Dieting
In the third article in my series on how adult eating behaviours impact parenting, I’m looking at body shame and dieting. It’s everywhere: we live in a culture that tells us not to love the body we inhabit. We are too fat; too thin; not curvy enough; too curvy… our bodies need to be ‘bikini-ready’ and perfect, whatever that means.
A quick google search for ‘diet’ turned up the 5:2 diet, the protein diet, the carnivore diet and apple cider vinegar weight loss (??!!!) on the first page of results alone. Really, ‘diet’ just means ‘what we eat’, but it has become cultural short-hand for an approach to eating where we limit ourselves in one way or another, usually with a view to changing shape.
With this limitation comes guilt, self-blame and a fusion of how we eat and how we feel about ourselves. These emotions take us further from our ability to self-regulate – to eat for internal instead of internal reasons.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t aspire to be our healthiest selves – I’m not even saying that we shouldn’t focus on what we eat. I believe that eating in a balanced and joyful way is really important. BUT the ubiquitous dieting culture that turns eating decisions into ‘being good’ or ‘being naughty’ makes it really hard to model optimal eating behaviours when we don’t always feel great about our own bodies or food choices.
Adina Pearson (check out her excellent blog if you’re interested in enhancing your relationship with food) says:
“a diet is a diet is a diet (even if it seems “healthy”) as long as it tells you what to eat, how much to eat, and when to eat.”
If you are trying to help your child develop a positive relationship with food, helping them learn to self-regulate needs to be central to that. If your eating is diet-driven, modelling self-regulation can be extremely hard to do.
Maybe you feel great because you have managed to go without anything on your banned list that day. Perhaps you are feeling low because you have ‘failed’. Maybe you are very focused on counting calories. All of these things can contribute to how you talk about food:
“I’ve been so good today!”
“I can’t have a cookie – I’m not being naughty until the weekend”
“I have 150 calories left today so I’m allowed a banana”
Talking this way can make it very difficult to teach your child how to feel good about eating and to eat in response to physiological cues. It tells them that eating is an emotional business, and a struggle too.
On top of this, the diet culture breeds shame and tells us to feel bad about our bodies. While aimed at adults, children are part of society too and are affected by these messages, especially as the enter the teen and pre-teen years. We need to counteract this as best we can – to show them how awesome our bodies are and how unique. This is pretty hard to communicate if you are at war with your own body and your natural appetite.
Follow my three simple rules to keep it positive:
- Never describe your eating in a moralistic way (“I can’t take another, it would be naughty”)
- Never talk about your body in a critical way (“I look so fat in this dress”)
- Avoid overt restriction of your child’s eating (“You’ve had enough, you don’t want to get fat!”)
If you have some tricky feelings about your body or your eating and are stuck in a cycle of dieting which you would like to break out of, check out the HAES movement (Health At Every Size). Here are a list of resources and here is the website for HAES UK.
We are all on our own journeys in relation to body acceptance and eating. But we can become more conscious of how we think about and behave around food, because truly, the years when our children are young are fleeting – we need to make the most of every opportunity to model positive behaviours and help our children be the ones to break the cycle that in many cases, has been handed down for multiple generations.