11/02/2022
As a Licensed Therapist and Certified Eating Disorder Specialist, my skin is crawling with all of the after Halloween body shaming and get rid of the candy posts showing up on my feed today.
1. Remember, kids are watching you. If you are shaming yourself or making food rules, they someday will too. This teaches generational diet culture and body shaming.
2. Halloween is not the beginning of the season of good or bad choices. Don’t assign morality to food, any kind of food. Food is neither good or bad and that includes cookies, candy, etc. And you eating certain foods also doesn’t make you good or bad. Would you tell a 5 year old they are “bad” for eating candy? How about a 15 year old? Hopefully the answer is ”no”. So if they are not bad for eating candy then are you? If the answer is “yes” then it’s time to think of how diet culture has impacted your views on the human body.
Facts:
⭐️51% of 10 year old girls feel better about themselves when they are dieting.
⭐️91% of girls when surveyed were unhappy with their bodies at age 18
⭐️89% of girls have dieted by age 17
⭐️81% of 10 year old girls were afraid of being fat
⭐️46% of 9-11 year old girls are on a diet
And last night my kids had to pay the peanut m&m toll. All their peanut m&ms had to be forfeited for their rent for living in my house. Obviously a joke, but still, I ate so many peanut m&ms that I’m fairly sure there are none left in Oswego County. And guess what? I’m still the SAME person today that I was yesterday. My worth is the same. My friends are the same. And… not one person called me bad today because I ate peanut m&ms last night so it looks like my morality hasn’t changed either.
