Your Body is Your Own

May 28

As I write this I am currently taking bites of cake batter ice cream with bits of cookie dough sprinkled throughout. Cake batter ice cream is the best ice cream because its two desserts in one. But then adding cookie dough bites to make it technically three desserts? Now that is the ultimate dessert right there and I am here for it.

I have a weird relationship with food and with my body and I have had it for as long as I can remember. This relationship has been cultivated through so many different influences and relationships that its hard to pinpoint exactly where it all began. I have memories of comparing the size of my thighs to my friend sitting next to me on the school bus and I remember crying in the dance studio because everyone else’s costumes fit them, except for mine. I remember going through a growth spurt between 8th grade and freshman year and my mom crying tears of joy at Macy’s when the dress I was trying on was a size 2. I can still hear her voice in my head, “my daughter, a size 2!” I can still hear my dad commenting on the bodies of the football players on the tv, how much they weigh, their height, and guessing how much they may eat to sustain that body mass. I remember my brother being constantly forced to consume more protein to “bulk up” while my mother and I were compared and praised for the smaller we got.

I say all of this not to throw anyone under the bus, in fact, I have tremendous empathy for the parents who never received the healing they needed and deserved. I say all of this because I know it is not just my family and to normalize how sly diet culture, the patriarchy, and white supremacy sneak into our day-to-day lives and affect our sense of self, and our children, so much more than we realize.

What is Diet Culture?

Christy Harrison, an intuitive eating coach, and anti-diet dietician defines Diet Culture as a system of beliefs that worship thinness and equate it to health, promotes weight loss, and promotes the weightloss as achieving a higher status in society, labels certain ways of eating as “bad,” while other forms of eating are seen as “good,” and oppresses those who do not fit into the supposed box that is “health.” The full definition can be read on her website if you click here. Basically, it is ingrained in us from a young age that large is bad and small is good, which is simply not the case. Body positivity movements such as Health At Every Size, or HAES, are doing the incredible work of spreading the idea that larger bodies are indeed healthy as well as taking the binary of large and small and creating the so needed middle ground of awareness of health in all shapes and forms. To learn more about HAES, click here.

So many of the parents and caregivers whose children I work with express a struggle when it comes to food, and honestly I see the ingrained diet culture already taking effect. Often the caregiver brings their child to their yearly physical. There, a pediatrician, who is working off of dated material that only considers the binary of large and small, and is working with their own and the research’s bias towards thinness, whiteness, and maleness, communicates to the caregiver that their child’s body is wrong. Their child is either eating too much, not enough, or the worst, the child is not getting enough nutrients. As in, they may be eating enough, however, it is not deemed “healthy,” enough. Families then attempt to do everything in their power to control their child’s diet. In my opinion, I think sometimes caregivers begin to obsess about their child’s food choices and food intake due to their unconsciously ingrained beliefs surrounding diet culture. Parents do not want their children’s lives to be any more difficult than they have to be, and it seems like parents have the idea that if their child eats too much and is in a larger body, or does not make healthy choices and is in a larger body, that their life will be more difficult than it has to be. Being in a larger body will not make your child’s life more difficult, judging and controlling your child’s food choices and quantities of food will make your child’s life more difficult.

Children are natural intuitive eaters and we are the ones who come in and mess it up for them. Think about it, babies are born with the natural ability to tell when they are hungry and when they are full. Children actually do not even develop the ability to taste certain flavors on their tongue until much later in life (I was obsessed when I learned about this, click here to become obsessed too). Intuitive eating is more than just eating chips and candy whenever we feel like it, it’s about listening to our bodies and reattuning ourselves to our inner nutritional needs and comforts when it comes to food. It is about tuning out the external influences of diets, media, weight loss apps, and the people around us. It is about looking inside ourselves and teaching our children to look inside themselves and trust our gut, literally. Learn more about Intuitive Eating here.

Obviously, our bodies do not always handle all food easily. Perhaps a caregiver in the household has their own ingrained diet culture or has severe dietary restrictions, oftentimes the children will pick up on that caregiver’s restrictive behavior around food and begin to apply it to their own eating. Or, perhaps the household is a strictly vegetarian household. I firmly believe that children of all ages are absolutely able to be educated on their caregiver’s food choices as well as understand why those may not apply to them. Children are also very capable of learning about and understanding why a certain food option is not available, such as meat and dairy in a vegan household, or pork in a Muslim household. I believe the major takeaway is that the child deserves to know why the food is not available and not just have the food be absent without explanation.

5 TIPS TO HELP YOUR CHILD NAVIGATE FOOD AND THEIR BODY

Give choices and praise them no matter the choice

Provide age-appropriate education regarding the food choices you are making for yourself

Have the child place their hands on their tummy and ask their stomach what it wants to eat, also works with exercise (you can ask your body with them!)

Create opportunities for children to help with cooking or engage in active activities with them

Discuss what foods your child likes and may not like. Ask them how that food makes their body feel

The Wellness Myth

Of course, we cannot change the outlook and bias in our children without first addressing our own. The word wellness is spreading throughout the minds and bodies of women as well as our Instagram feeds daily, sometimes, hourly. What is this new wellness culture? Wellness is a buzzword that, in my opinion, is equating a certain lifestyle with goodness and “being good.” Obviously, I am pro yoga, I drink kombucha, and my office is littered with crystals. However I am also here to tell you that one of my favorite things in the world is a Mcdonald’s double cheeseburger, on Monday nights you will find me watching The Bachelor franchise, and last Saturday I stayed in my pajamas until 4 pm. None of those things I just listed are bad or make me a bad person, however wellness culture would state otherwise.

It seems the more “well” we are the more “good” we are as humans. As women, we equate this to food and our bodies. How many times have you heard someone say something along the lines of, “oh I’ve been so bad today I simply could not take another cookie!” Now ask yourself, who have you heard this statement from? Was it your Mom? Grandmother? Aunt? Yourself? The truth is, from generation to generation, women equate goodness with health, wellness, and thinness. This is especially true within family relationships, such as mother-daughter relationships.

Therapist Ashlee Bennett is right, it is not our job to take on our mother’s views and biases of women’s bodies, especially her view of your own body. I think it is hard for mothers to see their children’s bodies, especially their daughter’s bodies, as separate from their own. They were connected for 9 months after all. But because of that, as well as environmental influence, sometimes their thoughts and feelings about their own bodies are projected onto the daughter. As daughters, you are allowed to set boundaries around your bodies. You are allowed to change the conversation. You are allowed to simply leave.

5 THINGS TO SAY WHEN BOUNDARY SETTING

“It makes me uncomfortable when you comment on my body.”

“I would love to talk about something other than our bodies and diets.”

“I wonder what our children are thinking overhearing this conversation.”

“I feel I am good no matter what I eat or how much I move my body.”

“It makes me uncomfortable when you comment on the bodies of others.”

I also believe discussions around food and body image come up more in groups of women due to patriarchal and white supremacist influences. In Sonya Renee Taylor’s book “the body is not an apology,” she highlights the amount of success and progress women could have made without their bodies being the focus of their attention and accuses the patriarchy of this disturbance. To that, I say, absolutely! Think about the amount of time and effort you personally have put into your body, your looks, and your thoughts about your body and your looks. Now imagine all of that time was spent thinking about and doing other things, things men have historically not wanted us to do, like speak our minds, learn, and live. Weight loss, wellness culture, dieting apps, gym memberships, all of the thoughts of telling yourself you are “bad” for eating those french fries, all created by the patriarchy’s attempt to keep us distracted. I think I could have solved world hunger by now had I realized this sooner.

In Sabrina String’s book “Fearing the Black Body,” she dives into a long, unacknowledged history of white women wanting their bodies to look the opposite of black women. Particularly during the American slave trade, white women would starve themselves and wear corsets to make their bodies frail and sickly compared to black women whose bodies were strong and muscular from the work they were forced to do. With diet culture and the favoring of thinness among white women being passed down from generation to generation, this makes dieting and viewing thinness as the ideal inherently racist.

I say the above not to label you as a misogynist or a racist if you partake in diet culture, but to spark your attention to the systems that are affecting you on a daily basis. Ultimately you and your body are good. The bodies our children will be in are good. Sonya Renee Taylor quotes, “Living in a female body, a Black body, an aging body, a fat body, a body with mental illness is to awaken daily to a planet that expects a certain set of apologies to already live on our tongues. There is a level of “not enough” or “too much” sewn into these strands of difference.”

I am here to say that the body you are currently reading this in, is enough. You and your body deserve to take up space. You are enough.

Resources

Books:

The Body is Not an Apology, Sonya Renee Taylor

Fearing the Black Body, Sabrina String

Podcast:

Food Psych, Christy Harrison

Instagram:

@thebodyahomeforlove

@bodyimage_therapist

Websites:

https://christyharrison.com