I think sticking up for your kids- early, consistently and forcefully- goes a long way. If you are not yet able to accept your own body, I say FAKE IT. Pretend you are kate and let ‘em have it. Eventually, the attitude will sink in and do you some good too.

Then at 14 she bought me a diet book, which recommended a serving size of 2 tablespoons of rice per meal. That stuck in my mind FOREVER because my best friend at school at the time was Japanese and when I announced the 2 tablespoons of rice rule to her she looked at me like I’d just sprouted a second head. But since my parents seemed to think that my starving myself was super cool and awesome I stuck with the plan and at one point was eating less than 800 calories a day. As a sporty active 15 year old. I spent a long time being hungry all the time and being really really angry that no one seemed to notice how miserable I was, they just kept remarking on how much prettier I was getting.

The funny thing? At my heaviest in my teens I was a size 11. I actually got bigger, not smaller, as a result of the aformentioned starvation diet. And then as an adult I eventually went “screw calorie counting” and went back to eating like a horse and tons of meat and grown up portions of rice and lot of produce like I had as a kid and hey guess what irony? Ended up stabilising at size 6-8. So I’m here to say that yes, kids, diets actually do lead to weight gain in that your body seems to go “wait, wtf is going on here?”. And also make you really angry that the people who’re supposed to love and protect you seem to be quite happy to watch you make yourself miserable as long as the goal is to be “prettier”.

So yeah, my parents basically did nothing right as far as not making me insane about weight. I think the best things you can do for your hypothetical kids are A. don’t act insane about food and weight in front of them, thus teaching them unhealthy attitudes and B. if they attempt to embark on some insane diet plan, tell them what a bad idea it is. Also if any of them are female and have the misfortune to hit puberty early let them know that boobs and hips are a natural part of being a woman, not a sign of impending fatness. Because seriously, that idea is so messed up, that female secondary sexual characteristics are intrinsically bad and alarming.

Oh, and also not encouraging your kids to eat special “diet” foods would be awesome. Low fat cream cheese, cookies etc are full of wierd artificial ingredients and taste like a$$. I’d like to find whoever invented the idea that all food products should have a special alternate “diet” version and beat him up.

I handle all three of them by reminding them of their intelligence, their integrity, the overwhelming love of their heavenly father, and their own individual talents. My dd is a fantastic – very enthusiastic – softball player, and although she is one of the biggest girls on her team – she fits in and feels comfortable as a part of the group. My thin son doesn’t think about his weight, loves his family, and loves what his body can do. So does my stockier son – he admires his strength, his overwhelming heart, and his dog headed determinedness to stick up for the underdog.

I know weight will be an issue in their life – I only hope their life continues to be big enough to keep the relative insignificance of comparative thin ness (or fat ness) irrelevant by comparison.

My husband has been fluffy his whole life – much like our youngest son. I developed my weight issues after marriage and children.. they are becoming much less of an issue every year, though, as my own life gets bigger and the size of my body becomes less important than its’ health, and what it can do.

You can do your level best to help your kids learn how to love and accept themselves, but what if it’s all undone by the cruel, judgmental stuff they hear from everyone else? What if my own efforts as a parent aren’t enough?

This is exactly the fear that prompted me to post a comment to the previous topic – here.

My children have access to a wide range of foods, including lots of fruits and veg and protein and carbs and fat and water and all the rest of it. We eat dessert every day. I like cake. They do the self-regulatory eating thing, and as far as I can tell it’s all good.

The older one even thinks “fat” is a compliment, because it’s what I say to fat babies, and I love babies, whatever their shape.

But there’s the whole rest of the world out there, and the stats for pre-teen anorexia are really frightening.

I was the only child on my mother’s side who was overweight, there was only one other on my father’s side. However, my parents not once harassed me, or were cruel to me. My sports teachers were occasionally, but my parents never were. Mum encouraged me to be healthy so I took up gym and trampolining because she was a coach. It wasn’t in an effort to drop weight.

I think it stems from my mother being bullied from a young age for being so slim. Her mother naturally had a 20 inch waist before having children, and my mother had exactly the same frame as her. She would constantly eat mass amounts of junk food because she was so bullied about being so thin. She would never ever gain a pound. Even at age 45, she is only 110 pounds, (7 stone 8) and a perfectly healthy size 10. I don’t think she ever wanted people to bully or harass me about my weight, because of her bad experience.

I’m very lucky for having parents who love me for who I am and was.

I am the fattest of my sisters, my eldest is very slim, my middle sister less so but still of a smaller build than me. And whilst my mother has never called me fat, would give my sisters hell for calling me fat if we were arguing, and I am sure would be incredibly angry at anyone else that tried it, my weight and my body type has always been an issue.

This is something I’d never talk to anyone I knew about because I love my mother a lot, and I wouldn’t want others to think badly of her, especially as I am sure she did what she thought best. But, for as long as I can remember she has told me I need to get rid of my pudgy tummy, tried to get me to do sit ups everyday, everytime she reads an article about toning your tummy she pulls it out and gives it me. She tells me I am beautiful that ‘you could be a model’ but always with the proviso ‘if you got rid of your tummy’, ‘you’d be gorgeous if you were a couple of dress sizes smaller’ an so on.

And I recognise it is society that has done this to her. No matter what I do I cannot convince her that anything but size 8-10 (UK sizes) are attractive to anyone.
And if I try to call it on her, her response is ‘but it’s so unhealthy, it’s taking years off your life’. Which drives me crazy because she knows I’m healthy, I spend a lot of time cooking and making sure I eat lots of fresh fruit and veg, I row, so I train for that for about twenty hours a week (she was so disappointed when I took up rowing and actually put on weight and got bigger because I was putting on muscle).

I know that sometimes she sees that it’s damaging me, but usually only when I actually breakdown and start sobbing and asking her ‘do you think I want to be like this?’ and even then I suspect that she is thinking ‘if only she was thin, she wouldn’t have to feel like this’

It is only recently that I am starting to recognise that I’m not really some huge blubberous whale like the world would like me to believe. Yes, my bmi says that I am overweight, yes most people I know my age are thinner and take smaller clothes, but I eat well, I exercise, and perhaps I deserve to be happy whatever I do.

Funnily enough the thing that made me realise this is a conversation with my mother when I asked her would she rather I were thin or that my eczema was better. For the record, I have really bad eczema, it is unsightly, it is pretty much constantly painful, it gets infected and makes me ill and on occasions has given my septicaemia and put me in hospital.
My Mother would rather I was thin, and I had to admit to myself, so would I. Looking at this as a rational person, I realised this was crazy, absolutely and utterly insane. We both would rather I was ill than endure the horror of fat. What kind of world worked like this?

And perhaps so were all those years of trying to starve myself then breaking down and binging, perhaps feeling I couldn’t buy a bikini, that I could never expose my mid-rift, that everything I bought had to be something that hid my belly, that no one would love me or find me attractive because they’d be too horrified by my stomach were crazy too.

I wondered how far this game would work? Would people think it better I had one leg than be overweight, or blind, or have asthma, or have epilepsy. Is it better to be dead than fat?

I know from my mother’s part it is because she herself carries extra weight on her stomach and has been taught to hate it. I really hope when I have kids I am able to stop myself falling into the same trap.

*Also what drives me craziest is actually my grandma who never mentions weight, but goes on and on about how slim she was and how she had a 20″ waist and everyone said how gorgeous her figure was when she was young.

I was just -barely- what anyone could consider chubby when I was a little girl. If anything, the body-shape of my prepubescent years wasn’t so much chubbiness as it was a foretelling of the saucy-luscious curves I’d be blessed with once I hit adolescence. However, kids are cruel, and if you’re different in any way, they’ll find whatever they can about you to tease and torment you about. I was very lightly chubby, the only brown kid (half Filipino, half white,) and in a couple of advanced classes (very smart and unashamed of it,) but I also had some pretty obvious emotional problems that I tried to hide – nobody ever found out about the abuse I was enduring at home, though, looking back, it was obvious there was something ‘off’ about me.) Plus, I had/have what was years later diagnosed as ADHD – something I didn’t know I had ’til four years ago. Because of all these things, I was teased relentlessly, to the point that I started having suicidal thoughts as early as the fourth grade. My mother also only bought me clothes off the cheapest of the clearance racks, and only the most unflattering sweatpants outfits, so the “You’re fat… AND you dress funny!” comments came fast and furious as well. Kids learn quickly, too, what affects the objects of their torment the most, and once they figured that cracks about my intelligence and color or how weird I was didn’t bother me, it was all about how fat I was, how ugly I was, etc.

At home, I was told frequently how being a “mestiza” (mixed kid,) would easily find me a career as a singer, model, or actress in the Phillipines, because ‘everyone knows mestiza are the most beautiful’, but this life of prestige would only be available to me if I were skinny. “I’d buy you nice clothes, Kim Lee, if you would only lose weight.” It still surprises me to this day that I could more or less shrug off the intense beatings (for instance, she once held me down and tried to pull my teeth out with a pair of vice grip pliers to punish me for not brushing my teeth,) by just sort of detatching myself mentally and thinking of other stuff while it was happening, but I was more hurt by the things she’d -say- to me.

As a teenager, I blossomed physically. I was a petite size ten with an hourglass figure, no longer tormented by my peers for my looks, and somehow managing to hide my depression and suicidal desires by faking an upbeat persona to the utmost and becoming a fairly promiscuous party-hard kind of girl. I hid my partying ways from my parents (my father did nothing to stop my mother, by the way,) and I hid my abuse and self-hate from my friends, and nobody, not anybody, knew who I really was.

One may ask why my father did nothing to stop my mother’s abuse of me, and since I’ve already gone on so long and been so over-share-y already, I may as well blurt out all the ugliness – he was caught sexually abusing me when I was eleven. He’d been doing it off and on for three years at that point. My skill at dissociation was amazing at that point – he was my best friend and ally against the world during the day, and I only saw him as a ‘monster’ during the wee morning hours before school. (My mother worked a very early first-shift job, so it would happen after she’d gone to work already.) He’d always cry and apologize afterwards and say that it was because I was the only one who loved him, that he was so lonely, that he loved me too much. I never told on him because I was scared to my bones what my mother would do to me if she found out, and also I pitied him a little bit because he was abused by my mother physically and verbally as much as I was. After my mother caught him, the abuse from him stopped, but the beatings and verbal abuse from her increased a hundredfold. She blamed me for all of it, insisted that I instigated it, that I didn’t tell because I -wanted- it, etc. Even as an adult, before I finally cut off all contact with my family, whenever we’d have an argument she’d hiss, “Remember what you did to me, Kim Lee.” She never told the police because ‘she didn’t want to bring shame down upon her family,’ and she ‘wanted to be able to walk through town with her head held high, not ducked in shame because of what you did.’ I wasn’t even able to physically bring myself to even -speak- about it ’til I was sixteen; every time I tried to tell someone, my throat would literally constrict upon myself and I’d start to choke ’til the urge to confess finally passed. Instead, I’d lie in my room, cutting at myself with Exact-O blades on my arms, thighs, breasts, stomach, then after I bandaged myself up, I’d cry and eat the Hostess cupcakes I’d hidden in a secret stash in my room. After ‘the discovery’, I retreated further into myself, into my own mental escape place, just to survive; my mother made night and day a living hell for me…sometimes she’d come home and hiss in my ear, “I know what you said to him today; I know what you did; I’ve got tape recorders hidden all over this house and I have it ALL ON TAPE.” and I would be so scared that it was true that I’d huddle in the corner of my room in a panic with my heart beating rabbit-fast, even though I knew I hadn’t said a word to my father at all that day. (He was home a lot as he ran a lobster-trap-making business from the barn in our backyard.) It still amazes me that she could be such a terrifying presence in my life that what she put me through overshadows the sexual abuse I went through. It wasn’t ’til I finally managed to choke out, over the course of two hours one night, the circumstances of my childhood to my boyfriend at the time, that I started the healing process that I’m continuing even up to this day.

…Fast-forward through the next several years as I got away from them and that house and started to rebuild my life…I met my husband when I was 19; by the time I was 21, we were married. My weight had already started to go up at that point. By our wedding day, I was up to a size 18 from the 10 of my early-to-mid teens – my mother, whom I was still in contact with at the time, would often lament longingly, “Kim Lee, remember how slim you were back in high school? Oh, I wish you were still like that!” to which I’d reply, “Actually, mother, all I remember was you telling me how much of a fat cow I was, and telling your friends in Tagalog that it was too bad I’m so ‘mataba’.”

Due to whatever it is – likely a combo of genetics (my mother’s a size 3 and always has been, but my father is very pot-bellied and from good, hardy Maine fisherman stock,) and the medications I’m on to stabilise my ADHD and anxiety attacks, plus the Pill and the high blood pressure pill I’m on to combat the HBP caused by my other three meds, I’m now a size 20, and I love my looks and myself more now than I ever have in my life. I’ve been this size now for the past five or so years, and it’s not likely to change any time soon, and that’s fine by me. Despite my size acceptance, though, I’m still afraid as hell that my skinny-skinny six-year-old with the appetite of a baby elephant will one day wake up and be a ‘fat kid’ like I was, even though I wasn’t that fat of a kid. He has no chance of the at-home abuse I went through, but if he experiences the at-school bullying…I remember that hell all too well. My husband was a skinny kid and young adult, and now at 41, he’s average-sized; since our boy takes after his dad so much, it’s likely he’ll be like his father in that respect, too. Regardless of his size, though, we try to do our best to instill a healthy sense of self-esteem and confidence in our son. He’s such a ball of sunshine and love – he’s genuinely empathetic, he sees everyone as just friends waiting to happen, and even at six he’s still a snuggler. I find myself hoping so hard that the world, so often cruel, won’t crush that bright spirit out of him too easily or too early. Just yesterday, he was curled up on my lap, cuddling as I read him a story, and he spontaneously kissed the rising curve of my belly. “Mom, you know what I love about your tummy? It’s SO SOFT and NICE.” The other night, he caught me grumping at a WW commercial on TV, and asked why. “Because even though they’re not using these words exactly, what they’re saying -really- is that it’s not good to be big like Mommy, and that there’s something wrong with people my shape because we’re shaped like this. Like we can’t be pretty or nice or okay because of the way we’re shaped.” He looked shocked for a moment and then replied matter-of-factly, “But they’re wrong. Some people are just skinny, and some are…well…just MEDIUM like Daddy, and some people are just fat. There’s nothing wrong with them. Momma, you should call them and tell them to stop saying those things; it’s not nice at all!”

…I get the feeling that he’s gonna be okay.

(By the way, I just sat here for a few minutes debating whether to hit the “Submit Comment” button or not…there’s something about putting so much of my business all out on Front Street like that when it’s my very first comment, ever, that feels really gauche and embarrassing. But, well, it’s my story, and I refuse to be embarrassed by it anymore – it’s part of what shaped me into who I am, it’s part of what defines me, but -I- am not defined by IT. And so it goes, and so my comment stands.

Dad is less accepting but never downright rude about it either. He’d pass comments like “You’re getting fatter aren’t you?” but would usually stop there and nothing more.

In all, I guess I should feel really lucky that I’m not subjected to a certain cruelty at home, despite my parents being really tiny in their younger years.

The one thing I remember about fat and growing up was my grandma/mom making comments on how I ‘had a butt’ or ‘had a tummy’ or was starting to get said butt/tummy or how said butt/tummy was growing. My aunt, who always was ‘the fat sister,’ made a really telling comment to me one day. She said ‘Mom(grandma) always feels like it’s her right to comment on our weights. I would never do that to (her daughter’s name) because I know how that feels. Even if she gained hundreds of pounds. I just keep telling her to be healthy.’ When my aunt says ‘be healthy’ she means the REAL definition of being healthy and not just being thin.

My mom was the thinnest of her sister, and now, she is the one with more of the health problems. She has diabetes, so I did grow up in a house where we were ‘on a diet’ because my mom basically cut all sugar from her life after I was born – which was when she was diagnosed with diabetes. Most people think of diabetes as a ‘fat people disease,’ but my mom has shown me that the ‘thin person’ in the family can have this illness, too.

In the end, it’s those little comments that can really hurt a person. As I’ve gotten older, I realize how all those ‘little things’ really have shaped me. Your kids DO remember the little things. The ‘big trauma’ experiences will be remembered, sure, but those little things that your kids experience daily will be what shapes your kids attitudes.

My dad – and everyone else in his family – is fat. My mom’s thin, but thinks she’s fat because she’s pear shaped, like me. She hates her body. It took me a long time to really believe that it’s okay, or even attractive, to have a butt and hips. My mom is a intelligent, strong, and beautiful woman, but she never had a positive thing to say about herself. She was always on a diet, and she often asked me to diet with her, but I always declined. (Yes, thankfully, I was never forced to diet as a child.) My dad was much meaner to me about my weight. He’d occasionally make nasty comments about it, but he’s not the world’s nicest guy, so I took it with a grain of salt. My parents broke up when I was 11, and things were better when we weren’t living with dad anymore.

I think that to some extent, I was off the hook with my parents because I was very healthy and physically active as a kid. I have a brother who’s thin. He’s 8 years younger than me, so we weren’t really compared to each other. He’s always been the more fragile one, health-wise. I was always the kid who acted older than her years, and seemed to be physically and emotionally indestructible. Also, I was very, very stubborn. My parents – or at least my mom – always treated me with respect.

My parents never gave me the idea that my appearance was the most important thing about me. On the other hand, they reinforced to the anti-fat messages I was getting from outside. I was in my mid twenties before I realized that my body could be considered attractive, and that it wasn’t innately horrible and disgusting. I wasted what should have been the first ten years of my personal life thinking that no one worth having could possibly be interested in me. That pisses me off now, because I’m actually very good looking, and my body is well proportioned. Why couldn’t someone have told me that when I was younger, instead of making me feel like I was some kind of giant, deformed mutant? I hated my body So. Much. I remember being 9 or 10 and hitting my belly until it was red, thinking that if I didn’t somehow become thin, I’d never have a boyfriend.

I got teased in school. Actually, I found school to be a painful experience in general. I was always bored, and I got into trouble. I wasn’t any good at giving the teachers what they were looking for. When I got bullied, I was told to ignore it – and it was treated as a problem with me rather than a problem with the bullies. (Apparently, I was “oversensitive.”) I was angry, restless, and depressed a lot of the time. I was an escapist reader. At my peak, I was reading a book a day. But, things got better as I got older, and the last couple of years of high school went well in a lot of ways.

So, hum… lessons from my childhood.

Things my parents did right:
• Not trying to force me to diet.
• Not acting like my appearance was the only thing about me that mattered.

Things I wish they’d done:
• I wish my mom hadn’t modeled so much body hatred
• I wish my dad hadn’t been a jerk about my weight
• I wish that we’d discussed the negative messages in the media and advertising.
• I wish they’d tried to find a school where I could have been happier – where bullying wasn’t tolerated – or at least advocated for me a little.
• I wish that I’d gotten even one unqualified compliment about my appearance from an adult. (it was always “You’d be so pretty if you lost weight”)
• I wish that my parents had encouraged me to get involved in athletics for fun. They were very anti-jock.
• I wish that they’d made an effort to help me look better at the weight I was. I had thick, ugly glasses, bad haircuts, and unfashionable clothes when I was growing up. To be fair, it was almost impossible to find fashionable plus-sized clothes in the ’80s, but still…