Lighten up on yourself: obsessing about diets in front of your children

This post has been brewing for a while now, but something about the onset of summer and plethora of 'bikini-ready diets' and 'do you dare to bare?' features in the press and magazines has finally pushed me over the edge to write it.  Well, that, a great post that Very Busy Mama wrote at the weekend about dealing with her own body issues, and a conversation I had with friends last week.

I grew up in the 1970's and 1980's.  (Yes.  I AM that old...). And for as long as I can remember, my mother - and all her friends - were on a diet.  Many of them still are.

We had the lemon juice & hot water diet (*makes face like a cat's bottom at the memory of the taste*), the British Heart Foundation Cabbage Soup diet (only to be tried once for fear of suffocation), the Hi-Fibre Diet (only to be tried until you run out of loo roll), the Leslie Kenton  Raw Food Diet (believe me, there are only so many ways you can eat raw carrot and celery), The Atkins Diets (woman cannot live on red meat alone - unless bad breath really doesn't bother her), The Grapefruit Diet (the only one that necessitated the purchase of new cutlery - in this case, serrated-edged spoons), the Three Day Diet, The Chicken Soup Diet, the one that gave you red days and green days (can't remember the name of that one), the Whole Food Diet (to this day I refuse to eat bean sprouts as they are the work of the devil), and the plain-old stop eating so much diet (which, frankly, is the only one that really works).

And through it all, I can't really remember my mum ever being fatter or thinner.  She always looked great, whether she thought so or not, and whether she was eating normally or not.

You would think that with this background I would be a bit of a diet junkie myself, and I have to admit, over the years, to having dabbled with Weight Watchers, food combining, and detox (thankyou Carol Vorderman for introducing me to quinoa, if nothing else), but nowadays - and for some time - I have simply tried eating healthy, balanced food, and applying the 80:20 rule (and sometimes the 50:50 rule, or even - at Christmas and on holiday, the 20:80 rule).  Guess what? It works - mostly.  I don't have a goddess-like body, certainly, but I do have one that I can live with and which I don't feel the need to do down in public at every opportunity.

And that, actually, is the point of this post.  (Apologies for having taken so long to have reached it).  Why, ladies, in this age of supposed empowerment and liberation, do we still feel the need to put our bodies down?  And even worse, in this age of an explosion in the numbers of children and young people suffering from weight-related disorders, why do we do so in front of our children?

Certainly, if you feel the need to, do something about your weight, but for the love of god, please, don't stand in front of your impressionable sons and daughters bemoaning the fact that you no longer possess the body of an 18 year old girl (even the 18 year old you once were) when you are - in fact - 38.  Or 40.  Or, indeed, cough, 45.

How on earth are children ever going to develop a healthy relationship with their own bodies and food (everything in moderation, etc etc), or realistic expectations of how it will develop as they get older, if all they see are their mums seemingly obsessed by the latest fruit and chocolate diet*?  For pity's sake; of course we don't have an 18 year-old beach-babe's toned skin, cellulite-free legs and perky boobs (And if you do, and aren't an 18 year old beach babe, good for you but I don't want to hear about it).  For most of us, the writing is on the wall.  We've got older, we've had babies.  Our bodies have been used, for want of a better term.  The lumps and bumps that we sport as the years pass are a change from our smooth-skinned youth, no doubt about it, but unless you want to make like Demi Moore and spend a couple of hundred thousand dollars on surgery, that's the way the oh-so-delicious cookie crumbles.

To a child, most of what their mother says is gospel.  (Disregarding, of course, the requests to put on shoes, brush teeth, find their missing sweater and clear their plate away from the table; that's just so much filler and white noise - for all the notice my sons take of such directions, in any case).  So if they hear their mother constantly belittling herself, moaning about not being able to wear sleeveless tops because she's over 40 and heaven forbid she shows her upper arms, refusing to take her kaftan off by the pool in case - gasp! - anyone should realise that she has cellulite / thread veins / sock marks round her ankles (oh, is the last one just me?), and generally allowing her life to be restricted by the self-imposed limitations she's placed on herself, like it or not the chances are that her children will impose the same restrictions on themselves in the future.

So, whether you do, or don't, decide to lose weight this summer in preparation for your summer holiday, please be careful of how you talk about your body in front of your children.  A split-second throw-away comment can so easily be internalised by an impressionable adolescent and result in a life-time of issues and an obsession with weight. And if you're anything like me, then I suspect that that is the last thing you want for your beautiful child.


* Although, I can see the attraction in that one.  And I'm sure I can dig out some serrated-edge spoons for the grapefruit...