Should I Delete That? - What is an Almond Mom?

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

A term made famous by Yolanda Hadid, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star and mother to supermodels Bella and Gigi Hadid, “Almond Mom” refers to the type of mother who sets their child up to be obsessed with food and their bodies in ways that are both toxic and harmful.In this, the second episode of our Body Image series, we explore generational trauma in the context of diet culture, and take a deeper look at the wounds passed down from our grandmothers, to our mothers and in turn - to us. Many millennials feel very passionately that they want to be the ones to break this cycle, that we don’t want our kids to watch us starting a new diet every Monday, or never wearing a swimming costume or eating a biscuit without first apologising for it, and as relatively new mothers ourselves, this is something we feel deeply passionate about.Thanks so much to our amazing guests who feature on this episode: Phillippa Diedrichs, Molly Forbes, Beth and Bev. Molly’s books Every Body and Body Happy Kids are available now - get your copies here!You can find The Body Happy Organisation’s free resources here: https://www.bodyhappyorg.com/start-here Read more about Phillippa’s work at https://www.phillippadiedrichs.com/  Follow @mollyjforbes on Instagram Follow @bodyhappyorg on Instagram Follow @phillippa.diedrichs on Instagram If you would like to get in touch - you can email us on [e-mail]  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A term made famous by Yolanda Hadid, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Star and Mother to Supermodels Bella and Gigi Hadid, almond mum refers to the type of mother who sets their child up to be obsessed with food and their bodies in ways that are both toxic and harmful. The term came into common parlance after a now infamous scene on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills when a then 19-year-old Gigi Hadid calls her mother Yolanda and says, I'm feeling really weak. I had like half an almond, to which she was. Yulanda replies, have a couple of almonds and chew them really well. Yolanda ended up encapsulating so much of what diet culture represented. She personified the inherent fatphobia that so many women internalised and in turn projected onto their own children.

Where was it, after all, that many of us first heard expressions like, a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips? And you're not hungry, you're bored, if not in our own homes. So in this episode, we explore generational trauma in the context of diet culture and take a deeper a look at the wounds passed down from our grandmothers to our mothers and in turn to us. Many millennials feel very passionately that they want to be the ones to break this cycle, that we don't want our kids to watch us starting a new diet every Monday, or never wearing a swimming costume or eating a biscuit without first apologising for it.

And as relatively new mothers ourselves, this is something that we feel deeply passionate about. But in order for us to do this, to be the ones that buck the trend, we will need to take a deeper look at the cycle as a whole. After all, if we don't understand it, how can we expect to change? it. As we worked our way through this series in our bid to unpick and further understand our societal relationship with body image, it felt really important that we first took some time for introspection to understand how deeply personal this is to all of us and where this has come from. Which means in a Freudian sort of way that we must explore our relationships

with our own mothers or the matriarchal figure in our life and consider two their relationship with their own mothers. This doesn't need to be family therapy for the two of us and it certainly doesn't mean throwing our mums under the bus either because this conversation has to be had with the enormous caveat that whilst, yes, some elements of Alma and Mum culture are deliberately harmful, and we will talk about those, there are also large parts of it that are inadvertently damaging and insidiously toxic in a way that feels inevitable. We only know what we know, right, and that applies to our mothers too. So, accepting that this is a spectrum with Super Armand Mum Yolanda Hadid on one end and the cake eating, bikini wearing, body embracing,

confident mum that we all hope to be on the other. Let's zoom out and look at the concept as a whole. Now, in a perverse sort of way, and if you think I'm wrong here, I welcome the challenge, but I suspect the overwhelming majority of almond mumming actually comes from a good place. Setting aside the rarer cases where mothers might be deliberately abusive, of course, I think a lot of it comes from a place of, however misguidedly, trying to protect our daughters. We spoke to Professor Philippa Diedrichs, a research psychologist and mental health expert to give her professional views on this. So I think what we're really referring to here is how our ideas about our bodies, weight and

eating and probably dieting in particular, get passed down across generations in families. And what happens is we experience that as children. And then what unfortunately will happen is we can. then pass it on to our own children or the young people that we have in our lives. And so it's basically how this cycle continues of diet culture, but also disordered eating and low body confidence gets passed down through generations. It may evolve slightly over time in terms of what is discussed and how it manifests, but essentially it's that passing down.

And sometimes people are aware of it and sometimes they're not. it does that does feel like a big like connection that we can that we can see at least anecdotally that's kind of seems like a very or even personally that's a that's a place that like I think I probably first became aware of dieting was from my own mom why were our months in your opinion why were our mom's generation so intent on instilling the virtuiness of thinness in us and how do you think that harmed us as individuals and as a collective yeah I think my mom and I've talked about this as well. I went to Weight Watchers when I was 13.

But I also know, and my mum says to me now, oh my God, you must tell people this story and they must be horrified. And I'm like, Mom, you also went to Weight Watchers when you were younger. And my Nana, who I am very close to my mum and I was very close to my Nana, she also went to Weight Watchers.

And so it's a really tricky one. I think as parent, I'm not a parent, but you both are and I think most parents try to do the best that they can with what they know and I think women historically have society has been shaped in a way such that women are valued based upon how they look and weight has been central to that and thinness has been glorified and also generationally if you look at baby boomers and before that they were still of a generation where education, workplace opportunities, and all sorts of those things were incredibly unequal between women and men. And women were highly valued for how they look. Of course,

we still have those problems today, but they were even more so back then. So when I think about it, and I still hear people tell me now that, you know, my mum and I have had lots of conversations and now she's a bit of a body image advocate in her own circles, but still experience that and they may be more aware of body positivity and body image themselves, but they go home or they talk to their parents and they're still kind of, their mums in particular, still heavily focused on weight. I have a lot of compassion and empathy for the individuals, the parents and the children of this cycle. And I have a lot of frustration and anger about the society that perpetuates this. So often we think about blaming individuals,

but there are bigger forces at play that everyone has been exposed to, particularly in those generations. The original body positivity movement was really in the 70s with black, fat activists in North America. Well, my mom grew up in New Zealand, and I'm pretty sure there was no body positivity, and they didn't have social media. It was mainstream culture.

So it's all of those factors combined, which is why I think this is happening. Of course, now we also have a really strong conflation between weight and health. So it sometimes can be teasing and negative comments quite explicit, but sometimes it's through concern. I genuinely think the reason my mum took me to Weight Watchers is I was probably, I can remember being teased about my weight when I was in grade four and specific things. And I would have been coming home and telling her about that.

And that then, weight loss was very normalized. it still is to an extent, and that was sold as a solution. So she wanted me to feel good about myself. So she took me to Weight Watchers. Now she would think differently, but that's probably because she has a daughter who specialises in body image and as a professor of psychology. Not everyone has that,

and not everyone like your listeners, has access or has thought about body positivity in this way. So I have a lot of compassion and empathy for individuals, a lot of anger and frustration at the system and society. I absolutely agree with this whilst obviously there is the caveat that it might be more complicated and there could be ill intentions overwhelmingly I believe that if we know and accept that society has always been an easier thing to navigate for those in smaller bodies that pretty privilege exists and the fatness has long since been judged and associated with tropes of laziness and failure

making you more likely to be bullying in school and less likely to get a job as an adult it does feel as if a lot of what our moms were trying to do was ensure that we were the best girls, quote-unquote, that we could be. And what do we think of when we think of good girls? They're quiet, they're small, dainty and poised, they don't cause trouble, they're desirable, feminine, delicate. Yes, with every passing year, feminism does an incredible job of dismantling the patriarchy and in turn these expectations. They held a tighter grip on us when we grew up in the 90s and they do now. But comparatively speaking, had women in a vice-like grip when our moms were growing up in the 60s and the 70s. It's hard to imagine it. It's hard to have like empathy for this

and compassion for them without taking a bit of time to fully consider what it was like for our moms growing up. And in order to do that, we need to take a look at some of the advertising and literature that was around for them at that time. Adverts for diet products were in abundance during the 60s and 70s, and they were overwhelmingly targeted at women. In fact, when we were doing our research for this and trawling through hundreds of vintage diet ads, painful, we saw probably less than a handful of men actually even feature in them. The over-representation of women was glaring,

but even more insidious was how many of these ads were actually tapping into women's insecurities about being attractive to men. One ad promoting MetroCal, which was essentially a meal replacement protein shake, showed a thin woman standing in front of a log fire, staring lovingly at a male partner. The caption reads, how slender you were in the glow of the fire, would he think so now? Before encouraging readers to buy MetraCal, which incidentally was pulled from shelves in the late 70s after being linked to deaths. A particularly horrifying TV ad from 1966, meanwhile, features a male voiceover informing viewers, let's face it, an attractive woman can fib about her age, but not about her weight,

as the camera freeze frames and zooms in on a woman's very slim, I might add, waist as she stands up. This is the mad men era. I can literally picture John Hamm in an executive room, a glass of whiskey in one hand, Siggy in the other, plotting the shrinking of women everywhere. There are so many that we could mention. And we are going to share some on our podcast Instagram at Should I Delete that if you want to have a look. But here's the bottom line. Through these adverts, women were told what to buy, what to be and what to do. Some adverts told women to lose weight, while others encouraged them to gain weight to have a more womanly physique. But either way, they were representative of the demand for self-control and self-discipline in women that is measured through their body size.

They were continually demanded to conform to a set of body ideals, and inevitably our moms will have unfortunately been victims of this. Our grandmothers, too. One ad from the 30 show a woman slimming down after smoking, lucky story. Yeah, seriously. And feature captions like, If men hate the sight of you, read this, which is an ad encouraging skinny women to gain weight and hourglass curves. What else were our mothers and their mothers

supposed to teach us, if not the stuff that they knew? And what they knew was that their lives were easier if they were thinner. More men would want them if they were thinner. And they'd be the best versions of themselves. If they were, you guessed it, thinner. Now let's couple the noise of their childhood with the ruckus that surrounded them around the time of having their own kids, us.

This is something we're going to explore in later episodes because, of course, so much of this noise was so informative to us when it came to our relationships with our own bodies. But to dip our toes into it momentarily, let's just have a look at how the world looked for our moms in the late 80s and 90s, how they were spoken to and about, and what was being sold to them when it came to their bodies. The 80s were rife with diet culture. Weight Watchers was at an all-time high subscriber. account. New diet company Jenny Craig was launched. Jane Fonda's famous workout VHS tapes sold

millions and Oprah infamously dragged a wagon containing 67 pounds of animal fat on stage the amount of weight she'd then lost to show her audience what she'd accomplished. I'm going to live on broccoli now, Oprah exclaimed. What a TV moment. It's hard. Animal fat story. Animal fat. It's really hard to quantify, but arguably the 90s was even more toxic. The weight loss industry was thriving with a reported value of 51 billion, with diets like Atkins enjoying an enormous resurgence. And heroin chic, a super skinny, aesthetic associated with the decade's most famous model, Kate Moss, was the desired luck of the time.

Celebrity workout VHS tape started to emerge like Cindy Crawford's Shape Your Body Workout of 1992. looking at it like this, it feels a bit inevitable then for a lot of our mothers, if they themselves had a terrible relationship with food and their own bodies, that they will probably have passed it down to us because not only did they not know how not to, they didn't know that they weren't supposed to. Right. I actually think you can look at Yolanda Hadid as a really good example of this and harking back to that spectrum that we discussed earlier, really assume that to a certain, albeit lesser extent, there might be elements of this dynamic that we feel familiar to all of us. We know we're not speaking to every single woman's relationship with

their mother. We know that this is not a dynamic that is unanimous and fits us all, but we can also see a pattern. We do recognise that generational trauma when it comes to body image and dieting is a very big thing for a lot of us. When we talk about Yolanda and about this, we're not saying that all of our moms were like this or that this is in a situation applicable to all of us. But I think putting a microscope up to her and her relationship with her daughters the way she spoke to them and navigated it is a very interesting way for the rest of us to perhaps explore elements of this within our own families. This is a woman who spent her younger life working as a model, a famously brutal industry, only to then get older, a cardinal sin for a woman,

have her own kids, career suicide, of course, and watch as her career as she knew it disappeared as a result. So then when her daughters, the new and shiny young things, get to pick up where she left off, it feels totally inevitable that she teaches in the lessons that she learned from the industry. And as a supportive mom, who also knows what is required of models when it comes to their body size, she's going to push them in the only direction that she knows how. And yes, you can criticise that and you can judge her and wonder why she didn't heal her own shit or ask why she'd want that own pain for her own daughters, knowing how hard it had been for her. But to me, it feels like it was only ever going to go one way there. And without conversations

like this and therapy and introspection and retrospection and a but ton of other work to heal all of this, it sort of feels that way for the rest of it, albeit, as we said, on a slightly lesser scale than Bella and Gigi Hadid experienced it. I put a call out on my Instagram a little while ago and asked for anyone with any experience with an almond mom or as one to come and talk to us and I was surprised and delighted when a friend of my sisters, Beth, got in touch to say that her and her mum would be happy to speak to us together. We talked about how Bev was impacted by her own family dynamics around weight and food and how that may or may not have been passed on to Beth and how diet culture became normalized within the family. How much of your

attitude towards weight do you think affected Beth growing up with her, how she felt about her body and her body image? I guess she would have been aware of that I was going to going to weight washers and I'd got to count points or I'd I think it was 20 points you had to have 20 points and I can't have that that's so many points or I can have a crunchy it's only three points so I would I definitely would have would have done that and she would have been aware of it yeah I would have been we also spoke about um you before every holiday didn't we oh it's really it's really exciting because you would always treat me to like a new wardrobe.

You know, if we went on a lovely holiday, we... You said new holiday clothes and we'd go out of shopping and I remember quite vividly going out of you and you're going, well, I can't have that because I want to get into this new dress and the holiday was quite a big buildup where you would be so strict.

And Christmas, you know, Christmas and holiday, yeah. And I'd be like, oh my God, we're going on a holiday, oh! It's like quite stressful because my mum wants to feel thin. and we'd all have these new clothes and you'd want to feel nice. Nice. But, you know, in my head, I was like, she's the most beautiful. And we're talking about someone who was trying to drop, you know, like, nothing. She's trying to lose four pounds because she's already in a size 10. Like, she couldn't really have four.

But, yeah. You know, she didn't have four pounds to lose. And I'm standing there like, oh, my goodness, look at her. You know, she's working so hard to be holiday ready. and then I'm asking for more chips at the dinner table. So it definitely was there. But in subtle ways, it wasn't you knowing anything more than you getting ready for your holiday,

I think, and me absorbing it all because I was in awe of my mom. Yeah, I don't think you think, do you? You don't think of the negative effects it would have on your child when you're doing this really. I don't think it ever crossed my mind. mind because I guess my mum did it to me as well so so not I don't my mum probably wasn't as bad as I was in in some respects I think we were talking about um like her you one of your earliest memories of non-arso Bev's mom um being weight conscious and you said you remember clearly they had measuring her waist almost well she used to she she she's no she

to say to me, well, when I was your age, I had a 24-inch waste and all this. And I used to think, oh, God, maybe I need a 24-inch waste. But there was obviously never any hope. But I was saying to Beth, what you kind of think as a teenager? Because we're all sort of, you're growing and developing at different rates. And then shops like Jack Wills can suit you at that age because you have that young body. But obviously, as you go into womanhood, your body completely changes. that as it does as you get older, you know, my body's changed lately. I thought, well,

you know, lately I'm thinking, well, why have my boobs gone bigger? But it's obviously just at my time of life. That is a thing that actually genuinely happens. And I think as a woman, we're probably not informed as to how our body will change. As we get older, our hips will get bigger. Our bust will get bigger. Our bones will get bigger. And I don't think, you kind of know this, you're not that aware. Or you're fighting it. Are you fighting it? Because you always want that figure of a 15-year-old,

which is totally unrealistic. When you did your Weight Watchers, and I'm only asking this because my mum took me and I went to them all with my mum. But Beth, did you ever go with your mum to the Weight Watchers? Yeah, I think you did, didn't you? Because it was funny. I mean, you used to think it was funny, didn't you?

But you don't tag along with me? Yeah, so the really young age, you know, it would be a case of, oh, do you want to come with me for company? Of course, I was happy to go, my mum, not really knowing what the hell we're going to. And yeah, it was funny for me. I just saw total humour at the start in, why is everyone standing on a scale and, like, women crying. And it was a really bizarre concept at 12. But by the time I was 15, it wasn't.

I would be desperate to go with you so I can stand on a scale and get a sticker for being the biggest, biggest weight lost. Remember, when I just got back from uni, every week I'd go and I'd have like starve the show, share your tips best. And I'd basically, I haven't eaten for a week. It's brilliant, isn't it?

Like, oh, how awful is that? Those weight loss clubs are crazy, weren't they? You know, I think that's probably when I started binge eating as well, really. Because weight watch is super strict, starving myself, enjoying the weight loss. and then rewarding myself. Oh, sometimes if you had a good weight loss, you'd go and have a trip.

Yeah, which starts, it doesn't it? Beth, if you could say or explain or let us know how your mum's change in attitude in recent years, your mum making that kind of piece with her body, as she's got older, has that helped you with your own relationship or is this a journey that you've both been on just in a parallel way? Do you think one's informed the other

or do you think you'd have got there on your own anyway? I'd say both, both others been on it. Yeah, I'd say. We've helped each other enormously. We would look at ourselves to blame before this experience, whereas now we totally understand that our environment has been set up and that we have basically, we've just fallen at the hurdles that they've put out for us, because we did sign up for Weight Watchers

and you wanted to be a gold member forever and all these little dangerous plugs we fell for at every possible moment we did buy Hello magazines we did you know I was obsessor Kate Moss and her top shop range you were all these things we just fell for

and that's just a product of our society because we like to shop because we were engaged with new makeup trends and because I had a young mum that, you know, we wanted to be present and that's the damage of it. It's my, it's my natural mindset. I totally understand that my personality is susceptible to it. Yours isn't as much, but you've had triggers, really bad triggers from your sister and family members. So between the two of us, we're probably.

bit of a recipe for disaster, but now I think we realised we were just stupid enough to allow media to affect us, and now we're a little bit stronger and reflective, which we'd never would have had time to be reflective before. Now, obviously, it's really complicated, and no two cases are going to be the same, but there is an element of this that can't be ignored, and I think it stems from the inherent competitiveness that is taught to girls and women from as early as they are cognizant. The scarcity complex is very real. And in a world where we've been taught to believe

there's only so many men, jobs and chances for women, we are inherently conditioned to feel at times competitive. And that does seep into the mother-daughter dynamic too. To bring in a very relevant, timely reference, I would draw listeners' attention because I know you still haven't seen it to rivals. where Maud gets jealous of her daughter Taggy's relationship with Rupert Camel Black. She's jealous that her daughter is the one that he finds attractive and not her.

And that was prevalent in a lot of the Jilly Cooper style literature of the time. Really? And I think it does exist to an extent. Well, it must do. And I think this is a really uncomfortable conversation, I have to admit, and I think it's going to be difficult for people to listen. Do you think? I think it's going to be difficult for people listening.

to engage in this conversation because it feels so taboo, right? For that to be jealousy within a mother and daughter dynamic that feels really uncomfortable. But I agree with you and I think it's a crucial part of this conversation that does need to be explored or at the very least acknowledged.

I think within that as well, we do need to say that jealousy, it's not an emotion that a lot of us are proud of within ourselves and I think as a result of that we don't really acknowledge it and we don't talk about it. But it's another inevitability. And I think we will go into this more in other episodes because we do talk to psychologists and really unpack kind of our relationship with the media and our relationship with fame

and our relationship with perfection and celebrities and all of that and kind of how we formed our own body image. But I think a lot of it does come from jealousy. But it's the scarcity complex that I just referenced there. Like, if we think there's only so much, we are going to be jealous of the ones that don't have it. That does feel like human nature. It does. And there's a lot of the mother-daughter bond that is nature.

Do you know what I mean? Like, we are looking at something like primitive here. Right. Harking back to literally our cavewoman days. Yeah. And I do think it's important to talk about, even though you're right, jealousy is one of the most, if not the most uncomfortable emotions that we experience or like to talk about to admit to. It's deeply uncomfortable. But if we don't look at it and if we don't talk about it,

then it's never going to cease to exist. Now, I think a really important point to make within this conversation is the reminder that moms are people and as such, they are flawed. Societally, we put so much pressure on mothers to be all things perfectly, to nurture just right, to be sacrificial, to work like they don't have kids and have kids like they don't work. It's a pressure that we're all under and it can feel impossibly heavy at times. So we want to be careful as we continue on this path to ensure that we do so

with as much empathy that we can muster. Or at the very least, with the proviso that we are willing to lower our expectations a little bit when it comes to mums. We hold women to impossibly high standards. And whilst there is space for a call for accountability within this conversation, the understanding that we very often set women up to fail in so many areas of their lives is a prerequisite to this. Now, it came up in this conversation and it came up in another interview we did too. When we started this series and when we started writing this episode, we wanted to focus on arm and mums. And genuinely, I don't think it occurred to either of us that it could come from anywhere else within the family other than directly from the

mother. But as was pointed out to us, it's not just mums. This stuff's coming from dads too. And I kind of felt a bit of relief within that as a mother thinking, oh, thank God. And then I kind of kind of had the like, oh my God, this is absolutely insidious. But of course it comes from dads as well. And this was a really interesting conversation that we had with Molly Forbes. She actually came to us because we were hoping to get some sort of tangible and practical advice from her about breaking the cycle and changing how we navigate the world with our children so that we can be happy and confident and help them be happy and confident in themselves. but she made such a good point on dads and that dynamic.

And we just wanted to include a bit of our conversation here. There's a huge amount of pressure on mums particularly to be the role models of positive body image, particularly when it comes to having daughters. And I think that's a little bit unfair because often the mums are victims of diet culture themselves. And so on the one hand, we are putting this huge amount of pressure on women to look a certain way. And then we're also putting a lot of pressure on them to feel a certain way. And then we're also putting a lot of pressure on them to kind of role model reversing this stuff. And when we talk about breaking generational cycles, often the focus is on mums. And I think

that it just lets dads off the hook often. I think that dads and grandparents and artis and uncles and teachers and all adults need to be part of this conversation. It's not fair just to put it on mums. However, there's no denying that and the research backs all of this up, right, that actually mums do have a really powerful, can either be a really powerful force for good or negative on their children's body image. And not just actually on the way that their own children think and feel about their own bodies, but also on the way that the judgments that they have about the other people around them who don't look like them. Like diet culture is often disguised as health, right? You know, it's it's being healthy. It's this idea that kind of we have total

control over our health and that if we just eat the right thing and do the right thing, then we will be healthy. But I feel like, I feel like our obsession with health is actually making kids unhealthy. And I think that a lot of these habits and behaviors are coming from a place of well-meaning, you know, parents want their kids to be healthy. They want to help their kids have like healthy, fulfilled, happy lives, but they don't understand. They don't realize the harm that they're doing with the way that, particularly the way that we're talking about food and bodies and health like a movement. And it's making, it's making children unhealthy, you know. I have the privilege of working with quite a lot of

teachers and I go into lots of schools and I do teacher training. And one thing that keeps coming up is the children that the teachers are worried about are younger and younger. So I was in a school recently and they had year threes who were like seven years old who were being diagnosed with anorexia. And these are like little kids, you know, and that is kind of quite shocking for me. And I think eating disorder is obviously incredibly complicated, but we know that there's a huge component around the way that we talk about food and, you know, body image plays a role there. And children are picking up ideas at a younger and younger age around what is good food and bad food and what is what is a good and bad body.

And they're not just picking this up from TikTok. You know, we know kids as young as three can suffer with feeling bad about their bodies. kids as young as three can display anti-fat buyers and those children probably aren't on TikTok. So I think that we're in a bit of a mess but I think it's unfair to just blame the mums because we're all the culture. I've been that mum before. You know, I've been that person as well. So such a good point and actually something that I haven't really considered before but we are like absolving the dads and like the other and other guardians or like like, you know, people who are responsible for kids,

absolving them of any kind of responsibility when it comes to that, you know, the children's body image. Some of these dads are like not okay, you know. They are really, we know that these body pressures can come up for men and men are increasingly being exposed to like harsher kind of appearance ideals and that if you think of all the beauty brands, when always growing up, it was generally marketed at women like these brands and now most of these brands have a line for men. as well. So these kind of appearance pressures are showing up more and more for men. But I think

that with dads, and this is like a common thing that I hear as well with parents where the mums have kind of woken up and become awake to a lot of the issues and they don't want to pass on some of their own stuff around food, but they can't agree with the partners on how to approach it. And the partners are actually, it is bad to be fat and actually, you know, it's not health. this is about their health and actually shame is a useful motivator and they're kind of you know in that gym bro kind of culture and I think that's really difficult particularly if you're in a couple and you're or it or just co-parenting and the person that you're parenting raising children with is like totally not on board and and is very much steeped in that thing and I think that

it really annoys me actually when we put all the focus on mums because we make it like we've got enough mental load, we're doing enough emotional labour in raising kids with this stuff. We need to bring dads. They should be 50-50. They should be just as much part of this conversation. It blew my mind when Molly said this and I also felt relief, but I also felt shame. Shame at the fact that we'd completely miss this out. It had been completely omitted from our conversation thus far about generational dieting. And actually my dad, and he admits this and he's actually admitted this online on my Instagram before, my dad had a huge part to play and how I felt about my body growing up. And he made numerous comments about how I looked.

And the fact that we hadn't yet included this or extended family members like aunts and uncles within our conversation yet kind of made me feel ashamed. But also I'm so glad that we have the opportunity now to discuss that and bring that to the narrative as well. Because why should the shame all fall? The shame and the responsibility and the blame all fall on the mother. It's true. You know, as we work towards unpicking all of this, you know, a lot of us feel this responsibility to heal ourselves for our children or for the next generation. And that is a burden. And it is part of what we were saying before about this huge sacrifice that we must do so much labour in order to be good mothers. And I think it's worth noting and thinking about the fact that

probably for a dad to make a comment, like your dad making comments to you, they don't understand the significance of what they're doing because they didn't feel, you know, know, what we've explained, what we've just outlined as the environment that our mums grew up in, our dads weren't targeted like they were. They weren't hurt like they were. They weren't traumatized like they were. So whilst they might have their own problematic views on what a woman should look like or have their own insecurities within themselves, they don't carry the trauma that mums do.

So their comments can almost be more dangerous because they're so. flippant. Right. Like chubby. Or, you know, it's words like that that your dad might say to you that he will never remember passing comment for them, for him. That will last a lifetime for you. Lest a lifetime, yeah.

Pretty but plump was my nickname. And I will always, it will never go. No. And I don't think he ever would have understood the pain that could cause. It devastated me, but he just didn't understand. has such an interesting point in and of itself and it does speak to this huge weight that women have to carry

it's so heavy what we're carrying oh and why shouldn't we share the burden hell yeah so I guess it begs the question what are you meant to do as mothers with our own unheeled shit who want healthy kids trying to navigate a world that still very much demonises fatness

with a government that's declared war and obesity but who you don't want to grow up with the same pain that you did, how do you break the cycle and encourage healthy eating and healthy body image for the next generation? How do you escape almond momming? And actually, we're going to expand what we mean when we say almond momming. How do you escape almond aunting or almond godmothering or almond darning? You know, this isn't just about the relationship between children. This is about how we speak in front of the next generation. This is the legacy that our generation gets to leave the next one.

So you heard a little bit from Molly Forbes earlier. She is a woman who has explored this extensively. She is a journalist and a campaigner who has written two books focusing on this very thing. She is, if you like, the antithesis of an almond mum. And we wanted to pick her brain as a mum and an expert on the topic to understand the research that she has done and the methods that she recommends as a result. Or it's like constantly trying to keep the balance between being like true to ourselves and authentic and recognizing that it's hard to have a body in the culture that we live in, but also not wanting to kind of role model negative behaviours. So I think like the first thing is don't voice out loud when you're having negative feelings in front of your children. If you can, you know, don't say things like, oh, I shouldn't wear that or I shouldn't eat that or, you know, using. this kind of morally loaded language around food like oh that's naughty that's a treat just kind of

be trying to be really neutral about it and and just try and language is super important and children will pick up language but we also talk with nonverbal cues so I think that body language is also important and I have a love-hate relationship with some of the approaches, particularly when, again, when we put pressure on mums to like, wear the bikini, you know, I'm like, oh, that's really hard if you feel bad. And also, it's also really hard if you've been discriminated against because you've got a bigger body and you've constantly been told that your fat body is unattractive or unworthy of wearing a bikini. Like, that's quite a lot of pressure to put on mums to, like, wear the bikini. And I think that, like, if you're not wearing a

bikini, it's fine. You're not going to, like, ruin your kids' body image. Like, it's okay. You don't have to, like, strut around in a bikini. But I think just kind of, when children can see you just enjoying your body, just living your life in the body that you have, you know, on holiday, you don't have to necessarily wear the bikini. Although, sure, if you want to wear the bikini, like, go for it. But just enjoying the feeling of, you know, swimming, if you like swimming, or resting, reading a book, eating food that you like to eat and taking pleasure in that if you can and and vocalising that pleasure and with food also just like talking about it I think we need to we spend so much time thinking about the nutritional value of food and what food like whether it's healthy or unhealthy

actually children learn this from a really young age they're picking it up from a really young age that, you know, vegetables are good for them. Actually, talking about all the other roles that food plays in our life, like food can be a huge source of comfort. It can be a great way to like celebrate our family history, our cultural heritage. It's just a really great opportunity to get together with friends and be sociable if you, you know, if you enjoy eating in that way. Like talking about food in those positive ways can also be really great for kids. And I think that recognising that the way that we talk about food and the way that we talk about health and the way that we talk about movement massively impacts how children think and feel about their bodies is really important. Because often people get really caught up in this idea that body image is like this separate thing.

It's kind of exists in a silo and that actually it's got nothing to do with like anything else, like healthy eating, whatever is like this separate thing. Actually, all of these things can impact how children. think and feel about their bodies. So I want to ask you for, I mean, a lot of what we're talking about is how to prevent, like you said, it's preventative and how to like prevent harm and to like equip our children with, you know, good tools for positive body image. If there are moms listening to this who are, who have children who are a bit older and they realize, they're starting to realize, you know, they've been immersed in diet culture

their whole life and they have therefore immersed their child in diet culture for their whole life and that they've caused harm in that sense. What do you think, like what are some steps to them to go about trying to like reverse any damage? Is it too late? Are there things that they can do? It's not too late. Okay. It's not too late. I think be honest and take ownership of it and if you recognize that you have like made mistakes in the past like I know it's a really overused word this like accountability is like a very kind of hot word but I think take accountability for it and be honest and open and I think I've seen some really lovely conversations happen with grandparents and like some of my friends and their mums and as they've been learning

about diet culture like even knowing that diet culture is a thing and trying to undo some of this kind of stuff, they've then had conversations with their mums and they've brought their mums into it. And the mums have been like, I wish I knew better then. You know, I wouldn't have done that. And actually, I think it's okay to say that. I think it's okay to say I wish I knew differently then because I wouldn't have done X, Y, Z. But also give yourself some grace and recognize actually, like I keep saying, we're all a product of the culture that we grow up in. we're all a product of the culture that we live in. This is not an individual person issue.

This is a society issue. And we're all part of this society. So I think on the one hand we can say, like, it was hard growing up. It's hard growing up, whatever period you're growing up in. There's always going to be appearance pressures. And I think be honest about that, but also say, do you know what, if I knew what I knew what I knew now, I probably wouldn't have done that then. And if you've caused harm, if you've been an almond mum and you've shamed, you've shamed,

you've shamed your child for their body or you've publicly shamed them or you've, whatever it is, I think, apologize. Because even if you, even if it came from a well-intentioned place, the impact was that you caused harm. And I think, apologize and take accountability for that. And, you know, try and just try and do. better and recognize that we're all human and we all make mistakes and you're probably going to make more mistakes. I know that I'm sitting here like giving all this advice. That doesn't

mean like no one's infallible. I've made mistakes in the past and I probably will, you know, at some point in the future because I'm a human being. I think that but I think that admitting those mistakes is important. We also asked Philippa whether she believes that we should forgive the older generation for passing on their dieting trauma to us. For anyone listening who has and historically has had this complicated relationship with their mums or another parent or extended family members, do you think, I mean, you said that you, you, we believe that we owe them compassion. Do we owe them forgiveness? Would you encourage anyone listening to try and forgive their family for, you know,

passing on generational dieting trauma? I think that's so nuanced and complex that I think everyone's situation is different. And also that can place a lot of burden on the victim, even though the perpetrator might be a victim as well. So I don't think I have a blanket response to that idea of forgiveness. I think probably taking a step back to think about why they're doing what they're doing what pressures they've been exposed to might create a little bit of a buffer between your intensity of your emotions to that person um it might not absolve them though and you know i think one of the other things although i think compassion is important boundaries are important too so you can be compassionate um but you can also set boundaries to be like i don't

you know that doesn't make me feel comfortable or i don't want to talk about weight or dieting or eating with you because of these reasons. And if someone continues to do that when you've tried to set a boundary, well, no, that's not okay, even if they've experienced those things. So I think setting healthy boundaries and being like, you know, if they continue to transgress those boundaries, if you do this, then I will do this, which I will remove myself from that situation or I, you know, I'll do whatever.

So I think it's complex and I think the compassion though doesn't mean you can't set boundaries and it doesn't mean that you have to put up with something that makes you feel uncomfortable. What is important to know though is that when we experience that and we can have awareness of the pain that it caused, there's research showing that if you experience it, you're more likely to pass it down to your children as well. So there's this amazing study which has been going on for over 20 years in the US. It's called Project Eat. And it's by a group of researchers that's led by a woman called Professor Diane Newmark-Steiner.

And they have been tracking who were teenagers in 1998, 1999. They're still tracking them now. So over 20 years and they've been measuring their body image, their eating behaviours, their weight, other health markers. and now a lot of those teenagers are parents themselves. And they've been publishing studies over the years and one of the most recent studies, because we've had a lot of research just kind of showing a correlation between

if you experienced diet talk and that kind of stuff when you were growing up, you're likely to have worse body image. But we hadn't actually tracked them over time and then seen how it gets passed again to the next generation. And in this study of over 500 adolescents, they found that if these teenagers grew up experiencing encouragement to diet or discussions about weight talk, they were more likely to have low body confidence, problematic relationship with

food or a complex relationship with food, disorder eating the things that we're talking about now. Interestingly, those same adolescents now have their own children, and in their home environments now, there's a greater weight focus as well. so there's a sense that by being aware of this you can grieve that experience and then also think about how we're going to disrupt that and change it for the next generation whether you're a parent or not thinking about the young people around you on a practical level when it comes to breaking generational trauma of this nature within ourselves if we we know where it's come from we're listening to this we can identify and recognize what you're saying as like

applying to us, what are the steps we can take as individuals to try and break that so that we don't then pass it on to the young people around us? I think listening to podcasts like this and trying to look at read and listen to podcasts and really look after your own body image because by looking after your own body image and healing that relationship, you will naturally pass that on to the people that are around you. It's a bit like put your oxygen mask on first when you're on a flight, it's the same thing. When you have to start working to accept and appreciate your own body, it forces you to confront a lot of the biases that we've internalised. It forces you to consider how the people around you have affected you and equally we affect

those that are around us. And it's tricky because sometimes some of the things that we can do when we're healing our own body image or struggling can actually perpetuate the problem. So as a starting point, body talk free zones, so just not talking about bodies and appearance until you feel like you can comfortably, you know, compliment someone based on how they look in a way that doesn't reinforce a narrow beauty standard. I think having, if you feel comfortable and you have that kind of relationship, having a conversation with your parent or whoever it was and being, and kind of, if you can frame, like, I remember this happening. I wonder what were the conversations about weight and dieting when you were growing up? What do you remember your

parents saying? Where do you think they got that from? What do you think about it now? I've been reading this or I listen to this podcast talking about this topic and use that as a conversation starter and see how far you get and then practicing setting boundaries. And then I think that idea of healing your own relationship with your body, you will naturally pass that on. With all that in mind and like as someone who's done a lot of work in this area where do you think you're at with it now i think we'd both say you know like that we learned a lot about diet culture from our moms that they both were kind of immersed in it and obviously you said that comment came from your dad how do you feel in kind of the boundary space the like forgiving space where are you at

within your own family now? Very interestingly. This was actually a conversation that played out live. I won't go into it too much but I'll just summarise briefly. I was doing a panel talk all about body confidence and my dad came to watch me and he was in the back row and I didn't for one second think that he was going to say anything and towards the end when we were talking about you know the stuff

that our parents have passed on to us he put his hand up and said I would you know I'd like to like apologize to you in front of all these people Oh, no, I'm going to cry. Oh, sorry. Oh, God. And he said, I'd like to apologize because I know that things that I said, I've had a huge impact on you and your sisters,

you know, he said, me and your mum both didn't realize the upset that it was going to cause you and the harm that it was going to cause you. And that's all I needed is him taking accountability for it. not being defensive and just saying I'm sorry because and I fully I fully accept that fully because I think he only knew what he knew at the time if he had known that it was going to have this great negative impact on his daughter who he loves you know more than anything he wouldn't have said it so that's where I land but I know that I'm also lucky to have a dad who was so open to taking accountability and responsibility and that is just not the case

for a lot of people, you know, often people when they confront their parents about something like this are met with defence. So I feel very lucky in that sense. I wasn't expecting to cry that. No, but I think it is important because it's what we were saying before. You don't, no one escapes this. This is the point and this is something that we will get into more in the series. From one angle or another, this will get you. Diet culture will affect you. It will hurt you, it will influence you, it will change you. And I think the relationship, this is the most formative relationship in our life is with our parents or with our caregivers or guardians. And it moulds us. That probably makes it the most painful of all.

Yeah. There is. Can we move on? Yeah. There is a Philip Larkin poem that reads, they fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with faults they had and add some extra just for you. He might not have meant to, but in that opener, Larkin crack the code when it came to almond moms. Whether it stems from a place of unhealed trauma within themselves, a perverse sense of really wanting a happy life for their little girl or an outright toxic jealousy, to a certain extent, generational trauma is an inevitability, particularly when it comes to this conversation.

And although there are so many other factors that shape our views of ourselves and our relationships with our bodies, this dynamic with our mother or our guardian is an incredibly formative one. In as much as by watching her go about her life, we learn how we should go about our own, either by emulating her or vowing to do it differently. Can I just pause? This is not scripted. I've scripted that bit, but I just need to put a thought in here. Please do.

There is so much pressure within that. As a mother now, I realize, and I think we talked about this with Molly. The pressure that that puts on you to know that as a mother, everything you do is being watched, you can't. It's, that's actually mammoth when you think about it. Like, it's not just how you speak. It's not just when you're on. It's not just when you're with your kid, actively conversing with them that you need to be careful. It's this pressure to stand tall in the mirror. It's, this pressure to, to push yourself and eat things that maybe you're uncomfortable eating, to not use language that comes instinctively, to not criticize your own body, and to perform, I guess, because a lot of it will feel performative because it's not how we really feel about ourselves or our bodies. That's actually a huge burden. And I think as millennials, we really feel the burden of breaking generational trauma across the board. And it's difficult

because it means that we have to live in a perma, hypervigilant state. Yeah. of continuously watching ourselves and monitoring ourselves. And it does further feel like a feminist issue, that it's just like, oh my God, this is just insidious. It's everywhere. For our whole lives, we were told you've got to be, you've got to be just this thinness. Everybody's watching you to check that you're the right size

and behaving right. And now all of a sudden, it's like, yeah, you've got society watching you to make sure that you're a right size, but then you've got these little eyes looking up at you to make sure that you don't care about all the noise that's outside. That is heavy. A lot of pressure. A lot of pressure.

But we can't get away from the fact that a mother's influence is significant. And it did feel, therefore, like an important conversation for us to have early on in this series. Before we became truly enthralled by the media or aware of the influences filling our screens and phones, we had that relationship with our mother, which was born from the one. she had with hers. Nature got us, nurture got us, and next week we'll be back to talk all about how the tabloids got us. We'll see you back here next Monday when we deep dive back into the 1990s and 2000s, playing close attention to the media and what it had to say about the women of the time. Should I delete that as part of the ACAS creator network?