Why Diet Culture Is Dangerous for Kids

Virginia Sole-Smith on how to raise kids who love their bodies — and why that really matters.

Apr 25, 2023

Today I’m thrilled to be running a Q&A with my good friend

in celebration of her new book Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture, which is out today! Fat Talk is a deeply reported, thought-provoking, crucial read for parents who want to raise kids who love their bodies. The book explores the many reasons why diet culture and anti-fat bias are so dangerous for children, and it illustrates the many insidious ways in which these biases show up in our homes, often without us realizing it.

When we encourage our kids to eat more vegetables, when we tell them they can’t have any more tortilla chips, when we lament that our own jeans don’t fit anymore — these are all subtle, but important, ways in which we teach our kids that bigger bodies aren’t okay. These lessons have real and often unexpected ramifications, increasing our kids’ risk for disordered eating and mental health problems. Although we say and do these things in the hopes of keeping our kids healthy, we essentially achieve the exact opposite.

If you’re skeptical, keep in mind, as I learned from her book, that much of the variation in body size is genetically determined, less tied to what we eat we might assume. The relationship between body size and physical health is also not as well-established as many people think. And it’s impossible to disentangle the health effects of a person’s body size from the stigma they experience for their body size. So when fat people do experience health woes, it can be hard to know exactly why.

In today’s Q&A, Virginia shares why she wrote her book, why and how fatphobia in the home leads to disordered eating, what to say when your kid says something rooted in diet culture, and how to navigate the tricky, often fatphobic world of youth sports. It’s a longer Q&A, but that’s because it was so damn good, I couldn’t bear to trim it. I also highly recommend that you buy Virginia’s book and read the whole thing. It’s well-resourced, beautifully written and essential.

Virginia, I’m so excited to talk to you about your book. What inspired you to write FAT TALK?

The idea developed in fits and starts ever since I wrote my first book, The Eating Instinct, but I really honed in on it in 2020. That’s when I realized that the recurring theme in all the questions I was being asked by parents in response to the first book, and in response to the pieces I was writing for The New York Times, all boiled down to this: “I want my kid to have a good relationship with their body and to feel safe around food, and I don't want them to get eating disorders. But I also don't want them to be fat.”

I realized that as long as we're putting that contingency on who gets to feel okay about their bodies, we're never going to really make any progress. Because you can't say, “We want people to love their bodies, but only if they're thin.” So it helped me understand that, as useful as it is to talk about the nuances of how we feed our kids and how diet culture shows up there, we really have to start by naming and understanding anti-fat bias. That is the foundation of this whole conversation.

In your book, you share many powerful stories involving well-meaning parents, teachers and coaches who want the best for kids, but who talk about or critique kids’ bodies or food choices under the guise of making them healthier. And then, in the book, we see those kids go on to develop disordered eating. What do we know about the relationship between encouraging kids to look or eat or look a certain way and the development of eating disorders?

Whenever we are trying to push healthy eating — even the kinder, gentler ways we talk about moderation and balance and those kinds of things — we are fundamentally putting restriction on our child around food. We are saying that there are some foods we are happy for you to be eating. They may not be your favorite foods, but those are the ones we most want you to be eating. And there are these other foods over here that we're going to have all these guardrails around in terms of how much you can have, or how often you can have them.

When we do that, we immediately tap into a thing that's fundamental to human psychology, which is that once you forbid something, that's the thing that the kid most wants. This kind of restriction, even really well-intentioned and rooted in health, breeds fixation and anxiety about the foods you're not letting them have. So that's why it's so common to then see kids interacting with these foods in ways that look disordered, because when they do get access to that food, they're going to want to eat as much of it as possible, because they don't know when they'll have it again. They may be prone to sneaking the foods or lying to you about how much they ate. And then we demonize those behaviors — we pathologize that, instead of saying “Oh, that's actually a pretty logical response to feeling restricted.” Kids are just doing what kids do.

If we can ease up on the restriction, we can actually interact with the system in a totally different way. And it's tricky, because of course, you can't have no restrictions, you can’t have no structure. Kids do need structure around feeding. They're not developmentally ready to assume all responsibility for feeding themselves. But we need to think much more about structure as a way to ensure kids are getting enough to eat and enough of the foods they love, rather than thinking about structure as the thing we're doing to control them and to prevent them from accessing things.

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Your book addresses the relationship between weight and health, and you also talk about common parental worries surrounding nutrition. There are so many parents who are like, “Oh my God, if my kid doesn't eat broccoli, they're not going to grow well.” Can you talk a little bit about the assumptions we make about food and health and what we really know from the research?

There was a moment in an interview for the book when I felt a flood of relief. The interview was with a pediatric dietitian named Katherine Zavodni, who said to me, “The most important thing about nutrition is kids getting enough to eat.” That is what matters most. Of course, there are going to be a handful of exceptions to that rule. But fundamentally, if your child is able to eat enough calories to grow and thrive, then you do not have to worry about the minutiae of nutrition. They are probably getting enough protein, they are probably getting enough fiber, they are probably getting enough vitamins and micronutrients. That's because we live in a time of food abundance. So they don't need to like broccoli, because they can get a lot of the same vitamins and minerals in fruits that they love. They don't need to love quinoa or kale.

That’s because even the processed foods that everyone loves to demonize tend to be fortified with the various vitamins and minerals we need. So it's just not as urgent as we think it is to obsess so much about nutrition. And when we do obsess so much about nutrition, we actually risk harming our children's health. Because when we push them into the scarcity mindset, when we push them into this place of feeling like their bodies are a problem and can't be trusted, and that they have to pursue thinness and pursue perfect eating in these ways, we dramatically increase their risk for disordered eating and eating disorders. And eating disorders are the the leading cause of mental health related deaths among kids. This is a huge, a huge problem.

So if you really are worried about protecting your child's health, thinking about preventing eating disorders should be very high on your list — higher than worrying about something like type 2 diabetes. The actual statistics on children developing type 2 diabetes — it’s a very small number. Naming anti-fat bias and taking weight out of conversations about our children's health is actually health promoting.

This next question I can’t take credit for. After I told a friend of mine that I was interviewing you, she said: “OMG, can you ask Virginia about my 11-year-old?” Apparently, he recently announced to her that that this summer, he plans to “get cut and get a new jawline and get a six pack.” What should we say to our kids when they say things rooted in diet culture?

We definitely want to take it seriously when our kids say things like that. But I think there's a knee jerk instinct, and a lot of us to jump to like, "Don't do that, dieting is bad. You're perfect the way you are." And I think that's very well-intentioned and true. But it doesn't give your child a chance to express the feelings that are motivating the need for those changes — what's underneath that? And I think that's what you want to get at.

I think it might be helpful to say, "What's making you so interested in working out?" If he's talking about his jaw line and six packs, "What's making you feel like those are really important things to have? Do you see a lot of 11-year-olds with cut jaw lines and six packs? Is that something that feels really important to you and your friends right now?" Just create space for the conversation without rushing to judgment. If you come in and say, "You can't work out like that, you can't pursue that," that's going to backfire. Really give them a chance to open up about what they're experiencing. Has he been teased about his body? Is someone making him feel bad about this?

Then, make it really, really, really clear that it is not his body that is the problem. Say, "I never want you to feel like you have to make your body smaller or more muscular and more cut or any of these things. Your body is totally great the way it is. And I just really hate that this culture makes us all feel like our bodies aren't good enough." Then you're putting the blame where it belongs, on this larger system, where you can really start to talk about this as anti-fat bias — this is something that we all experience, though folks in bigger bodies experience it more than thinner folks. And it's really important that we name this and that we start to call it out when we see it happening.

So then you're shifting this conversation from trying to shut down something that you think is dangerous that your kid might be doing — making them feel bad for wanting this — to helping them understand and connect their personal struggle to this larger systemic issue. Especially with 11-year-olds, who often are pretty good at having strong feelings about wanting to fight climate change, or other social justice issues, you have a real opportunity to help your kid understand that this is something they can actually be an active participant in fighting, as opposed to feeling like they just have to fall in line and strive for this ideal that's so out of reach for them.

That's super, super helpful. Ok — now let's talk about dads and masculinity. Your chapter on dads was amazing. As you explained, diet culture gets sort of masked in men, and it gets very tied to performance and masculinity norms. Can you talk a little bit about that? And also why dads are sometimes the biggest proponents of diet culture in the home?

There's a lot of layers to this one. So number one, yes, male diet culture is a thing. Men receive the same onslaught of messages that women do. It is true that there's definitely a wider margin for error in male bodies, like there's a little more diversity in terms of acceptable body size, and the the ideals for women are stricter, but for white straight cis men — their body norms are pretty tough. It's very tied up in, yes, muscles, but it's also about your body being able to do these super intense endurance sports. There’s counting your macros, intermittent fasting — there are different flavors. But it's all about upholding white masculinity. It's all about upholding this ideal of the man as superhero.

Also, there's this gravitas. Peter Attia, one of the guys I look at in the book, who's a doctor — he has all these different devices he uses to monitor his blood sugar throughout the month when he's doing his intermittent fasts. So it feels very scientific and weighty. And we give it this gravitas that we would never give women doing the same thing. When a woman does this sort of extreme dieting stuff — like when Kim Kardashian does it, when Gwyneth Paltrow does it — we immediately dismiss it as vanity, fluffy, like, “Oh, my God, women are so messed up about bodies.” But when men do it, we give them fucking book deals. So there's a clear double standard in terms of how we normalize that. And it's super dangerous, because it means that men who are really struggling, there's no way for them to talk about it. It is totally normalized and expected. Whereas at least women, for all of our struggles with our bodies, like there is a clear language. You are allowed to talk about hating your body as a woman in a way that you are just not as a man.

Then that does a double disservice. Because obviously, that's not great for the guy who's struggling. But it's also not great for his partner, it's not great for his kids, because his struggle is getting misconstrued as the gold standard for how to live. Then that creates this added pressure on his kids in his life to uphold what he's doing, even though it might be really disordered and dysfunctional — to support him and show up at the finish lines. There is a lot of research now starting to show that the way men interact with food and bodies really impacts kids, and that kids whose dads have disordered eating habits are likely to also have disordered eating habits. For a long time, researchers thought it was all moms having this influence, which of course, it does. But if your dad is not eating carbs, that's also not great for your kids to see.

Then the final layer that is important to name, especially in the parenting context, is that our gender norms around who is responsible for feeding kids also creates a lot of opportunity for harm here. Women are socialized to carry the burden of feeding our families. We tend to do most of the cooking, and even if we don't, we tend to do most of the meal planning and grocery shopping. Moms are the ones following all the kid food influencers on Instagram and learning about division of responsibility. They're the ones in those conversations. And so that means often the mom is the one doing this work and trying to identify diet culture and get it out of a family environment. And the dad is not doing this work. But because he's a man, and because we’ve socialized everyone this way, when he sits down at the dinner table and says to his kid, “No, you have to finish your broccoli before you have dessert!” — that's completely okay for him to just swoop in with those pronouncements in that more outdated, traditional way of thinking about food. So that part really pisses me off too — like, they're not doing their homework, but they're still showing up and expecting to have an equal stake in the conversation.

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