"Mom, What's a Calorie?"

A conversation I had with my 9-year-old about calories, exercise, diet culture, and fatphobia.

On Wednesday, while eating breakfast, my 9-year-old dropped one of those question bombs that you’re never prepared for as a parent, but especially not before 8am.

“Mom,” she said. “What’s a calorie?”

I knew that this was a question I could, in theory, answer in one or two sentences, after which I could easily change the subject. But I also knew that it presented a potential opening — an opening for me to talk with my daughter about the cultural issues that likely incited her question. I knew my kid probably wasn’t asking about calories because she was interested in the physics of metabolism. My guess was that she was asking about calories because she’d heard the term somewhere — from friends, maybe, or from YouTube. I suspected, too, that she’d heard the word in a moralized context, like that calories were bad, something to minimize, something to avoid.

So, I took a deep breath and started my answer — doing my best not to overwhelm her with information, yet also hoping to dig into some of these larger issues. (Note that we have talked about anti-fat bias and diet culture before, but with big, complicated issues like this, it’s always smart to revisit them often. Kids take different things from different conversations, especially since each conversation happens at a unique developmental moment.)

I’m going to share the details of our conversation to the best of my memory — not because I think I nailed my answers, or because there is “one right way” to answer these kinds of questions. There certainly isn’t!!!! But I know from past experience that many of you appreciate detailed scripts and catching a glimpse of how I handle the bumpy everyday aspects of parenting. So without further ado, here goes.

9yo: Mom, what’s a calorie?