, start making more salad and less starch. Your kid can only eat what YOU bring into the house, and they can only eat as much of it as YOU allow them to.

And I am completely disgusted by the ending, where she insists that eating disorders are genetic, not something a kid can get from their mother's unhealthy relationship with food, so she is absolving herself of the guilt that she will inevitably feel when her daughter almost certainly develops an eating disorder when she's older.

Just look at the part where she says her daughter cries about how she used to be overweight. She is ASHAMED for the fact she used to be heavier. AT EIGHT YEARS OLD. This is how she feels before puberty, before she cares about whether boys (or girls) find her attractive. This only gets worse once you start caring about that.

The mother admits she has, and has had as long as she has remembered, a bad relationship with food. She says she has personally been on a diet of one sort of another most of her life. She is self-aware enough to know that she isn't healthy in that regard, but she isn't self-aware enough to realize that she is projecting that onto her daughter, and the damage it will do.

My mother started telling me I needed to lose weight at puberty. I know how damaging this can be, because I struggle every damn day with my self-image.

This was me needing to lose weight at a couple of days after my thirteenth birthday:

This is the closest thing I have to a full-body picture that isn't me in a large sweater/dress:

This is me "maybe putting on some weight. Are you eating right?"

I go through phases where I am obsessed with what I eat and how much I exercise, to a point that's beyond healthy. I will feel sick and skip eating for a day or so because I dared to have something bad one day. Usually after I realize how light-headed I feel after a couple of days is when I snap out of it and get kind of scared by how I justified not eating to myself... But that isn't good. That isn't healthy.

And that's how me and both my sisters feel, and thank fucking god we have each other to talk to and for support, because the reality is, our mother has these same issues.

I snapped a couple of months ago. We fought on the phone, and I told her exactly this. The issues I have with body image directly related to her attitude towards both her own weight and my own. And she said to me - ON THE PHONE - "Did you gain weight recently and feeling bad about it? Are you blaming that on me?" I hung up on her.

We spoke about it a couple of weeks later, and she cried, because she had talked to Kelly and Naomi and they said the same thing. She hadn't realized. And she said she knew she had issues around weight.

And you know what hasn't helped? Her fucking (ex?) boyfriend.

Do you know what he said to her over Christmas?

He said, "I think you're fat, and I don't find you attractive anymore."

This is my "fat" mom:

What. The. Fuck.

So not only does my mom have issues with her weight, she likes men who have issues with her weight and also incredibly unrealistic ideas about what fat actually is.

So this mother can deny that she's doing any harm all she wants, but she is lying to herself. She is damaging her daughter. She is damaging her daughter's relationship with food. And worse, her daughter's relationship with the body she lives in.