A popular, and well-intentioned, children's magazine recently published overt messaging supporting dieting and weight loss in kids as well as the idea that being fat is bad and being thin is something to pursue.
That is. A bad idea. Practically unhelpful, harmful, fat-phobic. I broke my own record and finally wrote a letter to the editor about this, but it inspired me to write this post also, because what scares me almost as much as the fact that this was published in a kids magazine is that many people don't see anything wrong with it. This conversation is so
multi-faceted and there's so much to discuss, but here's a small start. I'd love to continue this conversation together with you, please reach out!
Why talking to kids about dieting and weight loss is never a good idea:
Kids are black and white thinkers.
Nutrition is very nuanced.
No one food will impact your nutrition in a large scale on its own. Eating cookies is not inherently unhealthy. Being fat is not inherently unhealthy. Feeling ashamed about the body that Gd gave you? That's unhealthy. Restricting foods in order to try to lose weight and being the only one of your friends not having a certain snack at recess and feeling sad about it? That's unhealthy.
Approaching food and physical activity from a mindset of gentleness; nourishing your body, mind, and soul with foods that provide nutrients and satisfaction; engaging in physical activity that's fun and provides social interaction or mentally invigorates you while strengthening and fueling your body .... That is healthy.
There's so much more to health and the 'obesity epidemic' than diet culture has conditioned us to believe.
It is impossible to tell someone's health status just by looking at their body; we aren't all meant to be thin-- and that is fine. As adults, the greatest gift we can give our children is not putting them on a diet so that they'll be thin so that they'll have an easier time in life. No. We know, we know, that that does not work. Look around you. Speak to people in your family, at work, in your friend group. Do those who were put on diets as children (or those who are perpetually dieting as adults) have increased confidence or an otherwise 'easier time in life'? Or do they struggle constantly with feeling like if only they would just manage to muster up the willpower to lose the weight, maintain the weight, then they would be happy- successful- married - popular.
It's all a farce. A very deeply embedded lie fed to us by the industry that has made $72 billion selling people weight loss - a product that fails time and again only to have consumers believe they're to blame for it's failure, and try just one more time, just one last time, this time it'll work for real.
Is that what we want for our children?
There's no need for children- or adults for that matter- to calculate their BMI. There's nothing to be gained when children feel singled out at a party being expected to eat different foods than their friends simply because their body is bigger than their peers.
Can we engender in them a relationship with healthy living that has nothing to do with shrinking their body but rather respecting and caring for the body that Gd gave them and maximizing their energy to develop themselves as much as possible?
Can we perhaps give our children a more long-lasting, intrinsic sense of self worth? A self worth that they are deserving of in the body they were given by Gd, how it looks today? A self worth that encourages them to pursue health in a way that serves them, nourishes them, makes them happy, enables them to develop deep relationships without shame, guilt, obsessing about food or inches?
What if they're not thin?
What if we stop making that matter so much, and focus instead on what they have to offer, celebrate them for what they are? We would be doing them a great service to teach them young that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes- and furthermore, that even when they don't feel beautiful, they are still worthy.
Comentarios