I just read a great post by Melissa Nibbles….The Day I Started Hating My Body. What a well-written and thought-provoking post.
This got me thinking about a post that I had written a few months ago about the same topic. I’m re-posting and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Yesterday, I was sitting in my office and I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation going on in the office right next door. A lady and her teenage daughter were both having a fitness assessment with one of our personal trainers…weight, body composition, strength, flexibility, and aerobic capacity.
The mom made several comments loudly and repeatedly, “This is horrible”, “I am disgusting”, and “I’ve gained so much weight”. The daughter was trying to encourage her mom, but it wasn’t working.
Earlier the same day, I also had a nutrition consult with a lady, 45 years old, whose mother regularly tells her, “You’re fat; You need to lose weight.” She stated that she has heard these comments from her mom her entire life.
Both of these conversations made me think about the effect that parents (moms and dads) can have, specifically, on their daughters’ self esteem. I feel blessed, my parents have always been positive, encouraging, and reassuring. I never once remember them saying anything that made me question my appearance or weight. However, the impact of parents’ comments come up fairly regularly in my work in weight management. They impact young women, especially, more than we probably realize. And, those effects often last far beyond childhood and adolescence.
One of my biggest pet peeves is hearing a woman, often a fit and healthy woman, comment negatively about her body. Especially in front of her young daughter. How is the young daughter supposed to process that information? Unfortunately, she usually feels that if her mom, who is fit and healthy, isn’t good enough….how can she ever measure up?
Have you ever overheard a conversation like that?
Did your parents do or say anything that contributed to your body image and self-esteem, positively or negatively?
What can we do as a society to help end these negative conversations?
I love Operation Beautiful, with the mission of Ending Fat Talk. What else can we do? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for reading!
Yes, I think what we say about our bodies can really affect our children. I have two boys, and I’ve always tried not to “evaluate” my body physically but point out what our bodies can do, even when I didn’t feel great about how I looked…
However, this can be hard if you truly don’t like your body. I think it takes some hard work to truly change your relationship with your body and learning to love and appreciate it because otherwise the feelings are still there, and I think it’s easy for them to show in one way or another (not necessarily words)…
Have a great weekend, Angie!
My family were the type to not outwardly call me fat/heavy but would give the “you would be so beautiful if you lost weight.” I got that comment from my grandmother and father constantly. That same grandmother would constantly comment on the bodies of celebrities picking their limbs and torso apart for being too heavy and too thin. My aunt and other grandmother would constantly pick apart their own bodies in front of me as a child and the same aunt was hospitalized for disordered eating when I was around 8-10 years old. I’ve never had a female role model that has healthy way of thinking about their bodies. I hope that if I have daughters I will not do this to them, that I will teach them to appreciate their bodies, their hearts and their minds to give them the confidence and self respect all women deserve.
Great points, Andrea! I’m curious how moms’ words and actions affect their sons? I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on that topic…..Have a great weekend, Andrea!
Wow-Jessica- great comment. I think we can all learn from your experiences. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!
I loved Melissa’s post too, so I am glad you posted on the topic. It does make me sad when parents say things without even thinking of the consequences. My mom does this too, but first it is too skinny, so I gain weight, then it is too fat, so I lose some, then too skinny again and so on. By now, I am much more educated, and an RD, so I am a better judge of my health and how I feel. I am glad to be out of that cycle, but I know I do need to lose some weight to be back where I was a few months before my wedding.
my mum used to measure her hips and waist very often and she would also measure mine and would comment on my physical attributes esp the waist and hips, it made me very conscious of what my waist should measure ideally and how my hips should not be huge… guess that led to my terrible relation with food, and i was scrawny to begin with.
it is not just what mothers say even close relatives who always compare your growth stage with your cousins of similar age. it makes you overly conscious of how you look and try to hide certain parts that would draw unwanted attention to!!!
My mom and aunts always talk about what they should and shouldn’t be eating – blahblahblah – which is just code for weight and fat talk.
But I think one thing that imapces women and girls is the media – its not the only thing that affects our body image, but it plays a key role. And one way we can help our girls is not necessarily by banning certain media images, but by starting the conversation around what we see and by giving girls and boys the tools they need to understand what they see and what it should – or shouldn’t! – mean for them.
The Healthy Media for Youth Act, currently in the U.S. House of Representatives, is one step in this direction. It encourages healthier media images of girls and women for the benefit of all youth. More specifically, it creates a competitive grant for media literacy programs for youth, facilitates research on the health effects of media images on youth, and sets up a taskforce to create voluntary standards for more girl-positive media.
The key part, for me, is the grants for media literacy programs. This will help our kids understand and negotiate the images they see everyday in the media. And more positive images of girls and women in the media could help all of us make peace with our own bodies.
Support the Healthy Media for Youth Act (HR 4925)! Visit http://www.girlscouts4girls.org to send a letter of support to your Member of Congress, urging her or him to co-sponsor the bill!
I was JUST thinking about this the other day. My parent/weight/problem is about the exact opposite of your post. My parents are both obese. They’ve NEVER commented on my weight (except for when I was pregnant, as in “wow, you look really pregnant”). My Mom’s answer to my gaining weight has always been to just offer to buy me new clothes that would fit and let me try her ‘diet pill of the week’. We’re both cursed with the “want to wake up 60lbs lighter” mentality and so we (yes, we) NEVER stick to a diet plan/exercise plan. My Dad (who oddly enough has his BA in PE) always gives me good tips, and always notices when I DO lose weight, but it’s like since they are both overweight, they refuse to comment on mine. My Mom has always lavished me with ‘you are beautiful’, so that’s another thing that I think works against me when I do try to lose weight. If I’m already ‘beautiful’ then why do I need to lose weight? I NEED to lose weight b/c right now I can’t stand myself and I don’t feel beautiful (no matter what other people say)-and there is NO way I can raise my children (a girl and a boy) to have a healthy body image when I don’t have one.
What a great topic! Working with kids I sadly, hear this all too often. The parents often times ridicule their children or say negative things about their weight.
It is so hard to hear and I always try to bring out a positive in the conversation.
It definitely affects them even if the parents do not realize it at the time.
Good post! Parents shape us so much that it’s kinda unavoidable to get body image, too… too bad it’s so often negative!
I disagree a little bit with Stephanie, in the sense that I KNOW there are foods I shouldn’t eat–but that’s not fat and weight talk, that’s me recognising that sometimes there might be something that I know tastes good, but then when I read the ingredients I’m horrified. I will eat my own baked goods (in moderation), but I’m super-suspicious and usually abstain from packaged goods because they use poor quality or simply BAD ingredients. I don’t want to ingest that stuff–so my “shouldn’t” list is unhealthy foods. And I don’t think that’s bad… it’s a matter of wanting to be healthy!
Angie — I just found your blog today by accident, but I am really enjoying it (and bookmarked it, of course!)
My mother has really bad self esteem and places all of her self worth in her appearance. Unfortunately, this also meant that when I was growing up (and even now, to a lesser extent) she also felt that my appearance/weight was of utmost importance.
She would tell me that I would never “get a man” unless I lost weight, that no one “would ever love me unless I was skinny”, called me a fat pig, forced me to go on crash diets as a pre-teen and teen, kept a weight journal and made me weigh in in front of her weekly, gave me illegal diet pills when I was as young as 12, plus much much more. All the while, my mom hated herself and skipped meals to remain stick thin.
Personally, I believe that my mom’s comments and treatment of me caused me to rebel subconsciously and as a result I spent a good portion of my teen years and adult life very obese.
As the mother of a 12 year old girl and an 8 year old boy, I have always been very careful about what I say to them about body image and weight (their or mine), knowing that those comments can be very damaging. My husband and I strive to build them up–not tear them down.
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