This is only tangentially related, but so very much on my mind that everything about parents and diet culture makes me think of it: I had a lightning bolt realization while my mother was here for Thanksgiving. My mom's position, as far as I understand it, is that one should be actively hungry the vast majority of the time. Not just not full/could eat, but *hungry.* I also have a lot of struggles with my mom where she, for instance, asks me for help with tech and then gets incredibly upset to the point of being physically shaky, and needs to stop trying to deal with whatever minor problem we're addressing. It's a real hassle.
And it suddenly occurred to me, when I'm hungry, my executive function declines. I lose focus. I get easily frustrated. How much of my mother's problems with things like making Zoom or her phone work are because she is just too hungry to do a challenging task right then? But there's no way to say this to her, because the grandparents are not ok...
Oh gosh. YES TO THIS. I think it's a shift people often notice when they finally stop dieting/restricting intensely... but also something very hard to identify when it's happening, especially if you've been told to deny your hunger for so much of your life.
Thanks for this! I'm a new subscriber and excited about all of the great content here. This might be a niche concern, but just for what it's worth: I'm an adoptive parent who shares food/body/nutrition concerns with my mom-friends who had their kids biologically. (Not that there aren't differences, such as our not having complete medical histories, but bio-moms may lack some of this information too.) In your post, you express empathy for mothers who have "been through the physiological wringer of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth"--and rightly so, of course! You don't mention (and few writers do) mothers like me, who have been through our own wringer of multiple miscarriages and failed fertility treatments, which also take a physiological and psychological toll. Anyway! This is not a critique, just a reminder that part of your readership might have experiences slightly divergent from what you identify here.
I loved this roundup. My ED was severe in high school, and gradually lessened every year after I moved out of the house at 18. Now at 40, I have come to recognize that my mother had the eating disorder and that she imposed it on me as a teenager, creating an environment in which it felt natural and inevitable to participate in it with her. So in my own personal case, my mother did cause my eating disorder.
I agree that it's unfair to blame mothers as a bloc, and it's also way more complicated. There's so much disordered eating that isn't classifiable as anorexia or bulimia. (My symptoms, even at their most severe, would not have filled the bill for either diagnosis.) So when you say the "ED community pushed back hard"... maybe in the case of a DSM5-classified disorder, there's more of an argument to be made for "nature over nurture" but not only is there gray area just with those disorders, there's a lot of gray area around what causes disordered eating that isn't anorexia/bulimia another eating disorder in the DSM. Or am I wrong? (I don't have a medical background.)
I think you're hitting on something really important here. A parent can't cause a brain-based disorder -- but they can play a role in, and even cause a kid to engage in disordered eating and for some kids, that will pull the trigger on the gun genetics loaded. And for other kids, it will just be a subclinical kind of shitty. And yes, there is so much gray area (and fatphobia!) in how we decide who meets criteria for a disorder in the first place.
Oh dads definitely have influence! And as you’ll see when I do the dads chapter link roundup… men have just as many diet culture beliefs (and sometimes more!) as women. They were just ignored by the eating disorder literature for decades.
(On the school lunch stuff — I linked an essay I wrote about that awhile back but this is reminding me of another I really need to write…)
This is only tangentially related, but so very much on my mind that everything about parents and diet culture makes me think of it: I had a lightning bolt realization while my mother was here for Thanksgiving. My mom's position, as far as I understand it, is that one should be actively hungry the vast majority of the time. Not just not full/could eat, but *hungry.* I also have a lot of struggles with my mom where she, for instance, asks me for help with tech and then gets incredibly upset to the point of being physically shaky, and needs to stop trying to deal with whatever minor problem we're addressing. It's a real hassle.
And it suddenly occurred to me, when I'm hungry, my executive function declines. I lose focus. I get easily frustrated. How much of my mother's problems with things like making Zoom or her phone work are because she is just too hungry to do a challenging task right then? But there's no way to say this to her, because the grandparents are not ok...
Oh gosh. YES TO THIS. I think it's a shift people often notice when they finally stop dieting/restricting intensely... but also something very hard to identify when it's happening, especially if you've been told to deny your hunger for so much of your life.
Thanks for this! I'm a new subscriber and excited about all of the great content here. This might be a niche concern, but just for what it's worth: I'm an adoptive parent who shares food/body/nutrition concerns with my mom-friends who had their kids biologically. (Not that there aren't differences, such as our not having complete medical histories, but bio-moms may lack some of this information too.) In your post, you express empathy for mothers who have "been through the physiological wringer of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth"--and rightly so, of course! You don't mention (and few writers do) mothers like me, who have been through our own wringer of multiple miscarriages and failed fertility treatments, which also take a physiological and psychological toll. Anyway! This is not a critique, just a reminder that part of your readership might have experiences slightly divergent from what you identify here.
THANK YOU. This is such an important point. I will do better.
I loved this roundup. My ED was severe in high school, and gradually lessened every year after I moved out of the house at 18. Now at 40, I have come to recognize that my mother had the eating disorder and that she imposed it on me as a teenager, creating an environment in which it felt natural and inevitable to participate in it with her. So in my own personal case, my mother did cause my eating disorder.
I agree that it's unfair to blame mothers as a bloc, and it's also way more complicated. There's so much disordered eating that isn't classifiable as anorexia or bulimia. (My symptoms, even at their most severe, would not have filled the bill for either diagnosis.) So when you say the "ED community pushed back hard"... maybe in the case of a DSM5-classified disorder, there's more of an argument to be made for "nature over nurture" but not only is there gray area just with those disorders, there's a lot of gray area around what causes disordered eating that isn't anorexia/bulimia another eating disorder in the DSM. Or am I wrong? (I don't have a medical background.)
I think you're hitting on something really important here. A parent can't cause a brain-based disorder -- but they can play a role in, and even cause a kid to engage in disordered eating and for some kids, that will pull the trigger on the gun genetics loaded. And for other kids, it will just be a subclinical kind of shitty. And yes, there is so much gray area (and fatphobia!) in how we decide who meets criteria for a disorder in the first place.
Exactly. Stealing “a subclinical kind of shitty” next time I talk about this 😂
Oh dads definitely have influence! And as you’ll see when I do the dads chapter link roundup… men have just as many diet culture beliefs (and sometimes more!) as women. They were just ignored by the eating disorder literature for decades.
(On the school lunch stuff — I linked an essay I wrote about that awhile back but this is reminding me of another I really need to write…)