When I Found Out I Was Having A Daughter, I Made A Vow To Myself. Keeping It Has Been Harder Than I Realized.

My daughter was born on a muggy August day in the early morning hours. Right from the beginning, she was a delightful surprise, with a shock of bright red hair and a feisty personality to match.

At my last ultrasound, the doctor estimated she’d weigh 8 pounds. When she finally made her entrance, the official measurement was 7 pounds, 4 ounces. As I shared her birth stats with gleeful family members and friends, I wondered: At what point will my daughter’s weight stop being celebrated?

In the seven months she’s been alive, loved ones have asked for updates on her growth and fawned over her chubby thighs. “Oh, she’s 15 pounds!” they’ll exclaim, as though her weight gain is the happiest news they’ve heard all week.

So, then, where is the cutoff? When she wakes up on the morning of her 10th birthday, will the comments about her body shift from delight and enthusiasm to critique and shame? And at what point will she internalize the message that her thighs, no matter their size, can only be categorized in the binary of “good” or “bad?”

Growing up, I don’t remember a time when dieting wasn’t a topic of casual conversation. As a child of the ‘90s, my upbringing coincided perfectly with all sorts of diets and weight loss programs. Carbs were the enemy (though not as evil as sugar), and the latest edition of the Atkins diet book could usually be found on my parents’ bookshelf. I listened as my mom and other women in my life congratulated each other on weight loss and shared their “secrets” to shedding pounds — as if shrinking to fit societal standards was the most important thing a woman could accomplish.

To me, the messaging was clear: Fat is ugly, skinny is pretty, thinness is the only indicator of good health, and our bodies are always up for conversation ― especially when they’ve changed. And while I’ve sometimes resented the way weight was addressed by my family as a child, the dieters of the ’90s were themselves victims of a toxic diet culture, and their resources for other ways of approaching body image were limited. But the effects of this immersion into diet culture followed me into adulthood.

When my metabolism slowed down in my mid-20s and I gained a significant amount of weight for the first time in my life, my immediate reaction was shame. For a time, I fell into the trap of dieting and obsessive exercise, believing my troubles might melt away if I could just get back to the size I was in high school. (Spoiler alert: It’s normal to grow between the ages of 18 and 28, and losing a few pounds is no substitute for therapy.)

By the time I got married at 30, I thought I’d made progress in unlearning the falsehoods I’d once bought into about thinness and worthiness, but I still felt a pang of shame when I noticed that some back fat was visible through my dress in our wedding photos.

“It must have been all the guests were focusing on,” I thought. I imagined my aunts sipping wine at the reception, chatting amongst themselves about my weight under the guise of “concern.” These are the ugly thoughts that come along with a life of normalized diet culture.

When my husband and I discussed trying to have a baby, I knew I had to face these feelings head-on. I dove into the world of intuitive eating, frequenting Reddit pages dedicated to resetting my body’s natural appetite and moving in ways that make me feel good without the singular purpose of losing weight. I followed anti-diet influencers on Instagram, spoke with friends about their own experiences growing up in the weight-obsessed ’90s (and beyond), and continued to work on body image in therapy.

I tried, with varying success, to set boundaries with the people in my life who still openly fretted over calories and weight loss, asking them to have those conversations outside my presence. Pregnancy would force me to accept changes to my body ― there was no doubt about that ― but when I found out we were expecting a little girl, I felt an even more urgent need to smash the cycle of diet culture.

During pregnancy, I made a few vows to myself. One was that my daughter would never hear me speaking ill of my size, or watch me poke and prod at my waist in the mirror. I’d take her swimming and never hide behind other people in photos to hide my body. I’d do my best to teach her that “fat” isn’t a bad word and BMI (body mass index) is an outdated, unreliable indicator of health.

These are easy vows to make but challenging ones to keep. Though she’s not yet a year old, my daughter has been in the room when I’ve criticized myself in a new pair of jeans or lamented my appearance in a selfie. I think of this first year as a training period. There’s room for me to fall back into old habits while my daughter is too young to understand, but each instance is an opportunity to remind myself of the promises I made.

My husband is endlessly supportive and fully on board with kicking the influences of diet culture on the way we raise our daughter, so I’m not alone in my endeavor (and lucky for that). But it’s just plain hard to unhear the words and unbelieve the beliefs I absorbed at such a young age. I know that my daughter will be exposed to her fair share of diet culture as she navigates school and life. She’ll hear her friends say ugly things about their faces and bodies, and absorb messages from media and pop culture. There’s no way to fully insulate our kids from these things, but we can provide them with the tools to better understand them.

I didn’t have these tools as a child. In my eyes, the things adults said and the diet-obsessed stars I saw on TV (I’m looking at you, Oprah and Kirstie Alley) had to be right. They were grownups, after all! With the right tools, I might have realized earlier that fad diets usually fail, celebrities often make money endorsing various weight loss plans, and body size is in no way tied to inherent worth.

If I can help it, my daughter will have a robust toolkit. I hope she’ll find comfort ― never shame ― in coming to me about changes to her body, knowing that my love and pride in her could never be altered by size or appearance. I want her to feel forever safe in our home, at any weight, in her beautiful body.

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