I’m 11 years old, eavesdropping on my mom and my aunt from the backseat. Sometimes, they forget I’m there and say something exciting. Now, though, they’re talking about diets — SlimFast, cabbage soup, the time my aunt ate only carrots until her skin turned orange. They’re intense and animated as they compare what diets they’ve tried, what they plan to try, and most importantly, why it is essential that they lose weight. At that moment, my pre-teen self had a realization: I would be on a diet for the rest of my life.
I wasn’t wrong. My pediatrician had recently ordered my mother to take me to WeightWatchers. So once a week, we traipsed to a church basement where we got weighed and sat in a circle of folding chairs with adults who carried a bottle of fat-free salad dressing in their purses. It was there that I learned that one banana is actually two servings and that dieting is a mother-daughter activity.
Learning about the importance of dieting as a kid ingrained it in me for the rest of my life. I’m not saying this to blame any one person. My mother and my pediatrician were doing what they thought was best.
WeightWatchers can go to hell, though. After taking my money on and off for over 30 years, in 2023, their CEO made a statement that their program was ineffective for about half its members and they were pivoting to prescribing weight loss drugs like Ozempic. It turns out you can’t willpower yourself thin after all. (I’m not going to discuss the complicated business of weight loss medication here, but I’ll add that the CEO was later fired and WeightWatchers is on the verge of bankruptcy.)
Having my own daughter forced me to re-examine the messages I received and think about what I want to pass along. She’s a teenager now, and I try to be neutral about weight and not criticize anyone’s body, especially my own. I keep ice cream in the freezer and replenish the snacks in the pantry.
My friend Megan tells me that she only got compliments from her mother for looking skinny. Her daughters, now six and nine, are becoming aware of their bodies.
“It feels almost impossible to turn off that judgmental voice in my head,” Megan said, “But as I get older, my body changes. My need to promote self-confidence in my girls — to teach them to love their bodies — helps me to keep my own judgmental thoughts in check.”
I like to think that things are better for Gen Z. My daughter eats a whole banana without a second thought. I grew up with “heroin chic” glamorizing being as skinny as drug addicts. While my daughter’s generation is bombarded with beauty ideals on social media, there are also lots of fashion and fitness influencers with different-sized bodies and acceptance that thin doesn’t always equal healthy.
My friend Emily is a professional fitness instructor whose mother constantly dieted. She wants her daughter to have “a much wider definition of what a healthy body looks like. Bodies change over time, and all look different at baseline.”
My mother recently looked back at her diary from the 1980s. She was shocked that almost all the entries were about how angry she was at herself that she couldn’t control her appetite and lose those last five pounds. At the time she was getting a PhD in psychology from Columbia University and raising two children. But her accomplishments didn’t matter to her inner voice.
I don’t want our children to look back on their lives and realize they weren’t present because they were trapped in a never-ending battle with their bodies. I want them to enjoy movement and food. And I want them to always eat the whole banana.
Jessica Barnard writes about Gen X for The Belmont Voice. She’s a program manager at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.