Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - “Mom, I’m so fat!” How to Teach Kids Nutrition without Messing Them Up!

Starting point is 00:00:00 But what about if your kid calls themselves fat? It's very tempting to quickly correct them. Oh, no, no, no, no, sweetheart, don't say that. You're beautiful. But what a child hears in this statement is, oh, wow, fatness must be so bad. It is the opposite of beautiful. Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abby Sharp, where I dismantle die culture rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Like many of you listening right now, I am a millennial mom. I was raised by 2000 toxic diet culture and struggled with my relationship with food and my body as a result. So when I became a mom myself, I swore I was going to try my damn hardest not to let my kids fall into the same traps that I did. Now, back when my first son was born eight years ago, we were kind of at the height of the body positivity and intuitive eating moments in our culture. And TikTok hadn't exactly really taken off. So I thought, yeah, like, we got this. We had lived with the damage of dye culture, and we were going to build a system that was better.

Starting point is 00:01:12 And then we had a hard swing right back. OZempec took over Hollywood, Skinny Talk flooded our feeds, collarbones and jetting out pelvices appeared on every red carpet and runway, and it happened just in time for my kids to get old enough to start noticing, asking questions and having thoughts about their own bodies. How fun. In today's episode, we are getting into all of those questions. How do we raise healthy, happy eaters in a diet culture

Starting point is 00:01:44 world? How should we talk about food and nutrition in ways that won't fuck them up? How should we respond to comments about body fatness and losing weight? And what do we do if our kids are considered overweight. If you're hoping to break out of that generational diet culture and help your kinder have a gentler, more supportive relationship with food than you did, you are not going to want to miss this. Before we dive in, just a quick reminder that my best-selling book, the hunger crushing combo method, is now available and it's got a whole chapter on kids nutrition that can be an incredibly helpful guide. And if you've already purchased and read it, leaving me review on Goodreads or Amazon makes a massive difference.

Starting point is 00:02:27 I also want to give everyone a heads up that I'm going to be hosting a webinar on this exact topic where we are going to be going into way more detail and I'll also be answering all of your burning questions. So if you're interested in that, check out the show notes for where you can register. All right, friends, let's get into it. So first of all, we have to talk about the gravity of raising kids in a world that glorifies extreme thinness. As a 90s kid and 2000s teen, my early introduction to, body dysmorphia came from Barbie dolls and Disney princesses. I also learned a lot about crash dieting from reading my grandmother's Woman's World magazines, which seemed to always have some

Starting point is 00:03:13 headline about losing 10 pounds before Labor Day. By my teen years, I was living through Y2K skin and bone-bearing fashion, non-stop body shaming and celebrity tabloids, and the popularity of unhinged reality and game show TV shows like The Biggest Loser, America's Next Top Model, and The Swan. 2000's media was undoubtedly vicious and irresponsible, but social media has taken those same messages and made them literally inescapable. Now, the expectation isn't just that celebrities with private chefs and trainers are engaging in extreme dieting behaviors and staying impossibly thin because social media has

Starting point is 00:03:56 served as the great fame equalizer. Everyone is an expert. Everyone is an influencer. Everyone is expected to conform. Not to mention, what young people are seeing online isn't even real life. Every post is run through beauty filters, heavily edited and manipulated, and now with AI might not even be real at all. So even the most body positive and food positive homes are at risk of problematic messaging sneaking in. And we actually have evidence to prove it. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal set up multiple TikTok accounts registered as 13-year-old girls. Within a few weeks on the app, these fake users were inundated with non-stop dieting, weight loss,

Starting point is 00:04:43 and pro-anorexia videos. And while TikTok has since attempted to tighten its community guidelines and ban terms like hashtag Skinny Talk, It hasn't stopped thousands of e-decoded videos from being posted under code words every single day. Now, I know how dystopian this all sounds, and it is why I am such a fierce advocate of internet safety, media literacy, and delaying social media use for as long as you possibly can in your family. Obviously, the internet can be a dangerous place for promoting disordered eating behaviors and beliefs, but what may be even more powerful is what, what we model for our children at home. Consider the almond mom, the stereotypical parenting archetype that is always dieting and watching her weight. She might be a Weight Watchers devotee dedicated to counting calories or clean eating and incapable of not commenting on your body or what's on your plate.

Starting point is 00:05:42 Some of you listening may have been raised by an almond mom yourself and are still dealing with the emotional or physical trauma of those early lessons. And while I think it's important to empathize with our almond parents, as they simply were victims of diet culture too, we still need to acknowledge the damage that they may have caused. Research has consistently shown that parents dieting behaviors and food rules are linked to higher risk of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in their kids. This is all to say that as parents, our words and actions matter, perhaps even more than what our kids see on life. line or from their friends. And so we have the power to either reinforce harmful beliefs or change the narrative to support their eating competence long term. To really illustrate why words matter, let's play a little game called what you say versus what kids hear. Because if you're a parent, you know that when we say let's go to bed, the kids here, hey, time to open up a whole new

Starting point is 00:06:47 Lego set. So I'm going to go over some common nutrition sayings, the message that we might inadvertently be sending and how we might be able to tweak it going forward. You say you can't have dessert until you finish all of your broccoli. Now I know it is so tempting to try to bribe your kid to eat their veggies but this tends to put certain foods like dessert on a pedestal while aligning nutritious foods like vegetables as a punishment. It implies that broccoli must be so gross that mom is simply willing to reward me with cake just to get me to try it. Dessert, must be earned. And you're also likely going to have to eat past the point of fullness in order to get it. In my house, my kids know that we don't have dessert every night. But on the scheduled

Starting point is 00:07:34 dessert nights, their ability to get dessert is not contingent on them eating their main meal. For younger kids, I also like serving a small portion of dessert with their main meal. And I know this sounds kind of crazy and counterintuitive, but this can help to remove scarcity mentality, can help teach kids that all foods are equal and allows them the autonomy to fully listen to their hunger and fullness cues rather than getting full on their main meal and then eating beyond the point of satiety with dessert. Here's another one. You say, oh, I'm so bad for eating that cake. When we call ourselves good or bad for eating certain foods, we are assigning foods moral value and our kids might start to internalize that they too are bad when they start eating something

Starting point is 00:08:23 sweet. Now, let's be honest, we cannot make foods nutritionally equal, but we can make them morally equal by talking about our food choices more neutrally or for more older kids in more functional terms. So if I were to eat a little more cake than is comfortable for me, rather than saying, oh, I'm so bad, or that the cake is bad, I might just use it as a teaching moment to say, whoops, you know, I eat a bit more cake than what felt good to my body. And sometimes that happens because cake is fun and cake tastes good. But next time, I'll try to slow down and stop when my body tells me that I feel full. Finally, maybe at dinner you might say something like, oh, I skip my workout, so I guess no carbs for me today. To kids, this says that, A, carbs are bad,

Starting point is 00:09:12 And B, they need to be earned with exercise. In reality, kids have super high carb needs. So 50 to 65% of calories need to be coming from carbs. And they also tend to be the most reliable safe food for picky kids. So we absolutely do not want to create any unnecessary fear or anxiety around these important staples. If you're choosing to avoid a food for whatever reason, including weight management, and your kids ask you, hey, mom, why aren't you having rice with your meal?

Starting point is 00:09:46 Position your choice as what feels best to your body. You could say something like, I love rice too, but tonight, my body is craving extra vegetables. What is your body craving today? No weight talk, no moralizing, just body attunement and preference. Now let's go over some more specific do's and don'ts about talking to kids about food. As I alluded to with some of my earlier suggestions, The big do's we are going to focus on include.

Starting point is 00:10:14 One, focus on descriptive, morally neutral language like, this is sweet, this is crunchy, this is sour, etc. Two, explore the positive attributes and functions of different foods in the body without judgment. And three, lean into their curiosity. Kids love learning the why. And the more we lean in, the better the influence that we will have over their peers and social media. As for the big don'ts, the first is to avoid any language that assigns moral value to food, aka good versus bad, or clean versus junk. This is crucial for young children as by age five to seven,

Starting point is 00:11:05 they are starting to classify objects in their world. And if diet culture is telling kids to classify tacos as bad and salad as good, that's going to be really hard to unlearn. And the second other big no-no is commenting on weight or bodies in a next. negative or in some cases even positive way, which I'm going to die deeper into later on. Now, if this all sounds a little abstract, I'm going to give you an example and really try to help you understand age-appropriate ways to talk about something typically demonized like sugar. So let's start with kiddos below age four. At this age, kids are busy building food exposures

Starting point is 00:11:44 through sight, taste, smell, et cetera. So we really want to focus on simple sensory-based language. So think about really objective words, like this cookie is sweet, or we're all done with cookies today, but we can have more tomorrow. No moralizing language, no nutrition talk. By age five to seven, kids begin to gain independence, develop strong likes and dislikes, may go through food jags or picky phases, and developmentally start to classify foods into more distinct categories. This is arguably the phase with some of the biggest opportunities to create positive experiences with eating. At this age, we can teach kids about the top level roles of foods in the body. So I might say something like sugary foods like candy are fun, but they only give us quick energy that doesn't

Starting point is 00:12:34 always last very long, so you might get tired halfway through your soccer game. But when we have a balanced meal like a sandwich or spaghetti and meatballs, we get energy that lasts longer so that we can finish the game strong. You can also encourage kids to think about how different foods make their bodies feel. If my kids complain after eating a lot of sugar or dessert, rather than say, oh yeah, because candy is junk, it's so bad, I might say something like, yeah, I love ice cream too. But sometimes eating a lot of foods high in sugar like ice cream can give me a tummy ache.

Starting point is 00:13:09 And it also means I might not have enough room in my tummy for a balanced meal that would give me longer lasting energy to do really fun things. But that's okay. Next time we might try to make a choice that feels better to our tummy. Function, body awareness, but again, no moralizing or judgment. Ages 8 to 12 is really fun because we can start introducing some basic science and nutrition. The key here is staying very objective and factual while being mindful of moralizing language. So for example, you could say the brain's favorite fuel is something called glucose,

Starting point is 00:13:44 which we get from eating foods that have carbohydrates like bread, pasta, fruit, and even sugary foods like candy. But the brain likes a slow, steady stream of glucose throughout the day. And when we just eat candy on its own, our energy goes up and down like a roller coaster, which can make us feel tired and cranky and hungry again soon after. But if we add foods that are high in protein like yogurt or cheese or some healthy fats like peanut butter and some fiber-rich carbohydrates like berries or beans, our brain gets a stable stream of energy so that we can do fun things like sports for longer. At this age, kids will likely be hearing a lot more moralizing language around food from their

Starting point is 00:14:28 peers, other adults, teachers, and media. So if and when they say something like, so-and-so said sugar is bad for you. Try to respond calmly. No food is good or bad or will make you healthy or unhealthy. Being healthy is all about variety, balance, and patterns. And that's why we eat lots of different foods in our house. Sometimes we have veggies, sometimes we have chickens, sometimes we have pasta, and sometimes we have fun foods like ice cream. Last but not least, the teen years.

Starting point is 00:14:58 This is the age where kids are relying more heavily on social media and peers for their nutrition knowledge. So we really want to double down on building those critical thinking and media literacy skills while leaning into curiosity. Teens tend to shut down if you tell them they're wrong about something. So if your teen comes home saying that they're cutting out sugar because it's toxic or it's going to make them fat, rather than unleashing a frantic monologue on dye culture on them, start simply by asking them questions about their belief. Where did you learn that information? Did hearing that about sugar make you feel scared, anxious, in control, out of control?

Starting point is 00:15:36 Why do you think that person or platform wants you to stop eating sugar? After a little bit of listening, I would then offer them a little bit of gentle pushback on the, the good versus bad food language by saying, you know, no food is automatically good or bad, and all foods have redeeming properties. The tricky thing about sugar is that it's just really easy to overeat, which would mean that we wouldn't be getting enough of all the other nutrients that we need to help support our brain, our muscles, and our heart. So that's why we try to have sugar with other foods that are rich in protein, healthy fats, or fiber. And that conversation on overeating leads us nicely into dealing with fat talk. Your kids will inevitably encounter conversations

Starting point is 00:16:19 about weight in their life, whether that's comments about their own body, their friends or family, or in bodies in the movies or media. So it's good to feel prepared to engage with these conversations meaningfully. Most kids don't really understand social cues, so a lot of us have probably had our kid point and very loudly announce, look, mom, that person is so fat. And because we as a society still feel a lot of discomfort around body fatness, our instinct is to quickly shut that down. Shh, be quiet. Don't say that. That's mean. But this can actually be a really great opportunity to neutralize fear around fatness and acknowledge that bodies come in all shapes and sizes. Here's what I might very calmly say. All bodies have fat. Fat isn't a bad thing.

Starting point is 00:17:08 Without fat, our bones and muscles would have no protection, we would be cold all the time, and we would constantly be getting hurt. It's normal for some bodies to be bigger, some to be smaller, taller, shorter. I mean, just like in dogs, some breeds are small and lanky, some are fluffy and big. They're all different. I mean, it would be really boring if we all look the same, don't you think? The dog thing works well for my kids because we're a dog family, but you can relate human diversity to whatever is relatable.

Starting point is 00:17:38 to your family. But what about if your kid calls themselves fat? Now, I know it's very tempting to quickly correct them and tell them, oh no, no, no, no, sweetheart, don't say that. You're beautiful. And of course, the intention there makes absolute sense. But what a child hears in this statement is, oh, wow, fatness must be so bad and something that mom would never, never, never want me to have because it is the opposite of beautiful. So the first step is to regulate, not for correct. Get curious by asking them, where did you learn that? And how does that make you feel? Again, this can lead back into conversations about healthy bodies coming in different shapes and sizes and destigmatizing fat as a bad word. Okay, but what if your kid calls you fat? Now, understandably,

Starting point is 00:18:28 this one can be uncomfortable, especially for those of us with histories of body dysmorphia. But the good news is you don't need to love your body 100% at the time in order to teach your kids these lessons. The important message here is that we don't comment on other people's bodies and fat doesn't have to automatically mean something bad. So I probably would start by saying, honey, it's not very polite to make comments about someone's body because someone else's body really isn't our business. And also, yes, I have fat on my body. All bodies have soft parts. And mine has changed since I've gotten older and after getting birth to you. I'm so grateful for what my body allows me to do, like grow you and your brother and play soccer with you guys. It's amazing. Also, P.S., there's a really

Starting point is 00:19:14 great book that I started reading with my kids when they were babies that I still bust out today, like once a quarter, called Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Fetter. And that gives them lots of visuals of a wide range of body types and really allows me to reinforce some of these important talking points. I'm honestly just scratching the service here and I go into way more detail and cover a lot more important topics in my webinar. So definitely check out the show notes. I also have tons of fantastic strategies, suggestions, and more specific nutrition tips for feeding kids and teens in my best-selling book, The Hunger Cushing combo method. It also has chapters on nutrition for applying the method for adult weight loss, insulin resistance, paramenopause and menopause, fitness goals, and so much more.

Starting point is 00:20:00 Plus, it's got cheat sheets and 30 full recipes to get you started. It is seriously the best resource for every goal and every stage of life. But on that note, that is a wrap. If you want more parenting infant child and teen nutrition advice and you want more episodes like this, I would really love to hear from you in the comments. And also, please don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave me a five-star review because it really does help me out. Signing off with Science and Sass, I'm Abby Sharp. Thanks for listening.

Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - “Mom, I’m so fat!” How to Teach Kids Nutrition without Messing Them Up!

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