Q: I want to stop dieting, but I'm torn because I also want to lose weight. I'm hoping to find some peace between the two. I'm a mom and my daughter is 9 years old and I'm getting kind of concerned that all the dieting that I've been doing for most of her life is not very good for her. How can I help her to change the negative feelings that she's developed about food and her body?
A: I understand your desire to want to lose weight, but it's important to know that habits that have been practiced over a long period, won't disappear overnight. Losing weight without dieting is a process. You can't expect the same results that you may have gotten on your best diet. Changing your behavior and attitude toward food will take some time.
Speaking as a mother who also realized that my disordered relationship with food was also costing my daughter her self esteem, I realized the importance of going against tradition and putting the power of control back in her hands. Despite her doctor's admonitions to put her on a diet, I chose the opposite. What she needed was to know that she could trust herself around the foods that she now felt compelled to eat. My recommendation is to take your daughter aside and share with her honestly the fact that you realize that your struggles with food have led her to question her own relationship with food and her body, fearing that she can't trust herself to stop eating.
Suggest to her to have a goal in mind at the start of each day to only eat when she's hungry and to refuse food every other time. She can eat anything she wants to at any time as long as she's hungry. She'll start to notice that she's getting very picky about what she wants to eat. On the days when she eats more than she intended to, remind her that we all fall in pursuit of learning how to walk and to be gentle with herself as she learns this new process of eating like a naturally slim person.
At first when I encouraged my daughter, Cara to stop dieting and eat what she wanted and listen to her body, I think she probably tested us both by eating chocolate and other sweet treats often throughout the day. It seemed that there were a good couple of weeks when she would 'crave' chocolate cake for breakfast or Reese's peanut butter cups for dinner, watching my face like a hawk looking for a reaction response. My thought is that that this was her way of saying, "Are you sure you really trust me to make my own decisions about what I can eat? Then when I caught onto what she was doing, I stopped making faces and trying to control her decisions, and backed off and dealt with my own judgments about what she should be eating, the quality of her choices completely changed their character, moving toward a varied combination of foods that only included moderate amounts of chocolate.
I can tell you that you are your daughter's best role model. As you begin learning new techniques and strategies for thinking about eating, food, and your body, by watching and observing you, your daughter is going to pick it up vicariously. Children are just like little sponges picking up the most subtle information about our thoughts and values without our ever having to utter a single word.
Instead of you saying, "Okay, this what you need to do, where you might encounter some mad amounts of resistance, "Mom, please you're not going to tell me this."
As she starts to see you act in a different way, becoming more at ease with and accepting of your own body, relaxing more around food, being less judgmental of your slip ups, feeling safer around the foods you used to consider temptation, she's going to want to get in on the goods. Feeling good is our body's natural state, and she's going to be encouraged to re-evaluate her own feelings and thoughts about her relationship with food and her body when she sees you feeling good about yourself because that teaches her that she can also feel good about herself and comfortable in her body. And who doesn't want that?
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