Comments on: So, your mom is a dieter. Her issue – not yours.

By: AthenatheNotSoWise

AthenatheNotSoWise — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:42:31 +0000

My dad was excellent at making me feel like I wasn’t worth much, but it never came down to weight between the two of us because of his own consistent size issue. I never thought anything bad of him for that issue, as a child I thought that that was just how all dads looked, but as I got older my brother and I would pick on him for this flaw because we knew just how well attacking someones unspoken insecruties worked.

My mom works mostly in jobs requiring maual labor that over time have made her rather buff, not Ulga the Ukrainia muscle woman buff, but fairly muscular in her own right. Every once in a while she’ll indulge herself on chocolate a little too much and complain about how her pants don’t fit for a week while she stops snacking and then she’ll go back to normal. She never goes on official diets, she never tells me I’m fat, and she only used to make joking comments when I would indulge myself in eating a lot of the foods I love. Now, she tends to be more sensitive about that, but after going through both extremes I’m doing my best to make her inable to point out either problematic eating pattern.

By: bellzar

bellzar — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:56:42 +0000

I have no idea where it all started.
I think it started from my interest in fashion, then eventually escalated to me perceiving thighs that don’t touch as the ideal, and fat-free arms as something to strive to achieve. It also had in large part to do with the fact that discussions about the female body among my friends were limited to praising a very thin parameter of what is beautiful – pun intended. My two closest friends both had eating disorders. One had been officially diagnosed and vehemently declared her hatred for anything fat without a second thought. And the other, someone who pretended to eat and lied about eating when actually they barely ate but claimed they ate like a pig.

So once I got away from these two, I found sites like Jezebel and this one, and was able to at least begin recovery and realize that female beauty should not be defined and that it is actually in the best interest of capitalism and patriachy to confine and belittle women – not in the best interest of women.

Recovery has been hard, the voice was like a best friend, however harmful. My eating disorder, although officially never diagnosed, was still very real and is something I still struggle with. I am about 3 months recovered and my ED took about 1 and 1/2 of my life. I am happy to be where I am, and I wouldn’t say that I am unhappy that I had an ED because who knows how I would be now. I love who I am now, and I suppose that’s all that matters.

By: Christine

Christine — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:02:43 +0000

I am one of the people this clicks for. My mother had/has low to no self esteem. She was bulemic from the time she was 14. She had weight and image issues all her life. She passed them on to me. One year for my birthday I had a stomach virus and she told me that it was because I was always eating too much and it was my body’s way of telling me to give it a rest and she had my birthday party anyhow except of course I couldn’t eat anything. She complained about how fast I grew when she had to buy new clothes because my old ones didn’t fit. I started restricting and throwing up when I was 13. I got thin but even when I was a size 3 she said things and recommended I go to Weight Watchers like my grandmother and aunt. I never wanted to look like my aunt, she’d been skinny until she had kids and then she was fat. It was just one reason I never wanted to have kids. Anyhow, years and years later, I had two kids in my 30s and I’m trying to be a better role model for them and hello, yes, turns out I look more like my aunt than my mom. My mom would only gain 12 pounds with pregnancy so that when she delivered she would have a net weight loss. Ugh. She’s still skinny. Her mouth is full of caps and bridgework because her teeth fell apart. She has to take Nexium for the damage to her esophagus. She still takes laxatives every day. She still has no self esteem. I’ve had 20 years of therapy and I’m not much like her at all.