The Grandparents Are Not OK
How to think about Boomer fatphobia—and our own.
Every time Rachel left the house as a teenager—to go to a friend’s house, to go to the mall—her mother would call out, “Be careful! Don’t eat anything!”
And most of the time, Rachel wouldn’t. She’d been writing out her own diets since she was five years old, sometimes under her mother’s supervision and sometimes in an effort to impress her mom, to show just how good she could be. Dieting was how Rachel (who has asked me to change her name) and her mom bonded. Sometimes it felt like the only way they bonded. And so together they tried medically supervised diets, they tried Weight Watchers, they tried a pizza diet. By 1989, the summer Rachel turned 14, her mom had started working for Nutrisystem, so Rachel tried that one too, for three months. She lost a bunch of weight, and celebrated the night before her birthday by eating an entire box of Teddy Grahams in secret.
The Nutrisystem diet didn’t last; Rachel re-gained the weight and now identifies as a fat adult who practices intuitive eating and works towards body peace, and towards silencing her mother’s voice in her head. When Rachel tells me about her mom now, her tone is mostly the kind of patient exasperation I imagine her perfecting even during her teenage years, slamming her way out of the house, away from the reminder to not eat. It’s the tone of someone who has recognized all the ways her mom’s belief system no longer feels true for her, but also knows that this is not a fight she can ever hope to win.
But Rachel becomes more emotional when she tells me how her mom talks about food and bodies now, to Rachel’s three kids. “If she sees me serve them strawberries, she’ll say, ‘that’s a good choice,’” says Rachel. “When we go to a restaurant, there is always a whole conversation about how she thinks the portions are so big, and she’s taking most of hers home to freeze.” And Rachel worries especially about how her mother talks to her 10-year-old Josie, who has recently come out as non-binary. Once, when Josie was five, Rachel’s mom spent an entire lunch explaining why she’d stopped eating carbs. “She was talking about herself, but it was clearly intended for Josie’s benefit. They are a big kid and they’ve struggled with it,” says Rachel. “And of course, my mother says to me, ‘well it’s because she’s obese, Rach! She’d be so much happier if she were slimmer!’”
This kind of experience is why the second-most common question I am asked (after this one) is: How do I get my parents to stop talking about their diet in front of my child?