Giving your daughter a good relationship with food when you have a bad one?

[Sotired22]

This is something on my mind at the moment… I’ll caveat by saying that I have a great mum who I love very much but she has given me massive body issues because she is borderline obsessed with being thin. Growing up I remember her talking about it a lot and obsessing over her weight. She was very slim but constantly trying to lose a few pounds (she liked to stay under 8.5 stone!!!) and spoke negatively about her perfectly good figure all the time. She also drilled into me that men don’t like overweight women (in her eyes anything above a size 12) and she ate like a bird and inadvertently made me feel guilty for eating more than her / eating chocolate, cake etc.

I don’t agree with her views (I think she’s just perpetuating what she was told growing up) yet I can’t stop her words going round in my head. I binge eat ‘naughty’ foods like biscuits cake etc I think because they were so restricted growing up (I remember a very strict 2 biscuit rule) and I internally berate myself all the time. I worry about my weight a lot and I always want to be thinner to get my mums approval, even though I know logically that it’s ridiculous.

Anyway, after that waffle my point is… how do I make sure I don’t pass this nonsense on to my daughters? I know I won’t pass a lot of it on because I won’t talk or obsess about weight in front of them but I don’t know how to give them a positive relationship with food because I don’t have one and it wasn’t modelled to me. One of my dd’s is very picky with eating which I was as a child too and I remember it being a big negative thing in my house that I was a ‘bad eater’ and it’s still talked about now. It made me feel like I was a massive nuisance and sometimes I worry I’m giving my dd the same complex.

This is very long and I feel like I’m just spilling my thoughts out now but does anyone have the same worries? How do you navigate it? Thanks for reading if you’ve got this far!

It's tough OP and I'm not sure I'm doing an amazing job at this, and also you can't completely control what she picks up from the outside world, but...

• don't talk about weight unless she specifically asks and then try and be unemotional and factual in your response
• talk about food in terms of nutrition - don't talk about good food and bad food, but about variety and balance
• eat meals together and encourage her to try everything on her plate but don't nag her to eat every mouthful. Don't use desert as a bribe.
• don't talk negatively about yourself or your own figure - and try and ask the same from female figures in her life (I had to have a word with my mum who described herself as ugly and fat in from of DD)
• be relaxed about your body in front of her - walk around naked, don't flinch if she walks in while you're getting dressed etc
• talk openly about bodies and physical health

They pick up so many messages from the outside world I don't think it's possible to do a perfect job at this but hopefully it's possible to lay a good foundation.

Aside from the food I would be addressing the 'men don't like overweight women'. She should be wanting to be a healthy weight for herself not for some man. Also healthy weight doesn't mean healthy, does she exercise?

I don’t plan on addressing any of this with my mum to be honest, she’s in her 60’s and I don’t think she’ll change her views now! It’s more about how I can make sure I encourage a healthy body image for my dd’s!

@CoverYourselfInChocolateGlory thank you, I already do all of these things so hopefully I’m on the right track! I just worry about it as I haven’t had a good attitude towards food and body image modelled to me, I feel like it’s unknown territory and I still think negatively about my own body and eating etc so I worry it’s going to be impossible for me to not pass any issues on….

I just let go of it tbh. I don’t talk about how I look in front of DD. I’m starting to work on my weight again but we don’t do negative self talk and we never ever make comments about anyone else’s appearance either (but neither of us do that anyway) DH had to pull me up a couple of times on it.

Foods I want to encourage I tend to call “big strong”. So do you want some “big strong yoghurt”. do you want some “big strong chicken”. I don’t praise or admonish for eating anything or how much she has eaten. Her gymnastics classes are great, they always talk about being strong, she gets get called a strong girl a lot and I think thats helpful. Her focus is on what her body can do not how it looks.

I’ve never made a fuss about cakes etc, she has some on the weekends with her dad, it’s fine. We don’t really keep sugary snacks in the house, no reason for that really, DH and I tend to just buy when we want one (I’m very fat btw so it’s not some sort of healthy habit)

She’s a veg refuser atm so I keep offering but not pushing it, she’ll come around in her own time I think.

I think the big thing is not to put a moral value on food, no good food bad food. Just food that helps your bones grow etc.

IT’s so difficult when you have a disordered relationship with food yourself, you have to expend energy and effort into not passing that along and basically ignore your training as it were.

I’ve always had a good, healthy relationship with food and I’m sure it’s partly down to my mum who basically didn’t mention it at all growing up! We just ate our food, nothing was banned/thought to be unhealthy, but we always had nice proper meals & pudding etc. i don’t remember there ever being conversations about being fat, thin, whatever. My mum never made a big deal out of it other than if we were off doing some big exercise session (eg D of E expedition) she would make sure we had plenty of food & had a good breakfast etc.
it worked for me - always been a size 8/10 without thinking about it, and now in my late 40s. I just don’t think about food other than to eat it. I think I’ve done the same with my dc - two teenagers who are very slim but eat everything - but they stop eating when they’re full, hardly ever discuss weight, & I’ve never owned a set of scales so no idea what any of us weigh. Making it a non-issue is the way forward! Probably easier said than done but it certainly worked in my family.

Thank you this is helpful…. It sounds ridiculous but when you’ve grown up with lots of focus on weight and ‘bad’ foods it’s hard to know what is a more ‘normal’ way to approach things.

I agree with your mum. 2 biscuits at a time is normal. And a size 12 and below is generally a healthy weight.
min our house we have DH - who could eat anything he wanted to until 5 years ago - think packets of biscuits, puddings etc.
DD takes after him.
dS2 is coeliac.
DS1 and I have to be careful about what we eat or we get fat.

I grew up w a mum who never had issues w food and I don’t have issues w food or body image but my DD 20 has, she’s stick thin, verging on being dangerously underweight, she just doesn’t eat enough and says she doesn’t have an appetite. She eats junk, she eats fruit n veg but not so much carbs. Honestly I don’t know why…. My son was in hospital a lot as a baby and had to have a tracheostomy for a while and is autistic and now eats more than DD, but I do wonder if DD problems stem from when I struggled to feed my DS he was so restricted on what he would eat when he was little, my DS is 2 yrs younger, so she witnessed it all. My advice would be lots of variety and inclusion on cooking and trying different foods, but I guess what I’m getting at is that sometimes it’s just the way some ppl are?! Certainly I gave DD all sorts, she helped w cooking and will try stuff but has developed a bit of a negative attitude to food despite all that. I wouldn’t say she has a negative body image tho, it’s all about the food. I have conversations w my DD all the time about her diet as I don’t want her to feel she needs to hide that she hasn’t eaten, it breaks my heart, but in every other way she is doing ok, she just doesn’t enjoy or want to eat.