Jan 24 2009
Unhealthy eating can turn dangerous
It’s starting again, the war between my daughter and myself on her eating habits. It is bad enough that I noticed none of us are eating as healthy as we should again. We go through phases like this. Of course this time I don’t have excuses, but causes. Such as the fact that my local store doesn’t carry many healthy fruits and veggies; without a vehicle this makes it more difficult. Add in the lack of money factor and there you have another cause. Again, not excuses just reasons behind it. So today I will be pulling out my recipes and looking for my cheaper healthy ones. I know I have them, I collect them all the time. However, that still leaves the fights between my daughter and myself.
She is 11, almost 12 now (although at times she acts like she is 17), and at that age where she feels like too much food and she balloons up. We have discussed so many times that meat on a girl is a good thing, that when your pelvis bone sticks out, this is a bad thing. However, it’s become a double edged sword for me. All of her life up till a year ago, she was the skinniest kid around. She had no bottom, and at age 10 was still wearing size 7 or 8 slim pants. So I was constantly reassuring her that she would fill out, but that she was perfectly normal at that size. Of course now that she is filling out, getting my past comments to her tossed in my face is making me crazy.
We’ve had the puberty discussion, we had to go buy training bras last year for her. (Why is it that I never filled out like that when I was younger?) So she starts skipping meals, no breakfast; she leaves her lunch here half the time; and she gets stingy about her dinner. Which in turn leads to her being moody as all get. Of course add in the fact that she will start her women’s time any day now, and you have a girl who goes from one extreme to another. Her friends are all the same as well. Some are still in the too thin range, while others are starting to fill out. Each one of the fillers are trying to stop it, the word fat gets tossed around all the time.
So this morning I took things to the extreme. I had written here before about a pro-Anna site, a place where young girls went to learn the tricks and trades of being anorexic. Well they have pictures on that site. I signed into my fake profile this morning and showed my daughter the most dangerous of cases. I’m not sure how much of a difference it will make, but for her to see girls her age with all their bones showing, barely able to walk, and then reading the health problems, all made her pause. I even noticed one girl that I saw on there weeks ago. She posted a new picture of herself. It was so bad it almost made me cry, and my daughter noticed this. She asked me why it made so sad and I explained to her that I felt if this girl didn’t get real help soon, she would never make it to her 18th birthday. I told my daughter I never wanted to see her get that way, it’s not natural. We were made to have curves, to have meat on our bones.
Some mothers will look down on this approach, but arguing wasn’t working. Force feeding isn’t going to help either. Perhaps the threat of dying will. That is what will happen to these girls who are anorexic, the ones that don’t get help. I think I have to stay away from that site for awhile, otherwise I might end up doing a bit of googling and try and find these girls. I would call up their mothers and tell them exactly what was going on. I’m sure that wouldn’t go over too well. Besides, that site makes me sad for the girls, and angry at every older woman that signs in there and gives them advice to stay thin.
As a mother myself, you can see how nosy I am already on my daughter’s eating habits. It’s what we do as parents, or at least what we are supposed to do.
I am not a mother (yet) but if and when it does happen for me I hope and pray that I will be the kind that cares enough to take the big risks to do what I need to for my children. I don’t think that it was too drastic showing your daughter that site. I do hope that it helps her not to go down that road. Good luck with getting her to eat and in helping her to deal with her blossoming body.
Society has women believing that we have to be thin to be pretty. I have a 14 year old daughter who has been a vegetarian now for three years (I thought it was a phase…it’s been a LONG phase lol). Eating right, is something she HAS to do, or she’ll end up sick! Showing your daughter the anorexic site, I feel, was a good idea. We bring our children into this world, we can’t really hide them from it. We have to teach them what is right and what is wrong in a world that was far different from our own.
I agree with the previous comment by ‘wind’ … It’s the people around her that matters. If they’re thin, then your daughter will try to be like them too. But there’s not much you can do about that!
You must tell her not to skip meals. Obviously everyone knows that the brain function slower if you skip your breakfast. But if you skip lunch, you tend to eat more (than usual) for dinner. And that’s when you generally rest or do minimal activities. So, it’s harder to shed off those calories.
Whooo hoooo I finally got my daughter to start eating breakfast! Baby steps, baby steps all in the right direction. Thanks guys. I did let her read these comments as well. Any little bit helps as most parents know!