Spending much of my on & off work hours helping parents raise children in a body conscious world, I was heartened to read Peggy Orenstein’s article, The Fat Trap, in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. She uses herself as a fine example of how important it is for mothers, in particular, to acknowledge their own body image issues and restrain themselves from giving out loud expression to them for the sake of our children.

Mothers are often shocked to learn that their self-denigration targeting their own body’s weight and size filters down to their daughters, sending them indirect messaging about the need to be anxious about their own body. When adults limit on our own negative self-talk, we limit how much negative referencing will flow to our daughters, nieces and cousins. When we enforce a commitment to eating “as though I didn’t live via a diet mentality,” we then model normal, healthy eating patterns for our kids.

These are the best inoculators for protecting our children from the onslaught of media messaging that encourages them to constantly compare themselves to others with a conclusion of not measuring up. We know that the result is being at risk to turn against our bodies and ourselves. Read on……..

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/magazine/18fob-wwln-t.html?emc=eta1

excerpt from the article:

“A 2003 analysis of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, meanwhile, showed that mothers were three times as likely to notice excess weight in daughters than in sons, even though the boys were more likely to be large. That gave me pause. It is so easy for the concern with “health,” however legitimate, to justify a focus on girls’ appearances. For organic-eating, right-living parents whose girls are merely on the fleshy side of average, “health” may also mask a discomfort with how a less-than-perfect daughter reflects on them. “ ‘Good’ parents today are expected to have normal-weight kids,” says Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of the book “The Body Project” and a professor of history and human development at Cornell University. “Having a fat girl is a failure.”

By the time my own daughter was born, I realized that avoiding conversations about food, health and body image would be impossible: what I didn’t say would speak as loudly as anything I did. So rather than opt out, I decided to actively model something different, something saner. I’ve tried to forget all I once knew about calories, carbs, fat and protein; I haven’t stepped on a scale in seven years. At dinner I pointedly enjoy what I eat, whether it’s steamed broccoli or pecan pie. I don’t fetishize food or indulge in foodieism. I exercise because it feels good, and I never, ever talk about weight. Honestly? It feels entirely unnatural, this studied unconcern, and it forces me to be more vigilant than ever about what goes in and what comes out of my mouth. Maybe my daughter senses that, but this conscious antidiet is the best I can do.

Still, my daughter lives in the world. She watches Disney movies. She plays with Barbies. So although I was saddened, I was hardly surprised one day when, at 6 years old, she looked at me, frowned and said, “Mama, don’t get f-a-t, O.K.?”

At least, I thought, she didn’t hear it from me.”

Here’s another article about a mother who is creating a documentary as a way of coping with grief from her daughter’s death at 18 from bulimia:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/fashion/22Melissa.html?emc=eta1

the film’s producer — Judy Avrin, Melissa’s mother, who decided to make a documentary about her daughter’s life and, ultimately, her death.

People deal with grief in their own ways, and those who have been spared the loss of a daughter or a son can only imagine how they would choose to try to cope. For Ms. Avrin, coping meant confronting her anguish and trying to make something good come out of i

The film, called “Someday Melissa” and now in the editing stages, has become for Ms. Avrin salve, distraction and cause — a way to get the word out to other families grappling with eating disorders that they are not alone; to sound the alarm that eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness; to help make sense of the senseless event that was losing her teenage daughter.

Here are some comments from the Huffington Post about my most recent posting. One of my friends wrote me saying that she would be interested to “discuss or see more about how we think about diets relates to the real obesity crisis we’re currently experiencing in the US - eg 57% of children in Philadelphia are overweight or obese- and it’s  epidemic in the African American community.”

The very same forces selling us messages that cause feelings of inadequacy are also helping to insert cornsyrup products in to our food, hooking us on tastes of sweetness, and our portions are twice (I’m not exaggerating) the size of standard portions in Europe. We are a culture of overeating on empty calories that promote cravings for more rather than satiety for what they have just eaten. A lot of research has been done about dieting and it is a wide held understanding that dieting leads to cycles of going on and off diets, with the in between times increasing the likelihood for binging. Fat cells also grow in such ways that with each cycle of weight gain and weight loss, fat cells multiply, and keep multiplying. While we can shed pounds on the body, we cannot shed fat cells; they’re ours for life.

I wanted to share some of the responses to this article about dieting, looking at Oprah’s most recent step in recognizing her addiction to food, dieting and the alluring sense that we can attain perfection

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-shure/how-to-diet—-the-dietin_b_535062.html

“The greater concern for Oprah is her health. She clearly has metabolic syndrome and is at great risk for “diabetes.” The problem with her “diets” is that she has followed misguided advice from such as Dr. Oz who is clueless about proper diet for those with insulin-resistance.”

“This just goes to show that Oprah is not the omniscient person that many people think she is! She is a very good person and has done worlds of good for the people of our country, BUT, she doesn’t know everything! Just because Oprah endorses something, be it a product or a method of eating/dieting, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do!
When considering weight-loss, dieting, or a lifestyle change…go to an expert!”

“The problem is the idea of diets itself - something that is 1 time fix and temporary. if oprah or others want to lose weight and be healthy they have to change what they eat PERMANENTLY, and commit themselves to exercise PERMANENTLY. and the changes have to become part of everyday living and normalized. read “eat, drink, and be healthy” for more info.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-shure/how-to-diet—-the-dietin_b_535062.html

I’ve been waiting a long time for this day. Oprah has finally come to see the light, recognizing that dieting promoted more of her negative body image rather than remedy it. This is a huge leap forward and provides hope that her influential voice may now be heard touting a different, more empowering public message.

A lifelong devotee of weight loss at any cost, Oprah has come to see that her years of yo-yo dieting have kept her on a roller coaster ride of weight gain, weight loss, with concomitant highs of excitement and lows of defeat, never guiding her toward fuller body-esteem. “I don’t like the term food addict,” she said recently in O, The Oprah Magazine, “but I realize that I’ve been one, and it has taken me years to learn (and relearn) that the choices we make about what we put in our mouths are only stand-ins for the beliefs we carry in our minds and our hearts.”

Throughout her life, Oprah rejected her mesomorph shaped body and revered the gods and goddesses of thinness, committing herself to battle with her hunger and her body. We know from watching the changes in her physical self, that Oprah struggled with the demons that drive obsessions with food, weight and body size. As a professional keenly aware of the complexities involved with body image, I’ve ached at particular moments when Oprah’s actions lent direct endorsement to the diet industry’s marketing gurus, reinforcing messages that encourage striving for a body size, shape, and thus, image, discrepant from one that can be sustained with a healthy approach - involving acceptance of our genetic body structure, willingness to feed our bodies enough foods to quell hunger and sustain energy and the practice of speaking to ourselves without judgment and blame for “who we are not,” and “what we do not look like.”

After all, we live within our bodies; they are the vessels that house us. If we support attitudes of dislike toward our bodies, not accepting them and cherishing for all they do for us, our deepest self suffers.
Oprah was hooked on the fanatasy that having a different body would heal her deepest wounds and release her into a life of internal ease. In fact, years of dieting did nothing of the sort for Oprah, nor does it do so for anyone else. Instead, it releases the follower in to a state of dis-ease…a path of continuous anxiety about how long they will stay at their worshiped weight and what they will feel like when they lose that “position” in life.

The statistics on dieting are staggering, suggesting that 95% of people who lose weight from diet regimes are certain to gain most of it back within a year or two. The multi-billion dollar diet industry seduces us into believing that cycles of dieting are the best way to achieve the “right” body for each one of us. They never admit that diets prevent us from learning how to regulate our body weight or balance our eating patterns, and they never mention that diets increase binging, moodiness, and the potential for developing an eating disorder -the full spectrum from anorexia to obesity - they don’t mention that patterns of dieting increase cardio vascular disease, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and even some cancers.

Despite the facts, many of us fall under their spell and argue in favor of dieting - saying that it is healthy and good, even something to be admired and rewarded, a virtue worth pursuing. Talking to Oprah in March, author Geneen Roth, assures us that “Unless you really see what your core beliefs are, what’s making you overeat, and until you name those beliefs, they will shape your life willy-nilly. You’ll just keep acting them out by punishing yourself with food. But if you can finally get to understand the beliefs underneath, you can learn how to live.”