Diet Culture can Hurt Kids. Author Urges to Redefine the Word Fat

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By the time they enter kindergarten, most American children believe that being “thin” makes them more valuable to society, writes journalist Virginia Sole-Smith. By middle school, Sole-Smith says, more than a quarter of kids in the U.S. will have been put on a diet.

Sole-Smith produces the newsletter and podcast Burnt Toast, where she explores fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. In her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, she argues that efforts to fight childhood obesity have caused kids to absorb an onslaught of body-shaming messages.

“The chronic experience of weight stigma … is similar to the research we see on chronic experiences of racism or other forms of bias,” Sole-Smith says. “This raises your stress level. This has you in a constant state of fight-or-flight, and stress hormones are elevated. That takes a toll on our bodies for sure.”

Sole-Smith says parents can combat American diet culture by reclaiming — and normalizing — the word “fat.” Instead of shushing a child in the grocery store who asks why a stranger is so fat, she advises parents to explain that bodies come in lots of shapes and sizes, some fat, some thin.

Sole-Smith, who herself identifies as “small fat,” suggests using the word “fat” as a neutral descriptor, saying it helps “take all the power out of the word. We make it something that can’t be weaponized against us , and that really is the first step towards starting to dismantle anti-fat bias.” Sole-Smith argues the issue of childhood obesity has become a “proxy,” which obscures larger, systemic problems, including childhood hunger and poverty.

“We as a culture have really zeroed in on weight, because we think that’s the piece that we should be able to control. But not only do we not have very much control over weight, it also won’t fix anything else,” she says. “All it really ends up doing is pathologizing kids’ bodies and giving parents extra pressure and extra guilt and these sort of unrealistic standards we can’t get to.”