The fear you feel for your daughter is totally natural, so I hope you don’t guilt yourself over it. You just want to protect her. Luckily, there are ways of doing that without foisting a lot of weight-related baggage on her.

Thank you for your answer, it was very good. :) I have to just relax and make it not a big deal.. I know that…

I’m a mom who found FA during my first maternity leave, and I now have two beautiful daughters. They are why I have to get my head on straight around food and body issues– they WILL NOT learn from me that any body (even mine!) is unacceptable.

Its hard work to re-frame the clean-your-plate, 5-more-bites relationship with food that I was raised with.

Thanks for this- I’m looking forward to reading more here- a chance to “eddy out” while swimming against the current.

Am looking forward to reading more entries here – you’ve made a fantastic start!

Actually, the advice I gave comes almost directly from Ellyn Satter, who is a “non-fat nutritionist.” I would recommend you read her books “How to Get Your Kid to Eat…But Not Too Much” and “Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family” for more information. She also says that no one should feel obligated to serve dessert if it simply doesn’t interest them. And I agree with that. But the reason I recommended serving dessert here is because AIMHF specifically mentioned that her daughter loves dessert.

Personally, I don’t eat dessert twice a day, or even every day. It was just an idea — the point being that if a child is exposed to something frequently, and it’s presented as a normal part of everyday life, it loses some of its mystique and its “forbidden” appeal.

Ellyn Satter suggests, and so do I, that many desserts include fruit, so that dessert can make a more balanced nutritional contribution to the overall diet. But, even so, there’s room in everyone’s diet for cake and ice cream and other treats.

In fact, I prefer my ice cream with fresh fruit. I think it strikes the perfect balance.

Otherwise, my knowledge, experience and education in nutrition have far more bearing on the advice I give than my weight. And, actually, I think I weigh closer to 260 than 250. Geesh.

This poor woman worries that her daughter has inherited her genetic tendency to be fat, so asks advice from a 250 pound nutritionist, who then advises her to feed her daughter dessert every day. Or even twice a day!?!

Then the mother, and everyone else, thanks the fat nutritionist for her wisdom. Something does *not* make sense here.

I can’t help wondering what advice the mother would have received if she’d asked a non-fat nutritionist, but something tells me it wouldn’t be along the lines of “feed your daughter dessert every day, or – heck – even twice a day!

It’s incredible the amount of people, women in particular, who have an urge to control their daughter’s weight (and it’s always daughters, strangely, never sons) in order for their daughters to be popular, successful, etc. It’s a bizarre anti-feminist fat-hatred paired with motherly love and concern gone completely arse-up. I know because my own mother did this to me, sent me to Gloria Marshall at the tender age of 14 because I was ‘fat and unpopular’. She on the other hand hated her body and used cigarettes as a food replacement.

I wish my mother knew about HAES principles, perhaps I wouldn’t be the way I am today?

Thank you for your excellent blog, Michelle.

Best wishes to you — I know it’s rough. But you’re doing a great thing for yourself.

I’m also seeing a nutritionist. A good one, who believes in HAES, and is trying to help me learn how to eat intuitively again. At 25, and after 10+ years of diet mentality when it comes to food (those 50 lbs. were pretty killer for a middle schooler, though I luckily avoided the worst of the teasing), I’m having trouble with it. At the very least, I’m eating enough, and have started to be ok with leaving food on my plate if that means stopping when I’m no longer hungry.

And, if my kid were gay, I know I’d want the whole damn world to be gay, too. In fact, I’d be pretty okay with a big gay world right now.

At any rate, I think you’re doing fabulously with your daughter.

If you, or anyone else, has questions about feeding kids, Ellyn Satter’s website and books are the best places to go.

She is, to me, the absolute authority on all things related to child nutrition, and she’s very HAES-oriented and fat-friendly. In short, my hero.

Quoted for truth, Meems. And I’m sorry you feel like it’s a skill you no longer possess. That sucks. I hope my blog can help.

If my little girl at some point comes to the realization that she is gay, I know that I wouldn’t want her to be dealing with that hatred, but I also would want her to know how much I love her and want her to be happy and have healthy relationships and enjoy life and love herself, and I know I would join PFLAG and become the most annoyingly supportive parent of a gay child, and an even more vocal proponent of gay rights, gay acceptance, gay marriage and just a hugely gay world.
So, I suppose by participating in the fat acceptance movement and just being a radical fat acceptance human being, I am doing something similar. I can say, “I fought for you to have a better life” no matter what size she wears. I am hopefully growing a fat-positive human being, which I hope will pay off in either her own view of herself and/or her being an awesome friend and/or ally and/or partner.

Her issues on the couch will be something other than body image and food, I think.

I don’t want to scare AIMHF, but I was just like her daughter as a child, though my mother is actually not fat, my father is quite tall and lanky. All through elementary school, it looked as though I would be built just like him. I was tall and thin, too (75th percentile for height and 50th for weight). Then, at age 11, just as puberty hit, so did depression. I gained 50 lbs in 2 years. Under different circumstances, I might have kept growing, or I might not have gained as much weight as I did. But those circumstances didn’t happen.

The most important thing, from my personal experience, is to make sure she maintains the ability to listen to her body’s needs. That’s a skill I wish I still had.

People tend to make food a much, much bigger issue than it should be. We need more people like you talking about food as fuel rather than meals as minefields.