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

For a lot of them, they honestly meant well - a woman’s weight was inversely proportional to her worth in their experience of the world. The slimmer, the higher the status.

My mum was a product of her upbringing just as I am. Her mother thought beauty was the only capital a working class woman had to trade with. Brains and skills didn’t matter, be slim and beautiful and you might be able to ‘marry up’ a little and improve your lot.

I've painted a terrible picture of my mum in my posts above, but all of her toxicity around food was set against a backdrop of her being a fairly normal (for the time), reasonably loving (for the time!) parent. I assume she picked up her attitudes to food from her own mum.

Absolutely. No one thought twice about “punching down” and reinforcing that a woman was the sum of her looks.

As recently as 1999 Victoria Beckham was asked live on air to get on a scale 2 months post partum and prove she’d lost her baby weight. Absolutely mad by today’s standards.

The Special K diet was still on the side of packs in 2013 ish or so as I remember it when I first started living with flatmates after uni.

Nc with my mum but growing up as a child in the 80s and a teen in the 90s was unbelievable looking back. My mums mantra was never let yourself go, stay slim with hair and make up always done and you will get a man with money. Dear reader my mother stayed slim on 20 Benson and Hedges a day plus unlimited cans of coca cola. She never did get a man with money and she was always shit with the benefits money she got. She did get a alcoholic man who beat her up practically every day.

Add on to society at the time, magazines were full of lose weight in 6 weeks, cut xy and z out to be slim. It's sad because you still see that behaviour a lot on here. Thin was in and anything else was shamed. Disgusting looking back.

In my teens I really restricted food and exercised daily for hours. Even now in my mid 40s a few stones over weight, I feel ashamed of my weight.

What a mess that whole era has left woman and many men in, it's really sad 😔 💐

I’d echo what @BeaAndBen said, with my mum it all came from her being relentlessly bullied as a child for her size and her desire for me not to go through the same thing (sadly not successful!)
I will admit that I prayed my DD would get her dad’s ‘whippet’ genes so that she could avoid the heartache I went through

Yes. The slim fast taking up the cupboards for years, the Adiós pills! Likewise, she was always so slim

'I was 6 stone after I had uou'

yeah mum, you also had raging PND/PPD!!!

mine was staying with us over one Easter so I got her a chocolate egg when I got one for husband and child. Next time she went to the supermarket she said I’ve got you something. Oh an egg I thought. Nope two avacados. That’s my mums relationship with food. When I was a child she would eat my Easter eggs after I’d gone to bed.

My mum is 5’1” and has been overweight since I was very young. She’s got a tiny frame and small bones but has never exercised at all and was always on the restrict/overeat cycle so was prone to weight gain. Always on a diet for as far back as I remember, rarely to any great effect. She’s a size 18-20 these days. I am a fair bit taller and have a different body type - I’m broader with larger bones and a different shape, like the women on my dad’s side of the family. I am a size 10-12 and have been for the majority of my life, give or take a stone. Yet she sees me as enormous. I’m always being told how massive I am and she buys me clothes in a size 16 or 18. She talks about my large frame regularly, how she’s so tiny compared to me and so on. But I’m about the right weight and size for my height and she is clinically obese. She’s also been very disparaging about the exercise that I do/did - she doesn’t trust gyms, can’t understand why anyone would want to go on a run. And she frets aloud about the food I eat. How could I possibly eat an avocado/nuts/cream? It’s so fatty. She talks and behaves as though I’m the one with the weight issue and she’s still the teeny tiny person she was when she got married (7 and a half stone, as she never lets me forget).

No. My mum was just healthy. And not preoccupied with appearances. She was more about emphasising being a nice person. She was really beautiful but in no way vain.

Yes the 80s lots of slimming bread and laxatives then slimfast, it's .not changed though now it's jabs and talking about "Happy weight" that today's children are exposed to.

Yes @Bartg . Though from the 80s and she’s still like this. I spent my teens constantly worrying about my weight and looks, feeling like shit and by my 20s was in the throes of bulimia, obsessed with what I was eating / losing and bouncing between all sorts of bad habits around diet and body image (only really addressed this in my late 30s).

Because she’s still obsessed (and makes comments about others 😒), she brings it up in front of my DC, who then parrots back the bullshit. I keep reinforcing they are perfect, healthy and don’t need to listen to Granny when it comes to food. I’m determined her fucked up approach isn’t going to impact them as it did me.

This is really hard when it starts to impact your own dc isn’t it? I have boys and the comments don’t seem to get aimed at boys thankfully

Yes she would always tell me proudly the weight she was at school which was tiny. And I was much taller than she was, but I just ended up thinking 7 stone was the target to get to

So you don’t think mental and emotional damage in childhood affects people as adults? At what age dose childhood trauma suddenly disappear?

I can't say it affected me much I am heavier than I was but that's an age thing,

My sister does go on about her weight and being greedy and "how fat " she is, she isn't, our mums eating habits and attitude seems to have penitrated into my sister which is a shame.

Yes, and putting me on diets with her. The cabbage soup one was particularly unpleasant.

She wasn't overly concerned about appearance otherwise, was neat and tidy but never wore makeup really, not especially fashionable. But the weight was in a totally separate category.

I am now fat. She despairs, I think.

No and she has never dieted and has always been a slim size 8-10.

Oh the cabbage soup used to stink the house out

A lot of the time Dm just drank vegetable water, her last job before retirement was shift work she survived on cigarettes and coffee on her breaks she was at her thinnest there. It's very sad seeing somebody having food or lack of affect someone's life.

I saw a reel online celebrity women on 80s/90s chatshows and men just talking about how chunky the guests were it was ingrained.

Yep.
Even now when she’s back from a holiday and I ask her how it was, her answer is always how much weight she gained or didn’t gain. Exhausting!

No, never. But my mum was always slim. She was quite sneery about fat people and would always comment about them in private.

My sister got fat in middle age and both my parents were horrified.

It really is isn't it? My parents don't go anywhere now due to illness but when they did it was always how much they ate and how "stuffed" she was. My stepdad was the same tbh he hated putting weight on.

Yes my mother constantly bragged about how tiny she was pre-kids and was always trying to get back to it. I looked up that weight against her height recently and she had a BMI of 17. I’m taller with a bigger frame and always felt so bad about myself from an early age for being so much heavier than she was, even though actually I was a normal weight. She’d buy lots of junk and I would be allowed to have whatever I wanted because she didn’t like to say no to me. But then of course I put on weight so got put on diets from 12 years old. She had a goal weight for me that was about 1 stone lower than I should be for my height. Unsurprisingly I’ve always had a terrible relationship with food and have struggled with a binge/starve cycle since my teens.

Oh lord. Constant.

And being SO critical of her body & how awful she is based solely on appearance.

She actually told me how saddened she was when I was about 8 and she realised I had inherited her body type "...And I thought, OH NO, Berlin is shaped like me".

We both do have lipodema, but FFS Mother you do not have to say everything that comes into your head.