perplexedhedgehog:

ok2befat:

thedilfbrigade:

ok2befat:

thedilfbrigade:

alithompson:

the-philosophers-bone:

madamethursday:

ok2befat:

Thin people don’t get to dictate what is and isn’t fatphobic abuse. 

I hate that phrase “putting [someone] on a diet”. Diet culture and fat hate have this way of making abuse sound good parenting.

It puts so much distance between the words and the reality of what you’re doing when you “put” a kid on a diet.

It pushes away from the very active things that are done to the child by the parent. You don’t put a kid on a diet like you put them on a bus. 

A diet is something you do to your kid. Trust me, I had it done to me. I know.

It’s regimented starvation intended to, at all costs, make your kid’s body pleasing to you. It’s never about health. Otherwise you’d be super concerned about the effects of deprivation on a body that’s still growing. Not to mention the effects of the message it sends to a mind and a self that’s still becoming.

Like I always say: if you do this to your kid? Start saving up for the therapy bills now. I’m not being facetious. Start putting aside money for the help your child will need to recover from what you did to them.

ok as the sister of a girl who had to go on a diet as a baby because she was a MORBIDLY OBESE BABY… this is some bullshit.

Yes, fat phobia is a thing. But so is over feeding your kid, or feeding them only total crap. My family grew up in rural NC – food desert, fast food central. YES, my sister NEEDED to be put on a diet. It stopped her from being a MORBIDLY OBESE CHILD. Parents are responsible for their kids’ health, and helping them to learn to exercise and eat healthy is part of that. For some kids and parents and families, they have to learn those habits together. And for many kids, they respond well to routine and normalcy – all of which a diet instills.

My sister lost weight and did not feel stigmatized by her diet. She learned to eat healthier and became more mindful of her food. She still struggles with weight, but is no longer morbidly obese. And she’s not an outlier. Diets help kids become healthy, and stay healthy. Eating habits learned early become your life’s eating habits. I wish someone had taught me to eat healthier and more portion controlled as a kid – it would make managing my health easier as an adult.

Like y’all are not distinguishing things that are good for the health of a child, a family and communities from your own personal experiences of shitty parents. Diets are not abuse. A good diet and, at times, regimented dieting are good for your health and for a child who struggles with weight. Dieting does not equal shitting on your kid for being fat or instilling shitty body image in them.

TL;DR: although abusive parenting can manifest through being over controlling of food, putting children with weight issues on diets is NOT abuse. Helping your kids control their weight and learn to eat healthily (which diets can kick start) is a way to guarantee your kids have better health and life outcomes than you necessarily had.

You’re making a hell of a lot of assumptions about how your sister feels about things. 

I wonder what she would say about being referred to as “morbidly obese” as a baby. Wow, that is amazingly fucked up. 

I feel sorry for her, I really do. 

I always feel really bad for people whose family members use them as pawns to win an argument with an internet stranger. It’s disrespectful and I bet she would feel pretty bad about it. 

I wonder if you’ve ever thought of that, or if you think your sister’s body belongs to you to use as you please. I mean, she’s not a “normal” person is she? 

Not to you. 

The thing that people don’t realize is that encouraging good eating habits and fostering a love of activity and sport is not “putting your kid on a diet.” There’s nothing wrong with teaching your kids about food and health and feeding them healthy, nourishing foods in reasonable potions.

But “Putting your kid on a diet” doesn’t teach a child health. It teaches your child shame, it fosters an attitude of never being good enough, it shows them that they will never be the same as their “normal” siblings because the rules are different for them. It sets them up to yoyo diet for the rest of their life, have disordered eating patterns, and need therapy well into adulthood.

I was a fat kid. I was put on diets, given books for fat teens, given different rules to my siblings. When I was sixteen I wrote a prose poem at fat camp about how I would never be skinny enough to make my mother happy. I have put on weight my entire life because I was never able to foster a healthy relationship with food and my body.

Abuse is a big word to throw around. It’s not fair to say all parents are abusing their children by doing this – my mom genuinely wanted the best for me. She just had an attitude that was twisted by society and thought that teaching me about dieting was going to serve me well, but it ended up destroying my confidence and caused me to have a toxic relationship with food that has followed me my whole life.

Tldr: don’t put your kids on diets. Foster a love of sport and activity. teach them to love healthy, wholesome food. Help them take ownership of their bodies and forge habits that help instead of hurt. Dieting isn’t the answer for adults, and definitely isn’t the answer for children.

You say abuse is a big word to throw around, but then describe life altering negative changes that were brought on by being subjected to shaming and denial as a child.

I think abuse is an appropriate word for that in a general sense, but you don’t have to take it on if you don’t want to. 

I think the worst thing diet culture does is convince loving parents to emotionally abuse their kids, and give abusive parents free license to abuse their fat children in the name of “health”.

Fat children are harmed by trusted adults– harm that can last a lifetime– and told that harm is love. 

Love shouldn’t hurt. It shouldn’t feel like shame. 

It is a sickness. It has to stop. 

i agree that diet culture is incredibly harmful, but I will never agree with you that my parent’s were abusive. misguided definitely. but they did their best. they also were never fat growing up and didn’t know how it would impact me. what i meant was, i don’t think parents are inherently to blame for this damage – just that they are complicit in the harm that diet culture and societal pressure is doing to children. 

ideally all parents would foster self love, encourage healthy behaviours, and support their kids with all their problems, but the reality is that parents are just as fucked up as all of us, and they project their insecurities on their children. what we need is an attitude shift by society, not to blame good parents doing their best. and DEFINITELY not to put kids on diets.

(i am not defending actually shitty & abusive parents. they need to rot in hell) 

I’m not asking you or anyone to shun their parents or label them in any way that makes you uncomfortable.

But adults have a responsibility to not hurt children. 

And I think fat activism has a responsibility to make the world a safer place for fat children, so they don’t have to endure what we did. So they can grow up less broken that we did. 

We can use our adult voices to explain how this affected us as children. 

I feel an obligation to do that.

Because we are the adults now. And someone has to break the cycle. 

Someone at least has to try.

As someone who wasn’t a fat kid, but was raised by a mother with an ED, I’d like to throw in a couple words here. I’ve heard a lot of people say something that really validated my own experience – “It was still abuse even if they didn’t intend to be abusive.”

I’m sure there are a lot of abusive people who do construct their abuse to deliberately hurt the people around them, strategically keeping them trapped in a sick system. There are also people who do fucked-up and abusive things, not because they woke up that morning thinking “how can I be a fucked-up, shitty person today?” but because they have an instilled system of harmful beliefs and behavior. And you know what? The result is the same – the people around them are still caught in that damaging system.

My mother deeply loved, and does love, my brother and I. And we know that. We still talk about being raised under her strict and often frenetic bursts of dieting, projecting, restricting, and verbal abuse as she tried to keep us from eating. She honestly thought she was doing the right thing and just wasn’t doing it well enough, because society teaches parents that it’s healthy to make your child be thin at any cost.

I’m not saying there is no medical reason a child might need a certain diet, but the “thinner, thinner, thinner” societal mentality IS inherently abusive – and any parent who buys into it IS enforcing a system of abuse, intentionally or not.