7/9/2023 0 Comments You ona diet![]() ![]() But having a five-year-old daughter has made me think about how I talk about dieting,” she says. ![]() “Since I’ve had kids, I’ve struggled to diet more because I’ve gotten heavier. Mary F., a “lifelong dieter,” in North Carolina, also feels challenged by the idea of dieting while parenting. After he has asked her about it repeatedly, she still measures her food, though she no longer does it in front of her kids. Danielle,* a mom in Tennessee, says that her six-year-old son has noticed that she constantly measures food to make sure that each serving size fits in with her diet plan. Sometimes it even feels impossible to learn to practice what we preach to our kids. It’s impossible to fall in love with your body just the way it is over the course of one meal. It’s impossible to unlearn all of the harmful messages about our bodies we’ve been internalizing for decades in one exchange. The tricky thing is figuring out how to do better. It was devastating to hear my son make such disturbing generalizations about women and even more upsetting to know that my behaviors were the cause. Later that week, he’d asked me another tough question about why ladies eat only salads for dinner. A world in which he might see women's bodies as projects that needed to be constantly under construction. I felt guilty for setting up a world in which it was normal for my son to see the woman he knows best saying no to healthy, good food, in pursuit of a smaller body. “I just don’t like them,” I lied.Īs soon as the words were out of my mouth, I felt guilty, not just for lying but for eating in a way that seemed so unnatural to my five-year-old-a kid I’d always encouraged to fill his plate with delicious and nutritious foods. “Lots of girls eat pancakes, baby,” I responded. Just like everyone else, my son had noticed my dieting, but it wasn't my thinner thighs or smaller tummy that caught his attention, it was the fact that I wasn't eating full meals. One morning, as I slid a fresh batch of pancakes, scrambled eggs, fruit, and bacon onto the plates of my husband and two sons, my eldest asked me, “Mommy, why don’t girls eat pancakes?” As I tried to piece together his question, I realized that I was the only girl he saw eating breakfast each day, and I was indeed guilty of skipping pancakes in favor of a small bowl of grapes. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |