kids and dieting

[keryx]

There's a discussion on BFB from last week about people's dieting history. This highlights just how much time and energy people, women especially, waste in fighting fat.

My parents never put me on the absurd diets some of these other women report, but - they and people around me berated me for being fat starting when I was 5 (and I was cute, not fat), and I recall being asked "should you eat that?" whenever something "bad" was involved ("bad" was ill-defined in my house, as my mom still thinks a cupcake is an acceptable breakfast as long as it's eaten with orange juice). I started dieting when I was 10 or 11, I think. And didn't stop permanently for over 10 years.

The article that Paul posted specifically points out that dieting at a young age, more than dieting in general, seems to make people fatter. But that aside, the thing that dieting at a young age seems to be most effective at is keeping you dieting, which is a tremendous waste of time. I still spend too much time and energy just trying to have a healthy, reasonable attitude towards food and exercise. If the people around me had just modeled healthy living instead of yelling at me for my phantom fatness, maybe I wouldn't have ended up like that.

If you added up the hours any woman spends worrying she's too fat - or too whatever - we'd probably each have enough hours to run a small business, or start a political career, or raise a kid really really well. That's depressing.

So, I hope the news that putting kids on diets makes them into fat adults will convince people paranoid about the "obesity crisis" (aka the dieting crisis) not to start kids down that road of wasting their time.

Comments

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Sigh. It seems like almost every mother-daughter interaction has some part of a beauty/weight/whatever problem attached to it. I wonder why that is?

[firecat]

Probably mostly because mothers believe/know that appearance is very important to a woman's success, and they want their daughters to be successful.

(Although if I had a daughter, I suspect our issue would be that she would try to diet and I wouldn't want her to, which would just be the reverse of what my mother and I went through.)

One thing that was interesting about the BFB discussion at the time I read it was that everyone talked about going on diets as kids as if it were their own choice. I was on diets as a kid but it wasn't my choice. My parents made me, and I didn't find ways around it until later.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Good point. The end of my mother's pestering about my weight coincides nicely with my starting to make more money than her. And for her it was always about how people don't hire/promote/reward fat workers. A lot of moms do push this notion of a thin, "attractive" body as a commodity to trade for a job, or a boyfriend, or whatever. And why wouldn't they? It's what they've learned, too.

Later in the thread, there were a lot more people whose parents put them on speed and such, in addition to the people like me, who seem to have almost "snuck" their dieting, though it was still pretty clear their parents pushed them about weight.