Author estranged from daughter over weight loss

“No!”, my mother has always liked to remind me, was my first word and one that I issued at her, with conviction, on the day of my first birthday to get her to stop feeding me and hand over the feeding spoon pronto. What mattered to me was getting the food in that spoon before my next birthday, thank you very much, and in a quantity and quality of my choosing.
And this deceptively tricky goal for myself, and then later for my daughter, who resisted most of my attempts to guide her eating choices, came to be a defining challenge and source of conflict in my life, to the point that an eating-disorder counsellor for me and a family counsellor for myself and my daughter were resorted to for help over the years, both to little benefit. So that today, though I have finally sorted out my own eating and weight issues, my daughter (27) and I are partially estranged as she continues to resent and reject my past attempts to help her manage her diet when she was both over and underweight.
I brought body baggage with me to my mothering experience from a youth somewhat misspent as a thin-obsessed, diet-mad ballet dancer and rampant bulimic in my young adulthood and then again in my forties. It was a part of what undermined my efforts to guide my daughter towards her weight health and humour. But I do not accept the fairly extreme resentment she has shown towards my well-intended, indeed loving efforts to help her manage this deceptively tricky battle.
We need to consider in the messy mix the collective cultural baggage of our society’s mother-blaming reflex. And this balancing is increasingly needed since the rise of the ‘body positivity’, Health at Every Size movement led by mostly younger women who are not mothers, and many of whom blame their mothers for their body insecurities. You also have the increasingly powerful and devious forces of Big Food and Big Diet pushing women and girls especially to the extremes of eating and weight disorder, along with Big Fashion shaping and promoting a thin body-beauty standard for women that few of us XX mortals can ever hope to achieve.
Diet and weight management might not look like a battle in any sense that it is usually understood. But I argue it is a battle due to the powerful enemies at work against us. These enemies are made all the more powerful because they are masters of deception and manipulation who have been very effective in getting women to fight against each other instead of on the same side of the battlefield, as we more naturally would fight. This is why I say that we of the fatter, much more body-embattled sex today need to embrace the warrior within to fight for our weight health and humour together as mothers, daughters and sisters alike.
In programming her daughters to be ‘the fatter sex’, that is the sex equipped with extra fat-storing capacities and impulses, with a slower metabolism, and a keener, more erratic and hormone-fuelled appetite for the most efficient fat-storing foods (sweet carbohydrates), Mother Nature did not equip us well for the modern day where these foods especially are in constant oversupply and back-up fat storage is rarely needed. She also made us the menstruating sex, another body burden that further heightens our carb cravings for at least one week in four and for approximately 40 years of our lives. She also gave us the unique body-battle challenges of pregnancy and breast-feeding, followed by menopause, a process of radical hormonal upheaval that further heightens our cravings for the most fattening foods while reducing our capacity to burn fat, making sure there would never be a dull moment for her daughters on the body battlefield.
These critical biological differences between the fatter and the skinnier sexes have not been given nearly enough attention in our modern diet and weight debates, and need to be emphasised as a central factor explaining women’s and girls’ disproportionately high rates of eating disorders, body insecurity and extreme weight disorders in the modern West.
We XX warriors need to work together in sisterly solidarity to fight this battle and the wider war for female power and self-determination that increasingly depends upon it. I believe we can and will succeed.
A mildly abbreviated chapter taken with kind permission from the new self-helper The Fatter Sex: A Battle Plan For Women’s Weight Health And Humour by Sacha Jones (Umbilical Books, $45), available in bookstores nationwide, and online through Bookhub, the easy way to locate NZ books.