The One Reason We Should All Stop The ‘Diet-Cycle’

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Are you a role model to someone?

Most of you know the reason that I got healthy, lost weight and improved my fitness was that after the birth of my first child I realised that I didn’t want my children growing up with a poor role model in me. I didn’t want them to think it was OK to live off junk food, drink too much and sit in front of the TV. I wanted them to be active and healthy with a healthy relationship with food and their own bodies.

Bringing up healthy kids is something I am extremely passionate about. It really upsets me when I see kids walking to school with a bottle of fizzy pop and a packet of crisps for breakfast, or stories in the press like the one a few years ago about the boy who had gone deaf and blind due to his poor diet. There was another news report around the same time, where a boy in Scotland was rushed to hospital, because he had collapsed due to what was termed ‘nutritional failure’. This severely obese boy, was basically being fed to death. In my opinion, this is just as bad as starving a child, but on the face of it, do the majority of people actually see it that way?

A report in The Sunday Post, about the boy, reflected on how people with eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa trigger help and treatment, due to it being seen as a psychological issue (although, we know there are still huge waiting lists for treatments for such disorders). Yet children presenting to GPs with health issues that are a symptom of overeating and poor nutrition, aren’t necessarily given the same priority.

And in my opinion, there is no denying that this is ‘malnutrition’. Whilst most of us associate malnutrition with the vision of 80’s news broadcasts and starving children in Africa, ‘malnutrition’ actually means ‘bad nutrition’. It means feeding your body with an imbalanced diet. This obviously includes being under-nourished and not getting enough energy into your body, but it also includes eating a poor diet, which leaves you unwell.

Striking the balance

As with all things parenting, we have to try and strike a balance.

But, I find it is difficult to strike that balance when it comes to body image. You want your kids to be body confident, whatever their size and shape, and feel comfortable in their skin, we all should feel that way!! But equally you want them to be healthy, and not put their health at risk by being too heavy.

When Ruby, my eldest, was weaned and entering toddlerhood, I was totally paranoid about not feeding her junk food and keeping her a healthy weight.  Terrified, in all honesty, that she would turn into the same child I did, and experience what I experienced. Don’t get me wrong I wasn’t tormented day in, day out, but what I felt and experienced as a child was enough to make me want to ensure my daughter was never made to feel the same.

Then one night we were getting her ready for bed, when she was about 7, she said to me, ‘Mum I’m fat!’ It was like someone had stabbed me in the heart.  I felt sick. Because first and foremost she wasn’t, she was a perfectly healthy weight, but like her Dad and I, carried a little bit of weight on her tummy at times.  This opinion hadn’t come from other children either – it was from herself.  Now whether the root of that came from things she had picked up from me, or from elsewhere I don’t know, but it made me realise we have to be so careful about how we speak about ourselves and others, and what we expose our children to in the media.

So started the conversation about how she was beautiful just the way she was, but it is important to eat a healthy diet, and eat foods in the right portion sizes to ensure that we don’t put too much weight on, because that can be bad for our health.  How we must eat lots of fruit and vegetables, and have junk food as a real treat.

She’s now slap bang in the middle of the teenage years, and I tell her every day that she is beautiful, and hope and pray that this translates into a positive body image. We have definitely had our issues, particularly now that she has access to social media, with snapchat filters that augment our faces into something unrecognisable, and everybody’s desire to live and display their ‘best Insta-life’.  We talk regularly as a family, about where our food comes from, and what it does for our bodies. We have regular discussions about what a healthy choice might be, and how we shouldn’t have too many treats. One particular time when I had to remind her that 4 twin packs of Kinder Bueno’s in a day, wasn’t perhaps the best choice nutritionally, her immediate response was ‘But I won’t get fat, I am always at dance!’. She probably had a point, she trained 2-3 hours, 6 days a week at the time, but I had to remind her how we can’t outrun a bad diet and regardless of energy balance, there was absolutely no nutritional benefit to eating that many chocolate bars in one sitting – let alone what her orthodontist might say!

Stopping the vicious diet cycle

We often have members attend our groups who bring their children along, and they want to stand on the scales, or even more occasionally, want to go on a diet. There has been a few times when parents have asked for a diet sheet for their teenage daughter. And whilst I think it is good that we normalise weighing ourselves, and not feeling frightened of what the scales say, acknowledging what it says and dealing with it, I would NEVER EVER give a child a diet sheet. For children and particularly teenagers, it is 1000% better that they learn while they are young, the concept of calories in and calories out, and how to fuel their body properly. It’s a life skill and once it is learned you know it forever.

To give a teenager a diet sheet, where they only eat a certain set of meals for a period of time ,until they lose some weight, puts them straight into that vicious cycle of dieting, not dieting, losing weight, gaining weight, and for all the misery that the majority of us knows that causes.

Why would we force that misery onto our children? Why don’t we just teach them how to manage it from a young age – keeping it real and scientific – about how to keeps ourselves healthy and strong. Take the emotion out of it that we feel, and stick to the facts, so that they grow up just dealing with the facts and none of the neuroses that we have picked up along the way.

It is our responsibility to teach the next generation, in whatever form our interactions are with them, whether you are a parent, auntie, uncle, teacher, friend or neighbour; how to manage weight in a healthy way, how to get the balance right between enjoying our food, and our lives, to have a healthy relationship with the weighing scales and above all to stay healthy and active. It is our responsibility to exemplify the life that we want for the next generation.

This week!

Think about how you speak about yourself, your body image and how you describe your foods, in front of the children in your life.  How do you describe yourself or talk about your habits and behaviours. Be mindful of how you might be influencing young minds. This goes beyond what we feed our children, it is how our whole attitude is impressed upon their developing belief systems. Kids are like sponges, they absorb everything around them, without us even realising. How many times has a child in your life repeated something back to you, that you had no idea they were paying any attention to.

Most of all, if you can’t do this for you, be the best version of yourself by being responsible for the next generation, so that they don’t grow up with the experiences that we had and problems that we now have as a result of our past. Let them grow up feeling happy, healthy, content and most of all in control of their lifestyle.