If you were a teen in the 90s did your mum spend a lot of time telling you that she was on a diet?

[Bartg]

Quoting her current weight. The weight she was at school. Whether she put in weight over the holidays or not. And also going on fad diets. Ryvitas, slim fasts etc.
And saying things to you about how you should watch your weight and whether or not clothes are slimming etc etc
this is what my mum did. And her weight was fine. Slim. Basically size 10 I would say.

i am just wondering how normal this was for that generation. It really messed me up and I feel sad for my teenage self

Yes! Constantly. In fact recently I found my diary from 2002 (when I was around 12) and there were lots of entries about how my mum keeps saying she's fat etc and how her bad moods about her weight were getting me down. She was and still is a size 8! it broke my heart reading it back. It definitely had a negative impact on my relationship with food growing up, I was always toying with diets, diet pills and very conscious of my weight. Luckily I educated myself and don't give dieting or weight loss a second thought now. I couldn't imagine talking or behaving like that around my own daughter.

I have to add to previous posts, my inlaws always talk about how "huge" the portions are that we serve, or how "stuffed" they are, or how they must apologise for "struggling so much".

It's so boring. I want to say "Weve served you a completely normal sized meal. But either way, I'm a size 8 and you weigh as much as a manatee, so presumably you polish off potions like this pretty regularly".

All the time. I remember the Cambridge diet was the thing. Grandma, aunts, mum. She first put me on a diet age about 8 or 9 then couldn't understand why had an eating disorder at 14 🙄

I also remember a posh friend at uni coming back from Christmas at home in first year and saying the first thing her dad had said when she got back was how fat she had become. She then went on to say in all seriousness that she was only allowed to shop in te fruit and veg section of tesco until summer term. She was horsey, athletic and absolutely normal sized.

No. She was quite big and saw this as a mark of her intelligence and superiority to those skinny women. When the school doctor said I needed to lose some weight (I was mortified) she said it was rubbish and I was fine.

Now I have an eating disorder.

Yes when my sister and I went to uni (my sister went before me) every term when we saw her again there would be an assessment as to if we had put in weight or not. I actually had eating disorder in my teens and I always felt my mum was kind of half concerned and half proud 😐

me and my friend were talking about this just this morning. Everything you said, our mums are still doing it now! Neither of them look any different from 30 years ago!It was constant, it made me paranoid despite being a healthy bmi all my life size 10/12, it’s made me guilty my whole life over eating “ ad” food. Apparently I was lucky as I didn’t have the “fat gene” but my sister was told repeatedly she was to diet, it’s really messed with her all her life she had to up dieted. So very unhealthy for us all.

I think there's truth in the getting a man for money mentality among some older generation and weight being part of that . I feel lucky that we were really encouraged to think independently at school. Just recently I had some nasty comments from a colleague and I had to work really hard on it but eventually the penny dropped that those comments are about their insecurities. The only person who gets to decide which thoughts take residence in your head is you. Harder when you are younger and the brain is still developing into your 20s.