I used to just ignore or roll my eyes, but since I had my daughter--especially because she is a girl, but I think this would be true if I had had a boy too--I've become much more vocal. My MIL is totally down the diet rabbit hole, despite having a daughter who almost died from anorexia, and it just fills me with rage. (She also happens to be tiny, but to her, apparently, not being tiny is the worst thing ever. It's actually so sad.)
So every time she comments, "I won't eat that, I should be good," or, "I'm being so bad by eating this dessert," or, "Rachel's being good [because I say I don't want something because I'm full or whatever], I should be like her," I now say, "there is no morality to food. There is no good or bad. Please don't talk that way in front of me or [daughter's name.]" Same script every time. I'm not sure it makes a difference, but her daughters both back me up and tell me how much they appreciate it.
I assume I will become more aggressive as my kid gets older and understands more, if she keeps doing it (which she probably will, sadly), but for now, I am very committed to setting the baseline expectation.
My dad is also super fat-phobic, but I've called him out more aggressively (wow, dad, that was super fatphobic) and he has gotten way better at what he says in front of my sisters and me.
Hmmm, I mean my current plan is to go absolutely nuclear, so I guess I could be open to other ideas. I'm going home for the first time in years this Christmas, and I've built myself a nice little life where I basically never encounter diet culture from loved ones, and I am prepared to burn it all to the ground if anyone says bullshit about eating or bodies in front of my kids.
I do have full backup, though, in that my sister and her husband and my husband will all have my back, and I have gone no contact recently enough that it's still on the table, and I just.....I don't care anymore. I'm so tired.
For people with whom I don't have a long history of horrible body shaming, though, I usually just make a really awkward face and say, "uhhhhh" before changing the subject, like I respond as I would if they said something sort of rude or uncouth and I was trying to smooth over it.
I like to take the approach of seeming to share a new and surprising piece of information with the fat-phobic-commenter. Like- "I JUST read the more interesting thing the other day- did you know that weight is not even a good metric of health? Bananas right? It's totally the opposite of everything else I've ever heard!" I honestly think I lot of people have never heard these ideas before, or at least not often enough for them to feel plausible amidst the backdrop of all the fat phobic information out there. I try to remember that I used to buy into the toxic body stuff too, and it wasn't all that long ago! And if I had heard little nuggets of HAES or body neutral wisdom over a family dinner, in a way that felt light and interesting, maybe it would have normalized these ideas for me sooner.
In my experience with my loved ones, my mom in particular, the statements about diets are usually passive aggressive because I’ve set hard boundaries with her and my immediate family about talking about bodies in general.
Her go-to robotic instinct is to look me up and down (or anyone) and make a comment about their body, appearance, diet etc. My automatic response is, “What effect does that have on them as a human? Does it measure their worth? Their status? Do you think that’s the most important thing to know about them?” Mom gets defensive and tries to explain her comment, but it’s like beating a dead horse. She has to hear it over and over to unlearn it.
It usually feels as if I’m teaching my four year old daughter about different shapes, sizes, and colors of bodies around us. One is not better than the other, we’re just different.
And how fucking boring would this world be if we were all the same?
With my mom, who’s the main source of these comments but also extremely liberal politically, I have said something like, “have you read about how diet culture is really racist?” I know this won’t work for everyone, but my mom is interested in justice work, and it’s intrigued her enough to think first.
Depending on who is doing the talking, I will often just literally walk away from the conversation. I've been in a yoga class where the instructor said something body shame-y, and I rolled up my mat and left in the middle of class. If my kids are present, I will say "I don't believe in diets" or "UGH. That's diet culture talking" or something of that nature.
On the question of when to hold them v. when to fold them... for me it just depends entirely on context and also the severity of the comments. For example, I have one thin friend who constantly calls herself a "fatass" and a "pig" if she orders fries instead of salad, or eats her whole sandwich instead of just half (GASP!!). I let it slide at first but I just hit a breaking point. I'm sure what I said wasn't eloquent, but I just said "you HAVE to stop talking about yourself and food like that. You're allowed to eat what you want. And there's nothing wrong with being fat, even if you were." Idk what impact it made, but I just couldn't not say anything.
My mother in law is deeply routed in diet culture and makes comments all the time only about herself. I haven’t found the mental energy to challenge it, my boundary is just changing the subject or suddenly needing to use the bathroom. I have compassion for her because her issues stem from some pretty severe body shaming from her own mother who has since passed, but as an in-law I struggle with being personally committed to helping her to heal those wounds. With my own mom I’m able to be more direct and straightforward when she makes comments about her and other peoples bodies.
Ugh, yeah, my in-laws in particular tend to comment about people's weight (gain or loss) or size, or say that they're not eating more than X amount b/c weight reasons, and yet they and my mom (my whole family) loves good food and appreciates food. They don't use the good/evil terminology, which I think I would find easier to say something about. I am not confrontational about their comments about their own food choices, but I get to reinforce my kids' choices.
I am still fairly proud of this past summer's in-law visit, where as part of a belated birthday celebration, my MIL made a cake with each of my kids. So, naturally, when it was cake-eating time, the 6-year-old asked for a piece of each. I was going to have a piece of each, too, and I don't want to be a Treat Hypocrite, so she got a piece of each, and I said it was fine to the grandparents and great-aunt being all "are you *sure*? that's a *lot* of cake." The kiddo ate all of her pink cake (which she'd picked) and only a small amount of the chocolate cake her brother had picked, and she stopped eating cake when she was full of cake and didn't want more. So I counted that as a win.
I am team, "Nah, I'm not going to respond." Not because I don't want to, but because I'm not going to convert anyone with a preachy comment, especially older relatives.
I'd be ROYALLY gaslit for saying something like, "This is making me uncomfortable."
One of my close family members has spent literally decades now in the binge/restrict cycle, weight cycling and doing weird diets, and putting themselves down when they're overweight. I am trying to get to a place where I feel more bad for this person instead of angry at them -- but it's SO HARD because I have a few dear, dear friends who have battled severe eating disorders.
I try to remember that diet talk is not something people do because they are trying to make *me* uncomfortable or because they are insanely stupid (that's my ego talking), but because they've been conditioned to view food and bodies this way, and culture is hard to undo.
I still utterly hate it, though. I don't think my family is going to change, and if someone's going to enlighten them, I just don't think it gets to be me.
My immediate family knows how deep into this work I am, so the comments are minimal. But I would say that most of them are still really stuck in the "health as a moral barometer" and "health as an absolute good" and what they mean by health is "diet culture without the word diet".
I have begun pushing back on this conception of health and all the exercise/food stuff that comes with it, but only with certain members of the family. My sister and her husband, and my mom are more receptive to this kind of information, for instance, while I simply will not go there with my dad and his wife.
Generally, I try to say things like, "What definition of health are you using?" or "If I do everything you say, will I be guaranteed not to die young?" or "What does it mean if I can never achieve the health goals you think are realistic?" or even, "What if I don't want the pursuit of health to take over my life?" and responses are mixed.
I do realize how lucky I am that most of my family just doesn't say things like, "Oh I'm being bad eating this cake." or "You look great! Have you lost weight?" But I've been doing anti-diet work for so long now that they just KNOW not to. I'm glad they respect that boundary.
Oh boy. I've been taking this on more directly with my mom, but I really have to choose my moments, because her life and her thinking is so structured around what she is or isn't eating at any given moment that it would absolutely destroy our relationship if I refused to let her engage in it at all, and she needs me.
So when she says something as direct as "I shouldn't eat brownies anyway, they're evil," I say, as calmly as I can, "mom, can we not refer to foods as evil?" And as we were making plans for Christmas last year, I said we were tentatively planning on focusing more on snacks and appetizers, like an afternoon of grazing, before a dinner that was less elaborate than my in-laws had traditionally done, and when she said "But when you have food out all day, you end up eating more" (generic you, not aimed at me), I responded "nobody worries about eating too much on Christmas." Interestingly, this year we have the same plan and she seems ok with it, even though last year she did bemoan how much she had eaten.
Maybe the biggest move I've made was recently when she was talking about how much trouble she was having focusing and getting things done, I said, "how much have you eaten? because I know when I am hungry, my executive function suffers, and what you're describing sounds like my state of mind when I'm too hungry." She answered that she had eaten what she always eats, and I refrained from saying "well...that might be the problem." (Yet over Thanksgiving when I was talking to her about my eating-disordered brother-in-law, I cited his obsessive tracking of what he eats as a sign of a problem and she agreed with me. And again, I didn't say "sound like anyone else you know?" Although to be fair to her I do think his problem is more serious than hers.)
With my parents (though mostly mom) I have what I call disengage / deflect / demur strategy. Disengage is just leaving the conversation altogether or changing the subject.
Deflect means that if it's "Oh I wouldn't make that apple cake it's so high calorie, you can make baked apples instead" just going on like it wasn't said at all "this recipe looks so great, I bet the sour cream makes it really moist."
Demur is just responding with "huh" or "hmm" when I don't want to say anything but not responding at all would be awkward. Or agreeing with the facts and not the judgment. We had gone to the apple orchard and they gave us a sheet with some recipes on it. Me: "Some of these look really good." Mom "that cake is so fattening it has a cup and a half of oil!" Me: "That is a lot of oil. It must make a pretty big cake."
I also tried to model in how I talk about food, being very factual about why I'm choosing to stop eating, for example. "Oh wow this is a huge portion and very filling, I'm going to bring the rest home for lunch tomorrow." Or "this is so good and I'm having a hungry day so I think I'll get seconds." Just naming the fact that I'm practicing intuitive eating and making no judgment about being "good" or "bad" when I eat less or more at any particular time.
My current favorite (and it works for so many things) is “hmmm that’s a weird thing to say!” and then just WALK AWAY. As a triple Capricorn I am very much *not* a people pleaser. My small children generally doing wild things helps to because I always have a reason to run off in a ploy to save someone from needing (more) stitches.
Father in law was talking about his low carb diet over Thanksgiving and I just screamed, the top of my lungs, “We don’t talk about diets!” I’m not a yeller, so that shut him up. Not sure what I would have done if my six year old daughter was in the room, but it felt good to set a clear boundary, since trying to educate hasn’t worked with him.
Such a a timely thread. I just spent my last therapy session preparing for my parents’ first Christmas visit to our family in many years. There are layers to our challenges but body talk and comments about bodies are a big way my mom tries to connect with me. I’m closely monitoring my tween’s current dietary rules for himself for increasing restriction, and with the last visit for with my parents I shared this info with them, letting them know that we WILL not be assigning value to foods and that all food is good food. I will use the “there is no morality to food” statement from above, as well.
The boundary will need to be expressed again and again during their visit, and I will need to remind many times that we won’t be commenting on folks’ bodies. I appreciate the line “is that the most important thing about them?” As well.
Mostly expressing thanks for others’ good ideas in this thread and solidarity that this is an ongoing discussion and work.
I used to just ignore or roll my eyes, but since I had my daughter--especially because she is a girl, but I think this would be true if I had had a boy too--I've become much more vocal. My MIL is totally down the diet rabbit hole, despite having a daughter who almost died from anorexia, and it just fills me with rage. (She also happens to be tiny, but to her, apparently, not being tiny is the worst thing ever. It's actually so sad.)
So every time she comments, "I won't eat that, I should be good," or, "I'm being so bad by eating this dessert," or, "Rachel's being good [because I say I don't want something because I'm full or whatever], I should be like her," I now say, "there is no morality to food. There is no good or bad. Please don't talk that way in front of me or [daughter's name.]" Same script every time. I'm not sure it makes a difference, but her daughters both back me up and tell me how much they appreciate it.
I assume I will become more aggressive as my kid gets older and understands more, if she keeps doing it (which she probably will, sadly), but for now, I am very committed to setting the baseline expectation.
My dad is also super fat-phobic, but I've called him out more aggressively (wow, dad, that was super fatphobic) and he has gotten way better at what he says in front of my sisters and me.
Hmmm, I mean my current plan is to go absolutely nuclear, so I guess I could be open to other ideas. I'm going home for the first time in years this Christmas, and I've built myself a nice little life where I basically never encounter diet culture from loved ones, and I am prepared to burn it all to the ground if anyone says bullshit about eating or bodies in front of my kids.
I do have full backup, though, in that my sister and her husband and my husband will all have my back, and I have gone no contact recently enough that it's still on the table, and I just.....I don't care anymore. I'm so tired.
For people with whom I don't have a long history of horrible body shaming, though, I usually just make a really awkward face and say, "uhhhhh" before changing the subject, like I respond as I would if they said something sort of rude or uncouth and I was trying to smooth over it.
I like to take the approach of seeming to share a new and surprising piece of information with the fat-phobic-commenter. Like- "I JUST read the more interesting thing the other day- did you know that weight is not even a good metric of health? Bananas right? It's totally the opposite of everything else I've ever heard!" I honestly think I lot of people have never heard these ideas before, or at least not often enough for them to feel plausible amidst the backdrop of all the fat phobic information out there. I try to remember that I used to buy into the toxic body stuff too, and it wasn't all that long ago! And if I had heard little nuggets of HAES or body neutral wisdom over a family dinner, in a way that felt light and interesting, maybe it would have normalized these ideas for me sooner.
In my experience with my loved ones, my mom in particular, the statements about diets are usually passive aggressive because I’ve set hard boundaries with her and my immediate family about talking about bodies in general.
Her go-to robotic instinct is to look me up and down (or anyone) and make a comment about their body, appearance, diet etc. My automatic response is, “What effect does that have on them as a human? Does it measure their worth? Their status? Do you think that’s the most important thing to know about them?” Mom gets defensive and tries to explain her comment, but it’s like beating a dead horse. She has to hear it over and over to unlearn it.
It usually feels as if I’m teaching my four year old daughter about different shapes, sizes, and colors of bodies around us. One is not better than the other, we’re just different.
And how fucking boring would this world be if we were all the same?
With my mom, who’s the main source of these comments but also extremely liberal politically, I have said something like, “have you read about how diet culture is really racist?” I know this won’t work for everyone, but my mom is interested in justice work, and it’s intrigued her enough to think first.
Depending on who is doing the talking, I will often just literally walk away from the conversation. I've been in a yoga class where the instructor said something body shame-y, and I rolled up my mat and left in the middle of class. If my kids are present, I will say "I don't believe in diets" or "UGH. That's diet culture talking" or something of that nature.
On the question of when to hold them v. when to fold them... for me it just depends entirely on context and also the severity of the comments. For example, I have one thin friend who constantly calls herself a "fatass" and a "pig" if she orders fries instead of salad, or eats her whole sandwich instead of just half (GASP!!). I let it slide at first but I just hit a breaking point. I'm sure what I said wasn't eloquent, but I just said "you HAVE to stop talking about yourself and food like that. You're allowed to eat what you want. And there's nothing wrong with being fat, even if you were." Idk what impact it made, but I just couldn't not say anything.
My mother in law is deeply routed in diet culture and makes comments all the time only about herself. I haven’t found the mental energy to challenge it, my boundary is just changing the subject or suddenly needing to use the bathroom. I have compassion for her because her issues stem from some pretty severe body shaming from her own mother who has since passed, but as an in-law I struggle with being personally committed to helping her to heal those wounds. With my own mom I’m able to be more direct and straightforward when she makes comments about her and other peoples bodies.
Ugh, yeah, my in-laws in particular tend to comment about people's weight (gain or loss) or size, or say that they're not eating more than X amount b/c weight reasons, and yet they and my mom (my whole family) loves good food and appreciates food. They don't use the good/evil terminology, which I think I would find easier to say something about. I am not confrontational about their comments about their own food choices, but I get to reinforce my kids' choices.
I am still fairly proud of this past summer's in-law visit, where as part of a belated birthday celebration, my MIL made a cake with each of my kids. So, naturally, when it was cake-eating time, the 6-year-old asked for a piece of each. I was going to have a piece of each, too, and I don't want to be a Treat Hypocrite, so she got a piece of each, and I said it was fine to the grandparents and great-aunt being all "are you *sure*? that's a *lot* of cake." The kiddo ate all of her pink cake (which she'd picked) and only a small amount of the chocolate cake her brother had picked, and she stopped eating cake when she was full of cake and didn't want more. So I counted that as a win.
I am team, "Nah, I'm not going to respond." Not because I don't want to, but because I'm not going to convert anyone with a preachy comment, especially older relatives.
I'd be ROYALLY gaslit for saying something like, "This is making me uncomfortable."
One of my close family members has spent literally decades now in the binge/restrict cycle, weight cycling and doing weird diets, and putting themselves down when they're overweight. I am trying to get to a place where I feel more bad for this person instead of angry at them -- but it's SO HARD because I have a few dear, dear friends who have battled severe eating disorders.
I try to remember that diet talk is not something people do because they are trying to make *me* uncomfortable or because they are insanely stupid (that's my ego talking), but because they've been conditioned to view food and bodies this way, and culture is hard to undo.
I still utterly hate it, though. I don't think my family is going to change, and if someone's going to enlighten them, I just don't think it gets to be me.
My immediate family knows how deep into this work I am, so the comments are minimal. But I would say that most of them are still really stuck in the "health as a moral barometer" and "health as an absolute good" and what they mean by health is "diet culture without the word diet".
I have begun pushing back on this conception of health and all the exercise/food stuff that comes with it, but only with certain members of the family. My sister and her husband, and my mom are more receptive to this kind of information, for instance, while I simply will not go there with my dad and his wife.
Generally, I try to say things like, "What definition of health are you using?" or "If I do everything you say, will I be guaranteed not to die young?" or "What does it mean if I can never achieve the health goals you think are realistic?" or even, "What if I don't want the pursuit of health to take over my life?" and responses are mixed.
I do realize how lucky I am that most of my family just doesn't say things like, "Oh I'm being bad eating this cake." or "You look great! Have you lost weight?" But I've been doing anti-diet work for so long now that they just KNOW not to. I'm glad they respect that boundary.
Oh boy. I've been taking this on more directly with my mom, but I really have to choose my moments, because her life and her thinking is so structured around what she is or isn't eating at any given moment that it would absolutely destroy our relationship if I refused to let her engage in it at all, and she needs me.
So when she says something as direct as "I shouldn't eat brownies anyway, they're evil," I say, as calmly as I can, "mom, can we not refer to foods as evil?" And as we were making plans for Christmas last year, I said we were tentatively planning on focusing more on snacks and appetizers, like an afternoon of grazing, before a dinner that was less elaborate than my in-laws had traditionally done, and when she said "But when you have food out all day, you end up eating more" (generic you, not aimed at me), I responded "nobody worries about eating too much on Christmas." Interestingly, this year we have the same plan and she seems ok with it, even though last year she did bemoan how much she had eaten.
Maybe the biggest move I've made was recently when she was talking about how much trouble she was having focusing and getting things done, I said, "how much have you eaten? because I know when I am hungry, my executive function suffers, and what you're describing sounds like my state of mind when I'm too hungry." She answered that she had eaten what she always eats, and I refrained from saying "well...that might be the problem." (Yet over Thanksgiving when I was talking to her about my eating-disordered brother-in-law, I cited his obsessive tracking of what he eats as a sign of a problem and she agreed with me. And again, I didn't say "sound like anyone else you know?" Although to be fair to her I do think his problem is more serious than hers.)
With my parents (though mostly mom) I have what I call disengage / deflect / demur strategy. Disengage is just leaving the conversation altogether or changing the subject.
Deflect means that if it's "Oh I wouldn't make that apple cake it's so high calorie, you can make baked apples instead" just going on like it wasn't said at all "this recipe looks so great, I bet the sour cream makes it really moist."
Demur is just responding with "huh" or "hmm" when I don't want to say anything but not responding at all would be awkward. Or agreeing with the facts and not the judgment. We had gone to the apple orchard and they gave us a sheet with some recipes on it. Me: "Some of these look really good." Mom "that cake is so fattening it has a cup and a half of oil!" Me: "That is a lot of oil. It must make a pretty big cake."
I also tried to model in how I talk about food, being very factual about why I'm choosing to stop eating, for example. "Oh wow this is a huge portion and very filling, I'm going to bring the rest home for lunch tomorrow." Or "this is so good and I'm having a hungry day so I think I'll get seconds." Just naming the fact that I'm practicing intuitive eating and making no judgment about being "good" or "bad" when I eat less or more at any particular time.
My current favorite (and it works for so many things) is “hmmm that’s a weird thing to say!” and then just WALK AWAY. As a triple Capricorn I am very much *not* a people pleaser. My small children generally doing wild things helps to because I always have a reason to run off in a ploy to save someone from needing (more) stitches.
Father in law was talking about his low carb diet over Thanksgiving and I just screamed, the top of my lungs, “We don’t talk about diets!” I’m not a yeller, so that shut him up. Not sure what I would have done if my six year old daughter was in the room, but it felt good to set a clear boundary, since trying to educate hasn’t worked with him.
Such a a timely thread. I just spent my last therapy session preparing for my parents’ first Christmas visit to our family in many years. There are layers to our challenges but body talk and comments about bodies are a big way my mom tries to connect with me. I’m closely monitoring my tween’s current dietary rules for himself for increasing restriction, and with the last visit for with my parents I shared this info with them, letting them know that we WILL not be assigning value to foods and that all food is good food. I will use the “there is no morality to food” statement from above, as well.
The boundary will need to be expressed again and again during their visit, and I will need to remind many times that we won’t be commenting on folks’ bodies. I appreciate the line “is that the most important thing about them?” As well.
Mostly expressing thanks for others’ good ideas in this thread and solidarity that this is an ongoing discussion and work.