The Fat Trap

Fascinating.

In today's NY Times, there's a great article about how to parent children, especially girls, in today's world where an obese child is seen as a failure for a parent.

The author states:

Food is love. Food is solace. It is politics. It is religion. And if that’s not enough to heap on your dinner plate each night, food is also, especially for mothers, the instant-read measure of our parenting. We are not only what we eat, we are what we feed our children. 

I, for one, know that it would be so scary to raise a girl in today's world. I was a fat kid, I was obese at 13. I am in recovery for being PSYCHO about food and weight in a way that almost killed me off. I'll never be sane and "normal" around food. I know women like that exist. I've met a few. They eat when they are hungry and what they are hungry for and stop eating when they are no longer hungry. It's fascinating.

The author goes on:

Doing right by our kids means doing right by their health — body and soul. Yet even as awareness about the family diet has spread across the country (especially among the middle class and the affluent), so, it seems, have youngsters’ waistlines. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a full third of America’s children are overweight, and 17 percent are clinically obese — a rate that has more than tripled since 1976. Those figures may be alarming, yet equally disturbing are the numbers of children, girls in particular, who risk their health in the other direction, in the vain pursuit of thinness. In a 2002 survey of 81,247 Minnesota high-school students published in The Journal of Adolescent Health, more than half of the girls reported engaging in some form of disordered behavior while trying to lose weight: fasting, popping diet pills, smoking, vomiting, abusing laxatives, binge eating.

Parents, then, are left in quandary, worrying about both the perils of obesity and those of anorexia. How can you simultaneously encourage your daughter to watch her size and accept her body?

Good question. All my gal pals who are mommies, my hat's off to you.

Comments

[Meghan Harvey]

I think this just gave me a headache thinking about how I'm going to approach this with my daughter when she is a teenager. Oy Vey.

[Amy]

This is my biggest challenge -- learning to love myself just exactly as I am but also wanting to change it at the same time. That whole concept of finding a balance is particularly troublesome. Bleh.

[Johanna Berg]

I'm all about this! I am trying really hard to let food just be food at my house. Not a reward, not a punishment, not a temptation you can't have, not a replacement for love and attention. Hopefully the deliberate foundation I am trying to lay will make it easier for my daughter to navigate these difficulties when she gets older. Hopefully. Yikes!