Ep.118 MOM CHAT: Diet Culture – Moms Share How to Embrace a New Approach for Themselves and Their Families w/ Erica & Maggie

Show Notes:

Our MOM CHAT episodes are special! What if moms recorded their conversations when they got together? There’s something wonderful about having casual conversations on a specific topic when out to dinner, having coffee, drinking wine or on a walk with other moms. We wanted to capture these conversations and share them with you.

We brought together two of our cherished HER Circle members Maggie and Erica to have a casual chat on a topic of importance. In this episode, we discuss the topic of Diet Culture. Erica and Maggie discuss their journeys in dismantling diet culture and its impact on their lives and parenting. Both friends stress the importance of modeling healthy behaviors, addressing neurodiversity sensitively, and using teachable moments to instill body positivity in children.

• Introduction and Purpose of the Conversation
• Maggie’s Journey with Diet Culture
• Defining Diet Culture
• Erica’s Perspective and Personal Experience
• Challenges of Raising Children in Diet Culture
• Modeling Healthy Relationships with Food
• Addressing Neurodiversity and Food
• Final Thoughts

Episode Notes and Resources:

HER Circle: https://www.herhealthcollective.com/membership

RD’s for Neurodiversity: https://www.rdsforneurodiversity.com/

Kid Food Explorers: https://kidfoodexplorers.com/

Support Mama Needs a Moment! Become a patron through our Mama Needs a Moment Patreon.

Mom Chat – Diet Culture – Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

diet culture, weight management, unlearning diet culture, thin ideal, food hierarchy, body trust, mindful eating, neurodiversity approach, body positivity, childhood nutrition, body comments, food restrictions, body image, responsive feeding, fat liberation

SPEAKERS

Erica, Cindi, Crissy, Maggie

Crissy  

We are so excited to be here for another one of our mom chats. This is a new type of conversation we’re having on Mama needs a moment where we sit down with two of our beloved her circle members and dive into a topic that is pertinent and relative relevant to moms, but really from the perspective of just four moms sitting down having a conversation like we were having a glass of wine or a cup of coffee and just chatting about it. So today, we are joined by Erica and Maggie, two of our moms, and we’re diving into a conversation about diet culture. We were very strategic in selecting these two mamas because we know that they have done a lot of personal work in this space, work in this space, raise their kids in this space, just they’re in it. They’re living it. And we know that this will be a very beneficial conversation. So welcome, Erica and Maggie. We are so excited to have you with us today.

Erica  

Excited to be here.

Maggie  

Yeah. Thank you so much for having us. 

Crissy  

Okay, we’re gonna go ahead and just dive right in Maggie. I’m gonna go ahead and start with you, and then we’ll pop over to Erica. But I’d love to know where you began on your journey with dismantling diet culture and embracing sort of a new way of doing things for yourself and your family? 

Maggie  

Yeah, so it’s a it’s a complicated answer. So I am a dietitian as well. So I was educated in a lot of diet culture, and I was interested in weight management during my education, because I had a family that dieted, and I saw the struggles they had, and I wanted the answers. So in schooling, I really focused in diet culture. It wasn’t until I was getting my graduate degree that I was it was my final project, and I was writing a review article. I was looking at the literature, and I was writing review about the parent child dyad and what weight management interventions there were that showed a significant successful change. So what I defined as success was losing a significant amount of weight and keeping it off for five years. And in writing that review article, I found nothing. There was no research to show a weight loss intervention that worked. So at that point in my life, I was like, Oh my gosh, what am I doing? Like, why am I focusing in this? So that was a turning point for me, but I think it’s really important to understand with diet culture, because it is our culture. It is everywhere, and we are all at different places and learning this information. So it took me a long time to realize this information and really put it in place. Another thing that happened is I was at a dietetic conference, and I saw Christy Harrison speak, and so she’s a leader in the space. She’s also a dietitian, and she wrote the book anti diet. And at that point in time, I was like, Okay, this is something I really like I want to change. So I really committed to unlearning and learning about diet culture from that point on. And I really just did a deep dive. Sometimes I can get a little obsessive about learning things, I think, with my job and with being a parent, and so I really just got a lot of resources, read a lot of books, completely changed my social media to, you know, be getting information from sources that were trustworthy. And so that was, that was how it all started and continues for the unlearning. 

Cindi  

Maggie, can you define for us what you interpret diet culture as being both from your personal and, of course, maybe from your professional perspective as well. 

Maggie  

Yeah, so I do use Christy Harrison’s definition of diet culture. And so diet culture is idolizing the thin ideal and connecting thin bodies to healthy bodies, to bodies that are successful and loved. So there’s a lot of emphasis on the thin, not only for health, but for being, you know, morally better. So that’s going to be diet culture. Diet culture is also going to put food on a hierarchy, meaning there’s foods that are bad and foods that are good, and when we eat the good foods, we are good, and when we eat the bad foods, we are bad. Diet. Culture is going to put a huge emphasis on our individual ability to change our health, saying, If I get in your diagnosis, oh, if I just eat more carrots and kale, you know what, I’m going to be a okay? And the reality is that it’s way more complex, and we can’t fully control our bodies or our health and diet. Culture is also going to oppress people that are outside of these ideas, so people in larger bodies, or people who are, you know, rejecting this this way of life, yeah. 

Cindi  

Thanks so much, Maggie! Erica, how about you? Can you give us your background, how you got into it, and then also define it for us from your perspective?

Erica  

Yeah, so was before I got pregnant, I had to have my gallbladder removed. So I had a number of gallstones, and afterward, it was important for me to see a dietitian, because I knew that the gallbladder did important things in terms of how it processes the foods that you eat, and how comfortable you may or may not be with your previous foods that you’ve intake prior to having my gallbladder removed, and so that, in combination with the fact that I wasn’t especially comfortable with my weight. I had been on birth control for most of my teens and 20s, and so it changed the way that my body looked and felt. I didn’t feel like my food intake, in terms of volume or type of food changed, but because my body was changing, it bothered me, and I thought that there must be something that I’m doing wrong. So with this medical situation, I thought, Okay, this is a perfect opportunity for me to get a good understanding of what I should or should not be doing. And I think that’s the big part for me as a non professional about what diet culture is the shoulds and the should nots, and when I did find a dietitian, she preferred to be referred to as nutritionist. Now I recognize and Maggie can explain. I know that there are certification and things like that differences, technically, between a dietitian and a nutritionist, but apparently within that space, it’s common now for people who have the proper certifications to prefer to refer to themselves as nutritionists, because of the stigma around the term diet. When I started speaking with her, she did help me understand what, for example, the gallbladder did, and what foods would or would not make me feel more uncomfortable, like say, in a GI perspective. But she told me something that I will never forget, and I tell it to myself internally a lot, and when my daughter gets to that age that these questions start to come up, I will tell her too. The only bad food is rotten food. There is no bad food. You know, as Maggie was saying bad foods mean you are bad and just because something is higher in sodium or sugar or something like that, it doesn’t make it bad. If you are physically able to eat it, then it’s not a bad food. And so when I started thinking about it like that, it made me feel so much better that, hey, you know, I am not my size. I am not my you know, what I see in the mirror, what I eat? And she really emphasized trusting your body in terms of the movement that you do and the foods that you eat, and how much that you eat, because your body is a fine tuned mechanism, and if you really tune into it, rather than eating mindlessly, or, you know, some of these other mental and emotional processes that you can go through around eating and movement, if you’re able to do those things mindfully, you can feel, hey, you know, I just took two bites of this salad, and it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve tasted in my entire life. I must be missing some nutrient that is in this salad. Maybe my next meal should be something similar as well. Or I start walking around and, you know, I don’t really feel like sitting down. I’m just gonna start getting up and moving and dancing and, Oh, this feels great. I’m just gonna keep it riding and just being aware of what your body wants and needs. Oh, I’m feeling full. Or, hey, Ooh, man, I took a second bite of that cookie, and that was just not making my tummy feel good. Mental note next time, we’ll stick with five cookies and not six. You know, that kind of thing. So just being aware of how you physically feel with what you eat don’t eat, how you move or don’t move. And for me as a child, I’m sure most a number of women that are in our age group grew up with this. Your mother doesn’t have to say, Hey, don’t eat that piece of cake. Or you’ll get fat. They’ll say, Oh, I can’t have any I’m on a diet. Or they’ll say, oh, I shouldn’t. Or, you know, I’m going to have to work that off later. Oh, let’s do this so we can earn this treat, or this, that or the other thing, and so for me, it was really important to be mindful of the things that I would say around my child, who’s five now, and she’s only going to get bigger, and being aware of how the words that I say can be interpreted in her brain. And. Her father’s side has diabetes that run in his family. Our conversation around sugar is not, no, don’t have a cookie. It’s, did you already have a cookie today? Okay, well, then let’s have another cookie tomorrow, and it’s no comment about how much she’s had. There’s no stigma associated with it in that way, but being mindful of the fact that she could potentially have these medical issues, we also want to make sure that she knows there are other foods that she can eat that can satisfy those things, but in a way, that’s not no no more cookies you’ve already had too many.

Crissy  

Yeah, yeah, such an important distinction, and I’m glad that you brought that up, because I would love to dive into that a little bit more thinking about how our generation and how we were all raised. I think about those magazines like teen beat and teen bop or whatever they were called. And then you have, like the US Weekly. And you know, you see all these celebrities, and I remember seeing this one where it was Jessica Simpson, and she was on stage, and I guess she had put on a little weight, and the headlines were just ripping her apart. And I saw this social media post going through how much she weighed and which, again, there’s a whole host of issues there with like, let’s plaster a woman’s weight out there, but it had what her weight was, and that she was basically just the average weight of women. And yet, we were receiving this message constantly, that that is Ooh, gross and not right. And like, gosh, look at Jessica Simpson, and she was gorgeous. And this is sort of the messaging that we received when we were growing up. And I think it’s very important, as Erica said, to be really mindful of the messaging that our children receive. I know looking across the screen here, of everyone we have with us, we all have daughters. Some have a son as well, but we all have daughters, and there’s that extra added pressure raising a young girl, and I’d love to know, Erica, you already mentioned kind of your approach, and especially, I also have diabetes that runs in my family, so there’s these other factors at play, but how we kind of protect our children, our daughters, especially from diet culture, because it’s still out there. It’s messaging that is still being pumped into our eyes and brains, and our children’s eyes and brains, so I’d love to know what you’re doing, how you approach that.

Maggie  

I think it’s really important that we use the words diet culture like we have these words to call out harm, and our children should hear them like we should define them. Culture is everywhere. It is so easy to find specifically in children’s shows, in media, so when things come up pointing it out, saying, Hey, I don’t believe in that. That doesn’t align with my values and our family values. That’s diet culture. That’s harmful, and that’s mean, if it’s, you know, weight based bullying or teasing, there’s so much of that in children’s media. There’s also a lot of nutrition lessons that are not appropriate develop, you know, with sugar. I mean, we hear it all the time, and and children’s media like, Oh, you shouldn’t eat sugar. It’s terrible for you and bad for you, which, I mean, like, we can’t just eat sugar. That’s true, but that’s not appropriate for a child, right? That’s not their job. They don’t decide the what. They don’t go the grocery shopping. They’re provided with the food. It just makes them feel that shame around that food. So then when they do have access to it and eat it, they have that good bad mentality. Children are really black and white thinkers, so if they hear something is bad, bad, bad, they’re very much going to think that they are bad. So calling that out, saying we have to eat all different types of food, as a dietitian, that is the only lesson I have given my children and nutrition is we have to eat all different types of food, like Erica said, like, oh, have you had foods like that already today? Well, can I offer you something different? Maybe we’ll have that another time, letting them know that those foods are still going to be available to you, and making it neutral. There’s no morality in their desire for carbohydrates or sugar.

Erica  

One thing that I had to talk to my parents about, who are older. They were older when they had me, and so when my child was young, very young, like under two. They would take care of her during the day, while we were at work, and she was always very thin. She was so thin, not a single baby roll on her. I was convinced that if some stranger saw me out with my childhood that they were going to think I was starving her, because she was so thin, but she could eat, she could pack it away, and we never restricted anything. Food restriction is never okay. And every once in a while I would be around and my my dad might say something like, Oh, you’ve had enough. And I’d say, oh, oh no, please don’t say that. It’s not you’ve had enough. And I might feel differently. You. If my child were displaying some concerning eating habits or movement habits or something like that. But you cannot sit my child down for 10 minutes. She is moving and grooving, and always has been. And so maybe if there were something to offset it, I might want to talk to a doctor or somebody like Maggie about how I should phrase something like that, or, Hey, maybe we’ve got enough of this. Hey, let’s give you more of this other food. But we don’t have any food restrictions. Whatever you’ve been offered. If you want more of any of these things, you want more grapes, sure, if you want more crackers, sure, as long as it was already on the menu, you can have as much as you want. So food restriction in terms of volume, is also really important to me in terms of how we do that, because the other thing that we have to keep in mind is that we do live in places where cheap food isn’t inherently the best food to be eating all of the time, and I know Maggie can speak to this. Unfortunately, if people don’t have the resources to shop at, you know, your whole foods, or to get fresh produce and higher quality meats and things like that, we can’t put that stigma onto our kids, who will then pass it on to their friends, who may or may not have the family resources to do things like that.

Maggie  

Yeah, that makes a good point, that diet culture is classist, right? Like we demonize foods, but some people don’t have access to their food, so they’re inherently classes. But you also made a really good point Erica, that when you’re mentioning people like to comment on what children are eating, so I think it’s really important for our children that we have to be advocates like we have to kind of shut that down because they’re listening and sharing. You know how you treat food in your household, and sometimes, you know, when I don’t feel comfortable or safe speaking up in the moment, I will definitely speak up later with my child like, know, how uncle, so and so was saying that about food? Well, I don’t believe in that. That’s not how I think of food. So using it as a teachable moment for our our children. And another point that I think is really important when we talk about diet, culture and children, is the most important thing we can or one of the most important things is modeling. I mean, we know that about children. We can say all day, your body is great. We can, you know, all food is good food, but if we are ourselves dieting and being even if we’re not saying it like they’re watching us, they’re watching us step on the scale, they’re watching us pinch our bodies in ways and being displeased with ourselves. So we really have to practice what we preach in this work.

Erica  

You know, you may find this interesting. I have a scale. Most people do. I don’t use it, but I do have it. And for a while, when my daughter was younger, like when she was between three and five, every once in a while, she’d step on it, and we’d, I’d help her read the numbers. So we would kind of just do it as numbers, and she wanted to see how she was growing. The way that I described the scale to her was it shows you how much bigger you’re getting, because you’re growing and you’re a little girl, and you’re going to keep getting bigger and bigger. And so when she learned her numbers every time that the scale would increase, as it does, because she’s a growing child, the way that I would put it is not yay you’re getting bigger, it’s yay you’re growing up and you’re you’re growing, and great job continuing to grow and things like that. Because big also as a word, even though we recognize children get big, grow big, it can be interpreted as width in addition to height. And so I try as best I can to make sure I say, grow up. Or like, if I’m talking about her growth, I’ll say that’s a big girl move, like she’s done something emotionally or physically that I’ve been trying to teach her to do. Hey, great job. That’s a big girl move you’ve been doing that. That’s wonderful.

Crissy  

You bring up an interesting point. I’ve seen some pushback on that a little bit in the Health at Every Size community, about taking back the terms big and fat, trying to kind of change the dynamic around that. What are your thoughts on that?

Erica  

Terms are what society means them to be. And you can say the same thing with racial or classist or any number of other slurs like those words are what the majority of the people define them to be, and you can choose to use different words if that’s something that doesn’t make you feel comfortable, if it doesn’t resonate with you. But you know, I really have loved Jessamine Stanley, for example, with underbelly yoga. She’s local to Durham, and she was the first plus size fitness person that I saw in the fact that she can get into these amazing yoga poses that I feel like I could never dream of doing. Saying, regardless of her size, I love that. She says things like, You got to pick up your belly and you’ve got to twist this way and things like that. So part of it is just, if you use words and your intent behind them is clear, then your children will understand what’s coming from you, I think maybe more than what’s coming from everybody else, especially at this young age, where where my child is right now,

Maggie  

I follow the leaders in the with the fat liberation community that are encouraging us to take back the word fat and making it a neutral descriptor. It still has a lot of stigma around it right now, so I usually, when talking to people, listen to how they talk about their bodies, and follow their lead on how they describe their body. But yeah, it’s just the word fat. It doesn’t need to be a negative word, right? It’s like, tall, it’s like, thin, it’s like, you know, all the other descriptors we have for bodies and that when we keep using it to harm, we gotta take that away, because there are fat bodies. There always have been fat bodies, and that is not a bad thing. 

Erica  

And I think especially as my child gets older. And for me, frankly, because we’ve been talking about for our children, but for me as a person, I’ve done various different dieting and exercise regimens some more or less strict. And what I have relatively recently, come to realize is that throughout the course of history, the ideal body, both female and male, has changed dramatically from era to era in cultures, and you can see that in paintings and statuary. And who’s the social media influencers? I mean, you know somebody the Kardashians would never have been considered the perfect body type in the era of Twiggy. It just wouldn’t happen. And so to recognize that there is not, nor has there ever been an actual ideal body type, and the fact that that changes all the time, there’s no point in chasing it, because you’re never going to be what society wants you to be. So what you should be is happy. And you know, regardless of any religious or spiritual belief, it’s a scientific fact that we are going to be in the bodies that we currently inhabit for a finite period of time, and what we choose to do with those bodies, and how we choose to use that time is going to affect our happiness and our life in this current lifetime. So we can choose to spend all of our time and money on diet fads and going to the gym for 12 hours a day and getting nipped and tucked here and there. We can choose to spend it doing nothing but sitting on the couch eating Oreos to the point where we’re not really comfortable. But those a choice that you can make. And at the end of the day, what I’ve come to realize is that I am more than my body and what it looks like. And if today, I’m not feeling all that great, and all I want to do is lay on the couch and eat Oreos and watch TV, you know what? I think I’m going to do that, and tomorrow, if what makes me happy is, you know, running around in the yard with my kid, then I’m going to run in the around in the yard with my kid all day, and I feel better about using my time and emotional energy that way, rather than counting calories or steps or, Oh, I have to, I have to, or I can’t, I can’t, because then you’re limiting your ability to live your life, and that life will end. And are you going to be happy with how you spent your time and your money and your life at the end of it?

Cindi  

Dang Erica, that’s a Mic drop. How long do you feel it took you to accept that mentality, because I feel like there is definitely a shift in society from of course, when we all were growing up, from now with our kids, like, how long did it take you to accept that mentality and to instill that in mentality? And what do you all do if your child makes a comment on their body. I have a high schooler who just made a comment on her body yesterday, and sometimes I am really good about saying everyone’s unique. You don’t need to be thin to be beautiful, you know, all of these things. But last night, sometimes I’m not spot on with my parenting, and so I want to have some tools in the toolbox. What do you all tell your kids about that?

Erica  

So in terms of how long it took me to instill that life philosophy, honestly, it’s been fairly recently, and it’s been, you know, this week is the one year anniversary of my dad’s untimely death. Yes, and so I had to recognize that if life is finite and time is finite, then how you choose it is really, really important. We all know that intellectually, but it’s not something that we practice all the time. So I’m a practicing Buddhist, and one thing that they encourage actually, is when you wake up every morning think to yourself, I’m going to die today, and think about how you want to live the last day of your life. It isn’t necessarily about, oh, I need to go see the Eiffel Tower or I need to eat at this restaurant. How do you want to act to people? How do you want to embody who you are and what you are as a person and your values? Who do you want to be kind to? Who do you want to see? Want to smile at? Who do you want to be patient for? And so doing that has made it very clear what matters and what doesn’t matter in this life. Now, you don’t have to have any particular religion in order to do anything like that, of course, but making the leap between intellectually and fully aware that my life and my body will end at one point, and internalizing that, because death culture is another thing. People in America are very uncomfortable with the concept of that finality. But your discomfort does not change fact, and so things like that, how you use your time can be a way that you can maybe tap into something like that. Now, as far as what I say to my child, thankfully, I don’t know if it’s age. She just started kindergarten, so I’m sure some of these things are going to start coming up more and more frequently. Now, the only comment that she makes about bodies is about makeup. Her aunt, my sister in law, has always really been into makeup, and so when she was very small, they would do makeup on each other, and I was always a little nervous about that. My child’s artistic and I love artistic expression in all forms, makeup being an example, but I don’t wear makeup. And it’s really important to me that she understand that makeup is not a requirement to look pretty. And every once in a while, including recently, actually, she was meeting somebody knew, and she said she wants to wear makeup because she wants to look pretty. And so every time she says something like that, which thankfully is more infrequent. Now, I say baby makeup doesn’t make you look pretty. Makeup makes you look fancy. Do you want to look fancy? Then? Sure, you know, pre dress, pre shoes. If you want to put on makeup, you want me to style your hair in a certain way. Sure, you’re always pretty if you want to look fancy, sure I can make you look fancy.

Maggie  

I’m not sure how long it’s taken me. I really kind of imagine it more as a journey, like I feel like those turning points. I feel like I’m always coming into new information and learning more and more about how to support myself, but also supporting others in this work for body comments. And I think you’ll be the expert, Cindy, because my children are also younger, so with the age group, it, you know, it’s going to change, but I think coming from a place of curiosity, to get a real understanding of what that body comment you know means, like, how are they feeling about their body, helping them realize that a lot of times human bodies are uncomfortable, and when stress and things happen, it’s very normal to kind of turn on the body. So helping them zoom out and bring curiosity. Is there anything else going on and sharing your values with them as well?

Erica  

You know, Maggie, I want to piggyback on that because, Cindi, I obviously don’t know what it was that your daughter had said, but in my mind, I could see someone saying something like, let’s say they’re trying to do a sport, or they’re trying to physically do something, a pull up. This has happened recently where my child’s father, you know, he did a pull up, and she wanted to try to do a pull up. And she tried, but, you know, she’s five, and she said, Mommy, can you do a pull up? And I said, No, baby, I cannot do a pull up. Well, why can’t you do a pull up? I could have said, well, mommy’s too fat to do a pull up, or mommy’s arms cannot support mommy’s weight. Like, if I wanted to be really scientific about it, but what I ended up saying was, mommy uses different muscles, and Mommy doesn’t do pull ups very often. If I practiced more, I could do a pull up, but I don’t practice. So if you want to get good at doing a pull up, I can help you practice. So maybe if the issue was, oh, I’m too fat for this, the response could be, no one’s to anything, for anything you can practice and get better at darn near anything in this world. 

Cindi  

We talked a lot about food and not demonizing food, not saying good food, not saying bad food. So can we talk about this a little bit from the perspective of neurodiversity, I struggle with this quite a bit, because my kids thrive on sugar and carbohydrates, because it gives them, it gives everybody the dopamine kick, but especially for some neurodiverse kiddos. And they tend to be a little bit more regimented with their food. They don’t explore as much with their foods. What do you do with that? What would you say about working through those particular issues?

Maggie  

Oh, this is a great question. I just took an amazing training with the Dietitian for RD’s for Neurodiversity, and so I’ve learned a lot about an approach that supports neurodiverse people, specifically children. So it’s really an acceptance based approach. So recognizing that for neurodiverse people, there are a lot of barriers for food with sensory differences or oral motor differences, so just recognizing that those barriers are true, and that, you know, helping accommodate, that that’s their right as a human to have accommodations put in place for them. And so, you know, recognizing, like, the one thing that that culture really takes is this trust from the body. Like we can’t trust our body. We we know that’s not what the My Plate says, but we’re the vegetables, right? But knowing that, like, we can trust our bodies, that we can support a child who’s neurodiverse by offering a lot of foods, but also being accepting, like, you know what? Maybe chicken nuggets are more accessible for you. And how hard is it for me to I’m making this fancy curry chicken but maybe it’s something that is way too sensory of an overload, and maybe I can accommodate you by also offering chicken nuggets. It’s not much harder for me. You’re still going to get, you know, different nutrients from food, and that’s very different from diet culture, right? Like how we can’t just serve that those foods, and they’re convenient and processed, but there’s nourishment there, and it’s providing accommodations and other support, like making sure you’re offering a variety of foods and and supporting the having access to food. But it’s a very gentle approach that really comes back to acceptance and accommodations.

Erica  

I have discovered, and there’s a number of different things, the Kid Food Explorers. So they have, like, they eat the rainbow idea where it’s like, okay, well, so today, we’re going to eat purple. Tomorrow we’re going to eat blue. You know how all of the different colors of various produce provide different phytonutrients, all of which are important, and do different things. And so my child loves rainbows and colors, and so doing things like that have been helpful to try to get her to try different things. We also have this approach where we ask her if she would try something that we’ve made for ourselves, and if she doesn’t want to, I’ll say, can you sniff it? Can you sniff it? How’s that smell? And if the sniff test goes okay, like, okay, maybe it’s not too overwhelming for sniff then I’ll say, can you lick it? Would you try licking it? You know, just so those simple little things, and we don’t say, Would you try? It’s like, do you want to lick it? You want to smell it. And maybe a third of the time, the actual food gets all the way into her mouth, and she’ll chew it and swallow it. Sometimes she wants more, sometimes she doesn’t, but by not doing the you have to, or you must clean your plate to earn dessert and things like that, because again, that’s making some foods better and others and earning or punishing associated with sweets and treats and things like that are their own set of problematic things. 

Maggie  

With Erica, what she’s saying, I think every child is different. And really, this idea of like responsive feeding, like your child likes rainbows, this is a good activity for her with another child, that may not work, and that’s okay, what approaches, what speaks to them. So there’s a lot of nuance in this work of learning how to feed our children without diet culture. But yeah, the harmful, the forceful, the disconnect with the body that can happen when we’re coming from a place of diet culture can really impact the feeding relationship parents have with their children and that child’s relationship with food for their lifetime.

Crissy  

Thank you so much Erica and Maggie for joining us. I did want to throw out that we cheated a little bit in this conversation, because we had Maggie join us, who is a her circle member, but is also a her expert. So we got to have a little of her expertise thrown in there. And Erica has a lifetime of experience too, and wisdom and lots of mic drop moments. So thank you both for joining us for this fabulous conversation. I really enjoyed it and hearing from you and getting to see both of your faces for 30 minutes during lunchtime. It’s great. 

Cindi  

It was awesome.

Erica  

Thank you guys. It’s nice to come. 

Maggie  

Thank you. This was great.