The Diet
Dilemma:
Protecting Kids
from Diet Culture
— by Malia Jacobson
“
David’s mom is fat. She
needs to go on a diet.”
When my sweet kindergartner
innocently uttered this line after
school one day, I couldn’t hide my
shock. After experiencing my own body
image ups and downs, I’d tried to protect
my young kids from talk about weight
loss and dieting. Faking composure, I
countered with, “Oh? Um, where did
you hear that?”
She explained, unfazed. “David’s
mom said it herself. She was at school
today and said to my teacher ‘I’m fat
and I need to go on a diet.’ She said she
doesn’t like her butt.” With a throwaway
shrug, she skipped off to join her friends
on the swing set. I was left swinging
between anger that my 5-year-old had
been introduced, albeit accidentally, to
the idea of dieting for weight loss, and
relief that she hadn’t come up with the
“too fat” judgment herself.
Mostly, though, I felt powerless.
I’d tried to shield my child from diet
culture and failed. Despite my efforts,
the world’s message that our bodies are
never good enough had found her.
How Diet Culture
Hurts Kids
The term “diet,” of course, isn’t necessarily
a dirty word. But equating thinness
with virtue and encouraging the pursuit of
a physical ideal through food restriction
— the ideas central to “diet culture” — are
problematic, says Amee Severson, RDN,
a registered dietician whose work focuses
on body positivity, fat acceptance, intuitive
eating, and social justice.
24 WNY Family July 2020
Though diet culture often passes for
“wellness” or “clean eating,” it’s actually
unhealthy, because people stop tuning
into their own body’s signals about
hunger and satiety, says Severson. By
elevating thinness as the ideal physical
state, moralizing food as good or bad,
and promoting rule-based eating, diet
culture disconnects people from their
bodies’ actual nutritional needs. That
might be why despite widespread dieting
— one-third of Americans are on a
diet any given time — nearly all dieters
regain lost weight within a few years.
Like any effort toward self-improvement,
dieting is well-intentioned. It’s also
completely normal and accepted in our
society, but that doesn’t mean it’s good
for our bodies or minds, says Severson.
“Even when it’s called ‘clean eating’ or
‘wellness,’ making food choices that
don’t come from your own body’s cues,
food choices that come from rules or
moral judgements about good food or bad
food, is considered disordered eating.”
Whether we like it or not, kids
observe this type of disordered eating
along with ideas about the right kind of
body to have. Even well-meaning comments
about body size, from “She’s really
trimmed down! She looks great!”
to “I’m just worried about his health,”
can breed intolerance and exclusion at
school and on the playground, says Severson.
“Kids notice when we judge bodies,
others’ or our own. Being fat is still
viewed very negatively, and fat people
are still the butt of jokes.”
Not surprisingly, kids quickly turn
this type of judgement on themselves.
Per research, the idea that other people’s
fat bodies are inferior is linked to what
researchers call “shape dissatisfaction,”
or unhappiness with one’s own body,
along with dieting behavior in young
children, disordered eating behavior,
and eating disorders.
Kids aren’t the only ones harmed by
diet culture, of course. By marginalizing
people who fall outside the societal ideal
— in our culture, it’s white thinness —
diet culture harms the mental and physical
health of trans people, people with different
abilities, people with larger bodies,
and people of color, per Christy Harrison,
RD, host of the Food Psych podcast.
For Ivory Bruinsma, a certified fitness
instructor who shares her journey
with body acceptance through her Instagram
account vibrantbrowngirl, rejecting
diet culture meant rejecting the
white standard of thinness.
“I had to stop chasing white thinness
and what white beauty looks like,
because that’s what I mostly see in our
culture,” says Bruinsma.
Unlearning diet culture can take decades,
says certified health and running
coach Rose Coats, so it’s worth trying to
prevent kids from absorbing it in the first
place. “I was raised in diet culture, with
Tab, Slim Fast, and the whole thing.”
Now a race director who organizes
inclusive Sporty Diva run/walk events,
she models a healthier approach to food,
one that doesn’t involve calorie counting,
for her twin granddaughters. “It took
me awhile to get here, but I’m trying to
show them a healthier way,” she says.
Fight Back Against
Fat Shame
One way to fight diet culture: teach
kids that “fat” is simply another descriptor,
not a bad word, says Severson. “Guide