Category: Causes of Eating Disorders

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Parent guide to how childhood trauma causes emotional eating

How does childhood trauma cause emotional eating and can parents help?

Emotional eating is a way to define a disordered way of eating, and it’s strongly associated with childhood trauma. 

That’s what led Brittany to call me about her daughter Candice. “I’m worried that she’s emotional eating,” Brittany said. “Candice has always been anxious, and she’s experienced some serious social and medical trauma. She’s always loved sweets, but lately, it’s as if she’s addicted to cake and candy. She just can’t get enough. It’s causing her a lot of pain, and she cries because she’s so miserable. I want to help her, but I don’t know how.” 

I understand. Watching your child go through this can be excruciating. Brittany has been doing the best she can by trying to limit sweets, but it’s backfiring. “The less access she has to sweets, the worse it gets,” she says. “I keep finding evidence that she’s eating them every day even though she swears to me she doesn’t want to. She keeps begging me to help, but I don’t know what to do.” 

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I know how badly Brittany wants to help Candice feel better, so I walked her through how childhood trauma can impact emotional eating and how common approaches like limiting sweets can make the problem worse, not better. Brittany changed her approach and is now on the path of supporting her daughter with childhood trauma and disordered emotional eating.

Does childhood trauma cause emotional eating?

Yes, childhood trauma is a major cause of disordered emotional eating. Disordered eating behaviors span a range of severity, from disordered emotional eating to binge eating disorder. Disordered eating is strongly associated with trauma. According to a recent study, over 80% of Americans diagnosed with binge eating disorder experienced childhood abuse, neglect, and other forms of trauma.

Many people can imagine using food as a psychological coping behavior. It’s commonly suggested that food and eating are a disordered way to soothe unhappy thoughts and feelings.

This suggests that disordered emotional eating is a mental process that can be changed with new/better education. It perpetuates the false belief that eating disorders are a choice and that someone can simply “choose” to recover from them. However, disordered eating is rarely an educable condition. In fact, most people who have disordered eating are exceptionally well educated about what they “should” and “shouldn’t” do with food.

Effective treatment must address the biological, psychological, and social causes of eating disorders. 

Food is naturally soothing for many complex biological reasons. Therefore, all eating is inherently emotionally-driven. Disordered emotional eating is rarely a simple mental issue of seeking comfort through food.

Emotional eating, binge eating, and food addiction cause a great deal of distress and are not mental choices. It’s not as simple as saying “I feel stressed, so I’ll eat,” and lacking the self-control to do otherwise. Rather, several physiological cues including hormones and brain pathways drive obsessive thoughts about food and a compulsion to eat beyond comfort. 

How does trauma impact emotional eating?

Trauma has a physiological impact on the body that can lead to adverse health consequences including disordered eating. These consequences are not due to active mental choices. They are responses to internal signals and drives outside the person’s rational, decision-making brain. 

Keep in mind that almost all the brain’s activity is non-conscious. Scientists estimate anywhere from 80-95% of how our brain functions is non-conscious. Therefore, most of our behaviors are “driven” more than “chosen.”

For example, researchers have identified a particular brain circuit that is susceptible to the impact of trauma and chronic stress, leading to its dysfunction. Additionally, certain hormones, including acyl-ghrelin, often called the “hunger hormone,” are associated with emotional eating and binge eating. These processes are completely outside of conscious awareness or choice and can’t be overcome with food rules and willpower.

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How do I know if my child has disordered emotional eating?

Ultimately all eating is emotional. It’s encoded in our DNA to find food emotionally stimulating and pleasurable.

There’s a difference between everyday emotional eating and disordered emotional eating. It’s important not to pathologize kids’ natural hunger and appetite. For example, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying sugary treats, salty snacks, and other highly palatable food. It’s genetically programmed.

Likewise, it’s completely normal for people to occasionally eat more than is technically necessary to meet their caloric needs, even to the point of physical discomfort. 

On the other hand, if your child appears to be obsessed with food or feels a compulsive need to eat beyond comfort repeatedly, they may be struggling with disordered emotional eating. Obsession is defined as having constant thoughts, cravings, and fantasies about food. Compulsion means feeling as if you are out of control and there’s a disconnect between conscious choice and behavior. The key difference between intuitive eating and disordered eating is not so much what’s happening with food but how it feels. Someone with disordered eating experiences extremely high levels of distress related to food and eating.

If you’re concerned that your child has disordered emotional eating, please reach out to a trained non-diet professional. It’s vitally important that you seek someone who operates from a non-diet or anti-diet perspective to avoid adding more shame to your child’s relationship with food.

What types of childhood experiences create trauma associated with emotional eating?

Childhood experiences of trauma are highly correlated with disordered emotional eating, including:

  • Emotional neglect, emotional abuse, physical neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse
  • Victimization and shaming, including teasing, criticism, bullying, and social exclusion
  • High levels of emotional dysregulation
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
  • Elevated adverse childhood experience scores (ACEs)
  • High levels of childhood cumulative trauma and emotional abuse

The link between childhood trauma and disordered emotional eating has been largely overlooked in both scientific literature and common culture due to outdated beliefs that eating is 100% within mental control. The belief that willpower and food rules can overcome disordered eating is outdated and counterproductive.

People with disordered emotional eating are accused of poor judgment, intellectual capacity, and morality. They are given nutrition information, told to “just eat less,” and “just stop eating.” This approach increases trauma around food, eating, and self-worth. In other words, common approaches to disordered emotional eating increase trauma and make things worse.

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Rather than assuming that people who have disordered emotional eating are lazy, weak, or immoral, we should support them in getting treated for childhood emotional neglect, abuse, and trauma. As long as we continue to treat emotional eating as a moral failure, we impose further trauma upon someone who is already traumatized.

What are the symptoms of emotional eating caused by childhood trauma?

Most disordered emotional eating behaviors are driven by non-conscious processes including brain activity, hormones, and hunger cues. We must be careful not to be too focused on the thoughts and beliefs that surround disordered emotional eating since these are often an over-simplification of a complex behavioral pattern. 

Observable behaviors of emotional eating

  • Eating large quantities of food
  • Feeling full but continuing to eat anyway
  • Eating to the point of physical discomfort
  • Intentionally restricting food for long periods 
  • Forgetting or avoiding eating for long periods

Thoughts and beliefs about emotional eating

  • I’m always hungry
  • I can’t stop myself
  • It’s as if I’m controlled by food
  • I use food as a way to cope when I have big feelings
  • It feels as if I’m addicted to food
  • I forget to eat and get too hungry
  • When I feel stressed or excited, I eat
  • I want to stop, but I can’t
  • I hate myself for eating this way
  • Make sure I don’t do it by never buying that food
  • Keep me away from that food

Many times parents, loved ones, and well-meaning healthcare providers assume thoughts and beliefs are the cause of emotional eating. However, this can lead to inadequate and even harmful treatment approaches. 

For example, when providers assume thoughts are the cause of emotional eating, they may suggest treatment that limits access to food and minimizes eating pleasure. Paradoxically, this approach often increases hunger, which cues the drive to binge eat. In other words, it backfires and causes more harm than good. 

It also perpetuates the experience of trauma by treating the person as if they are bad or make bad choices.

What are the different types of emotional eating?

There is a continuum of eating behavior that ranges from intuitive eating to various forms of emotional eating. The symptoms differ in terms of severity, level of obsession, degree of compulsiveness, and how much a person is distressed by their behavior. Here is one way of identifying different patterns of eating: 

1. Intuitive eating

This is when a person eats according to hunger and appetite approximately every 2-5 hours throughout the day. They typically don’t feel either extreme hunger or extreme fullness and have a peaceful relationship with food. 

2. Mindless eating

This is when a person eats without paying attention to hunger cues but purely in response to emotional or environmental cues. For example, they may eat in response to feeling stressed or bored. Or they may eat because the food is in front of them, such as when there’s a candy jar on the counter. 

3. Restrictive + binge eating

This is when a person restricts food in an attempt to control their behavior, only to become overwhelmingly hungry and have a binge eating episode to make up for missed calories. While this may look like emotional eating, oftentimes it is a response to physiological hunger cues, though they are often below the level of consciousness. 

4. Binge eating episodes

These are when a person is not restricted and feels adequately fed but eats a large quantity of food in a short period. Research has shown that this is often in response to a physiological, non-conscious drive to eat rather than a mental choice. 

5. Binge eating disorder

This is when a person has repeated binge eating episodes. Many times these people are in a restrict + binge eating cycle. Increasingly, binge eating disorder is seen as a physiological response to restriction combined with differences in brain functioning and hormones. Binge eating disorder is strongly associated with a history of weight-based teasing and criticism from family, peers, and healthcare providers, repeated experiences of weight stigma, restrictive eating patterns, and weight cycling caused by dieting.

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How to help your child who is using emotional eating to cope with childhood trauma

Your child can recover from both childhood trauma and emotional eating, and parents are key to the process. You can help your child heal from their trauma and support them in moving towards recovery from emotional eating. Here are five things to keep in mind when parenting a child who has childhood trauma and disordered emotional eating:

1. Inventory past experiences

Seek to understand how traumatic experiences have impacted your child. In addition to classic forms of trauma, look for very common but often overlooked forms of emotional trauma. For example, have they been teased, bullied, and criticized by peers, coaches, teachers, healthcare providers, siblings or parents? This is especially common if they are/were in a larger body.

2. Process your feelings

Get support if you feel guilt or shame about your child’s experiences. Parents are all doing the best we can, but sometimes our children still experience trauma in childhood. Before we can support them fully in recovery, we need to heal ourselves. Get professional support and guidance so you can process your feelings about your child’s trauma. 

3. Seek trauma treatment for your child

Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most common therapy in the United States, but it’s not often the best approach to healing childhood trauma. Seek options like EMDR, somatic therapy, trauma-informed therapy, and psychodynamic therapy, which are generally better at uncovering and addressing childhood trauma. 

4. Create a positive eating environment

Rather than try to change or fix your child’s eating behavior right now, begin by improving their eating environment. Trauma is healed in loving, accepting relationships. How you approach eating with your child can either help or hinder their care, so get some guidance about increasing and improving your child’s eating experiences with you. The less you try to “fix” your child’s eating by controlling their access to food, the greater your chance of leading them toward healing their relationship with food.  If you need support with what to feed your child, find a non-diet dietitian who can help.

5. Ditch the myths

Stop repeating popular myths about emotional eating. Most people see emotional eating as an issue of how someone thinks and what they do with food. They repeat popular myths like “just tell yourself to stop eating,” or “just stay away from sweets,” or provide nutritional facts and information. These approaches are popular and make a lot of intuitive sense, yet they are harmful and dangerous. Most people who have disordered eating are already more aware of common food rules and nutritional advice than the average person. Eating myths cause harm by increasing a sense of shame and judgment for people who have childhood trauma and emotional eating. Simple, easy fixes that have been repeated ad nauseam for decades don’t address childhood trauma and emotional eating. And they can cause more harm than good. Please seek support and guidance to optimize your ability to support your child.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To The Causes Of Eating Disorders

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Empowering your highly sensitive child with an eating disorder

Empowering Your Highly Sensitive Child with an Eating Disorder

It’s very common for people who have an eating disorder to identify as a highly sensitive person (HSP). While it may sound like a made-up term, this is actually a scientifically studied genetic condition. One of the notable traits is that HSPs are often more sensitive to food and eating. They may have significant differences in how they experience food and sensations like nausea and hunger. 

Many times when a parent is perplexed by their child’s eating disorder we discover that the missing piece is high sensitivity. If your child is an HSP, they need a higher level of patience, understanding, and support when eating. Once this understanding is incorporated into treatment, recovery may become easier.

Highly sensitive kids and eating disorders

Kids who are highly sensitive are at high risk of being overstimulated by food and eating. Common symptoms include:

  • Picky eating
  • Food aversion
  • Food refusal
  • Refusing to eat in public places
  • Refusing to eat with the rest of the family
  • Tantrums during meals
  • Throwing food
  • Criticizing/complaining about food and other people at the table
  • Under-eating (appetite and digestion are both affected by overstimulation)
  • Binge eating (either as an attempt to cope and/or when overstimulation has caused under-eating and the body needs a high volume of calories to compensate)
  • Weight loss/gain

What is high sensitivity?

A highly sensitive person (HSP) registers and processes more sensory information from their five senses, their internal organs, and other people’s emotional states. As a result, they often have strong reactions to things that individuals with typical nervous systems barely notice.

It’s important to note that HSPs are not being dramatic or making things up. Their highly sensitive nervous system is a biological and genetic feature. It’s found in approximately 20-30% of humans, as well as over 100 other animals, ranging from fruit flies to primates.

Highly Sensitive Child + Eating Disorders Printable Parent Guide

Parent Guide: Highly Sensitive Child With An Eating Disorder

This is a printable guide for parents with kids who are highly sensitive and have picky eating, disordered eating, or eating disorders.

  • Understand high sensitivity and eating issues
  • Improve mealtimes and reduce stress
  • Increase your child’s coping skills
Learn More

Being highly sensitive is a biological trait that carries both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, many inventors, explorers, artists, musicians, and critical thinkers are HSPs. 

Some notable individuals who exemplify HSP traits include Abraham Lincoln, Jane Goodall, Princess Diana, Albert Einstein, Emily Dickinson, and many more. Being highly sensitive is truly a gift that enriches not only the individual but also their family, community, and society as a whole.

However, their highly-sensitive nervous systems put HSPs are at risk of becoming overwhelmed. Eating is particularly stimulating for HSPs, so they often are picky eaters with intense food aversions and can develop disordered eating and/or eating disorders.

We live in a highly stimulating and unnatural environment, so HSPs face a higher risk of experiencing anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and substance use disorders. However, these conditions can often be managed or even eliminated when parents help HSPs learn effective strategies to regulate their emotions.

HSP traits

Here are three key traits associated with being highly sensitive that might lead to an eating disorder:

  1. Extreme noticing: HSPs have a heightened awareness and perception of the sensory information bombarding their nervous system. They notice and react to more subtle details that others may overlook. For example, they may experience intense discomfort from an imperceptible itch in a seam, be highly sensitive to certain sounds, or feel nauseated by specific sensory aspects of food. Eating, which engages all senses, can be particularly overstimulating for HSPs.
  2. Emotional contagion: As social beings, all humans possess mirror neurons that enable them to pick up on the emotions of others. HSPs have a greater number of mirror neurons in their brains, resulting in an increased sensitivity to nonverbal emotional cues. If someone close to them, like a family member, friend, or teacher, is emotionally dysregulated, HSPs often feel the same dysregulation. This heightened emotional contagion can make various social experiences, such as family dinner tables, school cafeterias, and restaurants more challenging for highly sensitive people.
  3. Overstimulation: With their heightened ability to process sensory information, HSPs are more susceptible to being overwhelmed by information from both internal and external sources. This means that things like noise, smells, light, other people’s emotions can quickly become overwhelming for them. Additionally, internal sensations such as upset stomachs, nausea, physical pain, and anxiety symptoms are intensified in HSPs. When overstimulated, highly sensitive individuals may exhibit behaviors that seem like overreactions to others, such as refusing to eat, throwing food, and extremely picky eating.

HSPs and neurodivergence

In our ancestral environment, the heightened sensory abilities of HSPs were essential for detecting threats and protecting the tribe. However, living in our modern, noisy, and overstimulating culture can be overwhelming for highly sensitive individuals.

Due to the unique wiring of their nervous systems, HSPs can fall under the category of “neurodivergent.” Importantly, not all HSPs have formal diagnoses for conditions like autism or ADHD. Nevertheless, it’s common for them to relate to some of the symptoms associated with these conditions.

It’s important to recognize that being highly sensitive is a biological trait. It is not a disorder or illness. However, HSPs benefit from developing skills that help them cope with our overstimulating environment. This is especially true if they’re struggling to eat.

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How to help your highly sensitive child with an eating disorder 

If you suspect that your child may be highly sensitive, one of the most effective ways you can support them is by helping them develop emotional regulation skills. Many highly sensitive individuals express a need for downtime to rest and recover from stimulating experiences. They also thrive with clear boundaries to protect them from emotional contagion. Finally, they need the freedom to explore their rich inner world on their own terms. Here are important ways you can help: 

  1. Teach them emotional regulation. All children are born with immature nervous systems, and parents are essential in teaching kids to regulate their emotions. If you have a highly sensitive child, they need a high level of support and skill-building. You can help them learn how to regulate their nervous systems given their unique biology.
  2. Support them with eating. A highly sensitive child who has an eating disorder needs a lot of support. You can help them learn how to eat in a more regulated way. Remember that they taste and experience food differently from others. Validate their unique experience even as you insist upon eating enough food, often throughout the day. Both parts (validating and boundaries) are essential to eating disorder recovery. This is a skill you can learn and practice every day as you support your child in recovery.
  3. Accept (and nurture!) their quirks. Highly sensitive people perceive the world differently. This is a major strength and is why so many notable figures in history have highly sensitive traits. Don’t try to turn your highly sensitive child into a typical child. Instead, nurture their unique strengths and support them in finding their way in the world with (not in spite of) their beautiful differences.
Highly Sensitive Child + Eating Disorders Printable Parent Guide

Parent Guide: Highly Sensitive Child With An Eating Disorder

This is a printable guide for parents with kids who are highly sensitive and have picky eating, disordered eating, or eating disorders.

  • Understand high sensitivity and eating issues
  • Improve mealtimes and reduce stress
  • Increase your child’s coping skills
Learn More

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To The Causes Of Eating Disorders

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Please don’t say that eating sugar and sweets causes diabetes

When parents say sugar causes diabetes it can lead to an eating disorder

3 real-life stories of women whose parents warned them about diabetes (and what to do instead)

“If you eat too many cupcakes, you’ll get diabetes.”

“Chocolate milk is like drinking a tall glass of diabetes.”

“Eating that much sugar will make you diabetic like Grandma.”

Some version of this has been said to too many children to count. It’s hard to speak with an adult from Gen X down to Gen Z who hasn’t heard some version of this warning. The parents who say this aren’t trying to cause harm. In fact, they’re most likely hoping to protect their child from a serious disease. And yet these comments are both inaccurate and cause harm every day. Sugar does not cause diabetes, and many people in eating disorder recovery cite parental warnings about the link between sugar and diabetes as contributing to their disorders. 

Note: Eating disorders have biological, psychological, and social causes, so these sorts of comments alone don’t cause an eating disorder, but they can increase risk.

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What causes diabetes?

Diabetes is primarily caused by genetics. In fact, Type 2 diabetes has a stronger link to family history than Type 1. People who develop diabetes are usually not the first in their family to get it, and saying it’s caused by sugar is a massive oversimplification of how our bodies work. If sugar causes diabetes then everyone with a sweet tooth would have diabetes, which is not true. 

“Genes play a large role in the development of diabetes. We’re all born with challenges in our genetic code — as well as in our life circumstances — and this is one of the challenges you were dealt. Your body was vulnerable to difficulty with glucose regulation, and some combination of factors triggered that genetic propensity.”

Lindo Bacon, PhD and Judith Matz, LCSW, Diabetes Self Management

And yet social stigma persists, and parents everywhere continue to warn children not to eat too much sugar, something that is delicious and rewarding. This creates a deep and confusing fear of a disease that kids can’t even understand yet. It’s terrifying and creates cognitive dissonance. The idea that sweets, which they (of course!) love so much, could kill them is overwhelming for kids.

Does being fat cause diabetes?

Similarly, if being fat causes diabetes, then everyone who is fat would have it, which they don’t. About 10% of Americans have diabetes, yet about 65% of Americans are on the higher end of the weight scale. So clearly not all fat people get diabetes. And thin people get diabetes, too. 

A word about the word “fat”

The word fat can be used as a negative or a neutral descriptor. In its neutral form, saying fat is the same as saying thin, tall, or brown-eyed. Other words for fat bodies, such as overweight and obese, are currently considered to be stigmatizing. Many fat justice leaders have reclaimed the word fat as the preferred neutral descriptor for their bodies. As such, I typically use the word fat when referring to body weight as a physical feature.

However, due to our culture’s terrible history of weight-shaming, we should not call an individual fat unless we 1) are doing so kindly 2) have zero thoughts that they should lose weight; and 3) clearly have their permission to do so. And nobody should ever use fat as an insult. It’s always best to let people who live in marginalized bodies to define themselves rather than assuming a label on their behalf. And never tell a person in a larger body that they are not fat or should be proud to be fat. It’s their body and their choice to define themselves on their own terms.

In other words, being fat doesn’t mean you’ll get diabetes, and being thin doesn’t protect you from it. Genes above all, followed by lifestyle factors like stress reduction, healthy social interaction, and exercise matter far more than your weight. 

“One cupcake won’t give you diabetes and joking that it will is dangerous on two levels: It creates misinformation about this disease and furthers the stigma that acquiring diabetes is something one has control over.”

Alysse Dalessandro for Healthline

Being fat does not cause diabetes, but the fear of being fat and eating foods associated with being fat like sugar can contribute to an eating disorder. Incorrect and harmful beliefs about sugar, diabetes, and fat are all driven by weight stigma, not science.

The biggest risk is stress, not sugar

The largest environmental factor leading to diabetes is not sugar, but stress. And one of the leading causes of stress for people who are at the higher end of the weight spectrum is their weight and the fear of getting diabetes. In this way, the fear of fat and diabetes can increase the conditions most likely to trigger it.

Parents who use the threat of diabetes and fat to restrict their kids’ eating sugar mean well, but they can accidentally create a cascade of negative outcomes, including an eating disorder.

For ideas about what to say to your child if another adult says something about sugar causing diabetes to your child, here’s a great post from Zoë Bisbing, LCSW (click to view full video and post on Instagram)

Here are three real-life stories of adults who were told to avoid sugar in childhood to avoid diabetes: 

Sonja developed at eating disorder at 8 years old and is currently in treatment

My dad and his mother, who lived with us, both made regular comments that my being overweight would lead to me developing diabetes and “my feet would fall off.”  They said things like “Sugar makes you fat,” and “Being fat gives you diabetes.”

I remember feeling so uncomfortable in my body, like it was a prison I just wanted to escape. I’ve always carried extra weight and no matter how much I dieted and exercised (this was a core piece of my childhood) my body wouldn’t change. I felt betrayed by it, like there was something inherently wrong with me, and that I was trapped by a disease that was going to happen to me no matter what I did.

Comments about sugar and diabetes led to an eating disorder that started as early as age eight. I developed a very complicated love/hate relationship with food and eating that I am still trying to heal 24 years later. 

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⭐ Learn the essential steps and family rules you need to have in place for positive body image.

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I had a very negative body image and developed body dysmorphia in high school. Because I was eating so little and exercising so much, my health was very poor. I was sick all the time and had no energy and awful moods. Now that I’m in recovery I recognize the profound health effects starvation had on my growing body and mind. I have been in treatment for 3 years now and I’m just starting to develop a healthy relationship with food and my body.

If I could go back in time and talk to my younger self, I would tell myself that those comments were based on my family members’ own insecurities about their own bodies and health, and it had nothing to do with me. I would also tell myself that scientifically we know that the best way to avoid conditions like diabetes is to take good care of our bodies, not neglect them. I would encourage myself to challenge my caregivers’ narrative and to find a professional to support me in finding my way to my own personal best health.

Andrea has struggled with body image and disordered eating since she was about 7 years old

I remember being about 7 and I wanted ice cream. My mom would use an ice cream scoop and scrape off the excess from the top of the scoop then serve it to me. I wasn’t allowed to just add some spoonfuls to my bowl without measuring it. She said, “You don’t want to be fat like Mama, right?” She lived in a bigger body her whole life. Mom would say “My Grandma died from diabetes, we can’t let that happen to us so we shouldn’t eat so much sugar.”

Hearing that “diabetes can kill you” scared me. At that young age I thought because I was fat and liked sugar that eventually that’s what I would die from. I would grab my belly rolls and squeeze them as hard as I could while looking in the mirror. I’m not sure what I had hoped would happen, maybe so I could make my fat body smaller.

At home I knew that I couldn’t drink sodas or eat sweets so I would go to a friend’s house and binge on whatever I wanted. 

If I could talk to my younger self I would say that there is no “bad” or “good” food. You are worthy and are so much more than your body. Don’t let anyone treat you like you are less than. Your body is amazing, it keeps you alive! 

Family and friends fueled my eating disorder by linking my weight and sugar to diabetes. If I lost weight it was always met with, “Wow what are you doing? You look great.” Now that I have children I want them to know that they are so much more than a number on a scale or a squishy belly. I WILL break the cycle. It isn’t always easy but I’m working on loving all of me. 

Marie has struggled with body image and disordered eating since childhood

My mom constantly commented on what people were eating, particularly how much sugar. When we would see people drinking a soda or eating candy, for example, she would comment that they were consuming so much sugar.  She said that sugar was “addicting” and that a bad diet, including too much sugar, gave people Type 2 diabetes. If someone had Type 2 diabetes, she would comment that a better diet would make their diabetes go away. 

I was diagnosed with insulin resistance at 20, which can be a precursor to Type 2 diabetes. My mom immediately signed me up for a personal trainer and would comment on my need to lose weight and eat less sugar. She would say I was “obsessed” with sugar on occasions where I would eat more than a small serving of dessert. When I lost weight (mainly due to my eating disorder), she would constantly tell me that my diet cured my insulin resistance. 

I felt a great sense of shame about my body. I had learned that only “fat people with bad diets” had ailments like diabetes. Her comments made me feel nervous. As a child, I was always concerned I was too fat and often felt tense and nervous.

Non-Diet HAES Parenting Tips

Non-Diet/Health At Every Size® Fact Sheets, Guidelines, and Scripts

  • Fact Sheets About Weight Stigma, Diet Culture, Kids and Diets, and More
  • Non-Diet Parent Guidelines
  • Non-Diet Parent Scripts About Responding to Fat Talk, Diet Talk, and More
  • What to Say/Not Say When Talking About Bodies and Food
Learn More

I was very concerned about my weight and what I ate in front of my mom (I still am). I have struggled with eating disorders and body dysmorphia since childhood. When I was in my mid-20s, I started purging and calorie restricting, to the point where I was underweight and incredibly anxious. When I was underweight, my mom would talk about how proud she was of how I had lost weight. Now that I have gained the weight back, I still struggle with shame, but through therapy and self-guided work, I am trying to heal.

My mom cared about my well-being, but it was incredibly misguided and actually harmful. I wish I could tell my younger self that my mom’s issues do not have to be mine. I’m loved just as I am. I am enough just as I am. Food is just food – not a moral judgment. 

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To Diet Culture And Eating Disorders

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How to protect your child from dangerous weight loss interventions

Protect your child from dangerous weight loss interventions

The risks of 2023 AAP guidelines for weight loss in kids and what parents can do about it

Megan reached out to me after a disastrous doctor’s office visit with her eleven-year-old son, Carl. “I’m so upset, I could scream!” she said. “The doctor lectured Carl about his weight even though I called ahead and specifically asked her not to do that, and when I asked her to stop, she just kept going. She recommended that he start an intensive weight intervention …a diet.” 

This news is upsetting but not uncommon. In 2023 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued new guidelines regarding obesity* in children and teens. The guidelines recommend intensive weight loss interventions, drugs, and even surgery. 

*Generally I don’t use the word “obesity” because it pathologizes higher-weight people based on the flawed, racist BMI scale. I’ve used it in this article sparingly in order to reflect the scientific data and guidelines accurately.

These guidelines are alarming for anyone who works with eating disorders. Because intentional weight loss of any type, for any reason, is identified as a major cause of eating disorders. The dubious claims in the guidelines rest on severe weight stigma, false assumptions about intentional weight loss, and poor evidence of the efficacy and safety of drugs and surgery on kids’ bodies. 

Creating medical guidelines without considering that they will cause eating disorders is horrifying. Eating disorders are NOT RARE. They affect at least 9% of the population. That’s about 29 million Americans, and rates are rising exponentially. For comparison, about 6 million Americans have Alzheimer’s and about 23 million Americans have heart disease. Eating disorders are common, present a high level of risk to mortality and long-term health, and are heavily influenced by family, social, and medical beliefs about diet and weight.

Non-Diet HAES Parenting Tips

Non-Diet/Health At Every Size® Fact Sheets, Guidelines, and Scripts

  • Fact Sheets About Weight Stigma, Diet Culture, Kids and Diets, and More
  • Non-Diet Parent Guidelines
  • Non-Diet Parent Scripts About Responding to Fat Talk, Diet Talk, and More
  • What to Say/Not Say When Talking About Bodies and Food
Learn More

Should a child get an intensive weight intervention?

The suggestion that Carl should undergo intensive weight loss counseling is not based on evidence that such programs are effective. In fact, there is no evidence that any diet plan results in long-term weight loss and health benefits. For example, a large Medicare study was created to find the most effective weight loss program for obesity. It was cancelled due to poor outcomes, including counterproductive side effects on both weight and health.

In another attempt to prove the effectiveness of weight loss interventions, this time for schoolchildren, a large randomized controlled trial (the scientific gold standard) was published in 2016. However, it found that high-quality intensive health interventions that included weighing children, nutrition counseling, and an exercise program were not effective in reducing BMI or improving health behaviors.

But the fact that intensive weight interventions are ineffective is not the worst problem; it’s that intentional weight loss has the following reliable outcomes: 

  1. Weight regain: The majority of individuals who lose weight are unlikely to maintain the reduced weight for an extended period of time.
  2. Additional weight gain: Intentional weight loss predicts accelerated weight gain and risk of overweight. 
  3. Eating disorders: Intentional weight loss is the most important predictor of new eating disorders.

In other words, not only are intensive weight interventions ineffective, they have a high risk of harm. Even worse are the recommendations that children take weight-loss medications and undergo bariatric surgery, which have an extremely high risk of creating lifelong complications. And they’re being done despite evidence that fat itself is not deadly. 

What to do to improve kids’ health without weight intervention

While we have a lot of evidence that intentional weight loss and weight interventions cause harm, that doesn’t mean you can’t support your child’s health. There are a number of excellent non-weight-based ways that parents can positively impact kids’ health, including: 

1. Develop and nurture a secure attachment with your child.

“There is substantial evidence that children with secure attachments in childhood develop more positive social–emotional competence, cognitive functioning, physical health and mental health, whereas children with insecure attachments are more at risk for negative outcomes in these domains.” —Early Childhood Development and Care, 2008

🔎 Read more about building a secure attachment

2. Share family meals at least three times per week.

“The frequency of shared family meals is significantly related to nutritional health in children and adolescents. Children and adolescents who share family meals 3 or more times per week are more likely to be in a [non-obese] weight range and have healthier dietary and eating patterns than those who share fewer than 3 family meals together. In addition, they are less likely to engage in disordered eating.” —Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, 2011

🔎 Read more about creating family meals

Free Cheat Sheet: Body Positive Parenting Essentials

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3. Ensure your child has a healthy sleep pattern.

“Short sleep duration is associated with a wide range of negative physical, social, emotional, and cognitive outcomes including poor concentration, impaired academic achievement, an increased risk of obesity, depression, suicide ideation, and injuries.” —Sleep Research Society, 2013

🔎 Read more about optimizing sleep

4. Support your child in developing social skills.

“The influence of social relationships on the risk of death are comparable with well-established risk factors for mortality such as smoking and alcohol consumption and exceed the influence of other risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity.” —PLOS Medicine, 2010  

These four interventions are all well-documented and will improve your child’s health. And the effects are long-lasting and have no negative consequences. This cannot be said for weight interventions (almost all intentional weight loss leads to weight cycling).

🔎 Read more about preventing loneliness

Handling pediatrician visits with 2023 AAP guidelines

The 2023 AAP guidelines put kids at risk, since intentional weight loss is a major cause of eating disorders. But what can you do if your child’s pediatrician is committed to the 2023 AAP guidelines for weight-based interventions? Well, it may be time to consider finding a new pediatrician! These guidelines are suggestions for physicians, not requirements. But if that’s not possible, keep asking questions and seeking answers about the most likely outcomes and risks of weight-based interventions. 

To help her navigate this distressing situation with her son, I recommended that Megan download the free guide provided by CRC for ED and Sunny Side Up Nutrition called “Navigating Pediatric Care in Light of the New AAP Guidelines.”

“We created this resource because we have concerns of the harmful impact the AAP guidelines are having on young people, particularly those with marginalized identities,” said Anna M. Lutz, MPH, RD/LDN, CEDS-S. “After the guidelines were released we heard from parents who were scared and worried about taking their child to the pediatrician. We hope parents can use this resource and feel more supported in navigating their child’s medical care.” 

I also have some cards that you can use at the doctor’s office and an eBook, Non-Diet/Health At Every Size® Fact Sheets, Guidelines, and Scripts. 

About the 2023 American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines

In January 2023 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued updated guidelines on obesity evaluation and treatment in children and teens. It’s been deeply discredited by the eating disorder professional community. 

For example, the Collaborative of Eating Disorders Organizations (CEDO) and the Eating Recovery Center say the recommendations put children at risk for developing eating disorders, disordered eating, and other mental and physical health issues.

The new AAP guidelines stray far from those released in 2016, which very carefully linked a focus on weight reduction to increased risks of eating disorders and recommended that physicians not recommend weight control to children and teens. It said:

  • “There are concerns that obesity prevention efforts may lead to the development of [an eating disorder].”
  • “Dieting, defined as caloric restriction with the goal of weight loss, is a risk factor for both obesity and [eating disorders].”
  • “The focus should be on a healthy lifestyle rather than on weight.”

Sadly, the 2023 AAP guidelines ignore the 2016 findings and suggest that physicians recommend weight loss using intensive behavioral interventions starting at age 2, weight-loss drugs as young as 12, and bariatric surgery as early as 13. 

The new guidelines recommend intentional weight loss, despite evidence that it is 1) ineffective, 2) counterproductive, and 2) a major cause of eating disorders.

🔎 Regan Chastain has provided several deep dives into the problematic nature of the new recommendations, including a review of the conflicts of interest the guidelines failed to disclose and faulty presentations of the effectiveness and risks of bariatric surgery in kids. 

Pushback against the new AAP guidelines

The Collaborative of Eating Disorders Organizations (CEDO) issued a letter saying “The statements made throughout these guidelines are problematic at best, and at worst, put American children and adolescents at serious risk for developing eating disorders, disordered eating, and other mental and physical health issues.”

The Eating Recovery Center in Denver, Colorado, launched a petition to change the guidelines saying “[W]e expect these guidelines will cause harm and put young people at risk of developing or worsening eating disorders, disordered eating, and other mental and physical health issues as well as perpetuate harmful weight stigma and move us further away from achieving universal weight-inclusive care.”

The Academy for Eating Disorders (AED) had three main concerns with the report, which it detailed in a press release saying “In line with the Hippocratic oath of first, do no harm, the AED urges the AAP to revise their Guideline with input from key stakeholders including eating disorder professionals and individuals/families with lived experience in higher-weight bodies.”

Non-Diet HAES Parenting Tips

Non-Diet/Health At Every Size® Fact Sheets, Guidelines, and Scripts

  • Fact Sheets About Weight Stigma, Diet Culture, Kids and Diets, and More
  • Non-Diet Parent Guidelines
  • Non-Diet Parent Scripts About Responding to Fat Talk, Diet Talk, and More
  • What to Say/Not Say When Talking About Bodies and Food
Learn More

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To The Causes Of Eating Disorders

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Helpful ways parents can improve girls’ body image

Helpful ways parents can improve girls' body image

“My body image has been terrible my whole life, and now I see the same thing happening with my girls,” says Liz. “I want to improve my daughters’ body image, but it feels impossible sometimes.”

Liz isn’t alone. Negative body image is a major issue, particularly for girls. One survey of 11–16-year-olds found that 79% said how they look is important to them, and over half (52%) often worry about how they look.

Poor body image is associated with many negative health outcomes, from anxiety and depression to eating disorders and suicidality. Given this, Liz is right to worry about her girls and it makes sense to find ways to improve their body image as much as possible.

Luckily, there is a lot that parents can do to improve girls’ body image.

How to help a girl with body image issues

To get some help with this topic, I spoke with Amelia Sherry, MPH, RD, CDCES, founder of NourishHer.com and author of Diet-Proof Your Daughter: A Mother’s Guide to Raising Girls Who Have Happy, Healthy Relationships with Food and Body. She knows personally how hard it is to navigate body image issues when raising daughters. 

Body Image Printable Worksheets

Colorful, fun, meaningful worksheets to improve body image!

  • Boost confidence
  • Improve self-esteem
  • Increase media literacy
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“When my own daughters’ bodies started changing in preparation for puberty, it triggered a lot of emotion in me ,” she says. “And seeing my discomfort with those changes made me realize that I still had  a lot of work to do with regard to my own body image issues. I had to remind myself that weight gain, particularly in adolescent girls, was perfectly normal and perfectly healthy. ”

“As a dietitian, I knew the “right” things to say and do in terms of allowing them to eat food they enjoy and eat as much as they need to feel full and satisfied,” says Amelia. “But because of my own history with disordered eating and dieting, trusting them with food and giving them that freedom didn’t come naturally. It was challenging, and a lot more triggering and a lot more emotional than I realized it would be.”

At least as far back as middle school, Amelia remembers feeling judged and criticized about her body. “I was chubby, so I started dieting and trying to lose weight,” she says. In high school she experimented with purging, and in college she used exercise to control her weight. 

Luckily for Amelia, when she started living on her own and feeling less judged, she started resolving her relationship with food and her body. Healing her relationship with herself led her to become a dietitian who helps families develop positive, happy relationships with food.

How to improve girls’ body image and self-esteem

After helping her own daughters get through puberty with their body image and a set of positive eating skills intact, Amelia started using the same framework to help other mothers who have a history of disordered eating do the same. Here are her five  top tips for improving body image and self-esteem in girls:

1. Trust girls to eat as much or as little as they like

Encourage girls to listen to their bodies as opposed to taking information about how much to eat from the outside world. We can show our trust by avoiding commenting on how much they are eating. And if our daughters’ eating or appetites make us uncomfortable, we can look inward to ask ourselves why. 

2. Accept our daughters’ natural body size and shape

Being accepting of their appetites as well as their food likes and dislikes. That doesn’t mean we avoid exposing them to new foods or offering balanced meals, by the way. 

3. Rethink what it means to be a healthy eater

We have been conditioned to think of healthy eating as eating in a way that controls our weight. However, when we understand that body weight is not an indicator of health we allow ourselves and our daughters to eat in more relaxed, confident ways as opposed to being restrictive and fearful. 

4. Be aware of the influences and pressures our daughters are under

From social media and peers, to diet culture and health culture. Teaching them to be critical thinkers, and conscious consumers of media can help them avoid ramping up their own body dissatisfaction. We can also protect our daughters from dieting by being aware of the influences in our own lives as a parent, such as the pressure to raise a perfect eater. 

5. Keep nutrition simple

Emphasizing the importance of getting enough to eat and eating variety–more diversity means more nutrients–as opposed to focusing on complex information and avoiding foods and food groups and specific nutrients can help protect our daughters from diets. Teaching them to be skeptical of eating fads and trends as well as being aware of the dangers of dieting is essential too. 

Body Image Printable Worksheets

Colorful, fun, meaningful worksheets to improve body image!

  • Boost confidence
  • Improve self-esteem
  • Increase media literacy
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What do you say to your daughter with body image issues?

It’s very common to praise little girls for their looks. Whether you call your daughter beautiful or cute, appearance-based praise can work against positive body image because it reinforces the idea that girls and women are valued primarily for their appearance. 

“Non-looks-based compliments boost our kids’ resilience against dieting, disordered eating, body comparison, and body dissatisfaction,” says Amelia. “Specifically, I suggest we move away from saying things like “you’re so cute” or “you’re so pretty” and instead say things that focus on who your daughter is and what she’s capable of.”

Here are some ideas for non-looks-based-compliments Amelia suggests:

  • I love that you’re not afraid to show your emotions
  • You’re really loyal to people you care about and I admire that!
  • I love that you feel comfortable enough to tell others how you feel.
  • I appreciate how brave you are when it comes to meeting new people.
  • You’re really good at being open to people who are different from you.
  • It’s awesome that you’re always willing to make a new friend.
  • I like how you choose to wear something comfortable – that was well thought out!
  • I’m so impressed that you’ve been getting to bed on time – that’s not always easy to do!
  • I admire how you listen to your body and eat as much or as little as feels right for you.

Social media and body image

Body image has always been tricky for girls in our society, but it has definitely gotten worse with the rise of social media. And while it’s very challenging to change social media usage in kids, it can make a huge difference in their mental health and wellbeing. 

Teens and young adults who reduced their social media use by 50% for just a few weeks saw significant improvement in how they felt about both their weight and their overall appearance compared with peers who maintained consistent levels of social media use, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

If you’d like some more ideas about limiting your daughter’s social media use, here are a few articles: 

Raising a diet-proof daughter

Dieting is the best predictor of eating disorders, which affect about 9% of the population and are the second-most deadly mental disorder. But dieting has many other negative health outcomes. For example, almost everyone who diets ends up weight cycling, which reduces cardiometabolic health. 

Amelia encourages families to raise diet-proof kids who will not fall prey to dangerous weight loss programs. “When you’re raising a diet-proof daughter, you’re teaching her to listen to her body, enjoy her appetite, take pleasure in food, and have a good perspective on eating and physical health,” she says. “You want her to listen to herself, honor herself, respect her body and her needs, her pleasures and appetite. If you do that, she’ll find a good balance between good nutrition and self-care.” 

“Elements of diet culture–such as cutting out specific nutrients or entire food groups–will put her health at risk, which is the exact opposite of what diet promoters and “health gurus” promise our girls,” says Amelia. “Feeding yourself is the ultimate act of self care. It’s the most basic thing, and it gets overlooked. So that’s what I want parents to focus on with their girls, making sure they are well fed–that they get enough food and that they feel good about eating. This is the best way to make sure they’re well-nourished both physically and emotionally. I want families to raise girls who are able to eat without feeling judged. There are so many benefits to that.”

With these ideas and more, parents can do a lot to improve girls’ body image.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To Body Image And Eating Disorders

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Real world stories of hormones and eating disorders

Real world stories of hormones and eating disorders

Elizabeth, Mireia, Lisette, Chelsey, and many others believe there is a link between their hormones and eating disorders. With the chemical changes throughout the menstrual cycle and the weight gain that often accompanies puberty and other hormone-related conditions, there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to body image, disordered eating, eating disorders, and hormones. Keep reading to hear their stories of how their experiences with puberty, PMS, hypothyroidism, PCOS, endometriosis, and diabetes interact with eating disorders.

Do hormones affect eating disorders?

Eating disorders are both more common in females and often begin around puberty. Because of this, researchers suggest that hormones may be one of the biological causes of eating disorders. According to one study, “Given the abundance of research suggesting that reproductive hormones play a critical part in normal eating behaviors and food intake, it is reasonable to postulate that these hormones also have a functional role in the dysregulated eating behaviors associated with eating disorders, with estrogens being the most promising candidate.”

Body Image Printable Worksheets

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  • Boost confidence
  • Improve self-esteem
  • Increase media literacy
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Menstruation has a clear effect on women’s mental health. Psychiatric hospitalizations, suicidal behaviors, and depressed mood are more frequent during the premenstrual phase. Studies have shown that binge eating frequency and purging behaviors are significantly increased during the premenstrual phase compared with other phases of the menstrual cycle. One report showed a 60% increase in binge-eating frequency in the premenstrual phase. Meanwhile, body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness are highest during the premenstrual phase compared to other phases. 

Since eating disorder symptoms are linked to menstrual phases, treatment should address female biology and the impacts of menstruation on mood and eating behaviors. For example, therapists can teach people cognitive techniques for responding to their increased chance of experiencing negative body image, “eating disorder thoughts” and eating disorder urges during the premenstrual phase. Unfortunately, hormonal fluctuations are rarely if ever a factor in eating disorder treatment.

How do hormones affect body image and disordered eating?

Beyond the biological fluctuations of menstruation, another trigger for eating disorders is the degree to which bodies change during puberty. Findings suggest that early puberty is associated with disordered eating and anxiety. Part of that may be due to the hormones themselves, but puberty also changes the way many girls look and therefore are treated by others. 

Dramatic changes in appearance and the way people look at and respond to you can have a huge impact on a girl’s identity and sense of self, both of which are involved in eating disorder symptomatology. But it’s not just girls. Both males and females who undergo early puberty have higher rates of disordered eating. This suggests that there are both biological and psychosocial causes of eating disorders associated with puberty. 

The research into the intersection of hormones and eating disorders is still in its early stages. However, there are many people with lived experience of their hormones influencing their eating disorder behaviors. Here are a few of their stories:

Elizabeth’s story of periods, anxiety, and eating

Elizabeth is 34 and actively in recovery from her eating disorder, which involves food restriction and food aversions. She has noticed a direct connection between her anxiety and her period. And since anxiety is a major factor in her eating disorder behaviors, identifying its source is essential to recovery. “When my anxiety gets worse, I have a harder time eating in general and a harder time with new or different foods or different textures.”

“I just recently noticed my anxiety gets worse right before I get my period, which directly affects my eating disorder,” says Elizabeth. “When I’m anxious, my OCD kicks in, I have a harder time working through things, and I have more issues with food. Now I’m able to realize where I am in my cycle and I can notice the voice of the eating disorder or the extra anxiety voice and know okay, well, it’s that time of the month. This is not just out of the blue, and it won’t last forever.”

Body Image Printable Worksheets

Colorful, fun, meaningful worksheets to improve body image!

  • Boost confidence
  • Improve self-esteem
  • Increase media literacy
Learn More

It’s been a relief for Elizabeth to track her period to her anxiety and eating disorder symptoms. “Right before my period, it shoots right up. I get super anxious and super hungry, but I also have more food aversions and more trouble eating. At first I asked myself ‘why is this happening? This is so annoying.’ And then I was like, ‘wait a minute, it’s the same time every month.”

“I was diagnosed last July with other specified feeding and eating disorders (OSFED), but I’ve been struggling since I was about 16, and I’m 34 now, so it’s been a long time,” says Elizabeth. “There are ARFID components to what I’m dealing with and a bit of anorexia as well.

Making the period-anxiety-eating disorder breakthrough is a milestone in Elizabeth’s recovery. “In the last month or so I’ve actually started feeling hopeful about the future,” she says. “Everything had always felt so out of my control and so uncomfortable that I never realized it all was so connected. I feel like now I’m in a different place with my thoughts, about my eating disorder.”

“Now I’m kind of like, all right, well, at least I know maybe the week before or even two to three days before my period the thoughts are going to most likely show up,” says Elizabeth. “I don’t have eating disorder thoughts every day now. So if it kicks in, I can say ‘oh, okay, no, get out of here, not now.’ And it’s easier to say knowing this is directly related to my period, and these are thoughts I do not want to engage in. I don’t have to listen to them.”

Mireia’s story of puberty, hypothyroidism, diabetes, and disordered eating

Mireia has struggled with disordered eating and body image issues since she was 12 years old. “I believe my body image issues started with puberty because it was a period of rapid changes. My period started and I started growing body hair well before my peers at age 11. I hated changing in front of girls my age, I was so ashamed of my body because it was different from theirs.” To this day, she says “My period always makes me hate my body, I perceive it bigger than it is when I’m on my period.” 

“At 15 I started my first official intentional weight loss diet because I had a bigger body than my peers and it was pointed out to me by my pediatrician and family members and basically everyone in school, even teachers,” says Mireia. “I wanted to fit in and those changes in my body weren’t accepted by society. I felt rejected.” 

Hormone-related conditions

Mireia has hypothyroidism, which is a hormonal condition associated with weight gain. When she was 21 years old she was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, another hormone-related condition. “It triggered a lot of body image issues because again I thought it was my fault for eating badly,” she says. “The year prior to being diagnosed with diabetes I was eating a lot and I even told my therapist I was concerned I had binge eating disorder/bulimia but she gaslighted me and told me to eat healthy and exercise more. Later I learned that insatiable hunger is a symptom of uncontrolled diabetes.” Mireia’s hunger was a symptom of diabetes, not a personal weakness. Her therapist’s weight stigma led to delayed medical diagnosis and a missed opportunity to address her eating behaviors.

ad-parentcoaching-ed

Mireia is now 26 years old and recently gave birth. Pregnancy with diabetes is more challenging, but she is grateful that her body was able to grow a baby. “I’m fat, but I try to remain at least neutral about it. I got so much better in the past months, pregnancy helped me realize I need to eat for nutrition and not to lose weight.” 

Lisette’s story of PCOS, hormones, and body image 

Lisette is 49 and is in her seventh year of eating disorder recovery. She traces her eating disorder back to when she was 17 years old and diagnosed with PCOS. She was prescribed two hormones and her body rapidly changed in response.

“My body changed a lot in about 3-6 months because it went through puberty very suddenly,” Lisette says. “It was alarming to me. It was scary. And that’s really when all of my disordered eating started. Looking back, I realize my body changing was normal and natural. But at the time, that’s really when I started messing around with eating disorder behaviors, and it just got worse as I got older. Maybe if I had understood that it was supposed to change my body and that these things were necessary in order to menstruate, it would have been different. But I got very strong messages that thin was good and dieting was what women did and all of the things most of us were exposed to.”

Lisette got positive feedback as her body changed, but she could not line up her new body with the identity she’d held for seventeen years of her life. “My mom said, ‘you look so beautiful,’ but in my head, it was way bigger than it had ever been. I was used to being smaller and all of a sudden, I wasn’t. I remember being at a pool party and comparing my body to my friends and really realizing that it had changed. My brain was thinking, ‘this change is not okay.”

Vivid memories

“I have this vivid memory of trying on clothes and there was some size that I always was and all of a sudden, none of it fit,” says Lisette. “And I had to go get bigger sizes and I remember looking at myself and thinking this is not okay.”

Lisette went into eating disorder treatment twice before getting married and having three kids. “I gained up to the target that they gave me and would not do certain behaviors. And in my mind, that was recovery, but I was not where my body wanted to be; I was still restricted.” 

Lisette entered what she calls true recovery after her youngest son was one year old. “Throughout my pregnancies, I was working on it but I wasn’t free all the way,” she says. “But then I learned about Health At Every Size® (HAES®) and learned about how this is a social justice issue. I learned that some of the treatment I had received was harmful. And I did what I consider true recovery. My body changed and found its set point in a size much larger than any target weight they ever gave me in treatment.”

Non-Diet HAES Parenting Tips

Non-Diet/Health At Every Size® Fact Sheets, Guidelines, and Scripts

  • Fact Sheets About Weight Stigma, Diet Culture, Kids and Diets, and More
  • Non-Diet Parent Guidelines
  • Non-Diet Parent Scripts About Responding to Fat Talk, Diet Talk, and More
  • What to Say/Not Say When Talking About Bodies and Food
Learn More

Chelsey’s story of puberty, endometriosis, and an eating disorder

Chelsey developed an eating disorder at age 14. She’s now 31 years old and has been working on recovery for three years. “When I first got my period, at 13 years old, I immediately struggled with severe pain,” says Chelsey. “I was told that I needed to lose weight, change my eating habits, or work out more. They even said that I probably have a low pain tolerance and just simply cannot handle the pain of menstrual cramps. I quickly became unhappy with my body for having pain. It felt like it was my fault. I would often become depressed, anxious, and irritable before my period and noticed increased fear and unhappiness with my body.” 

After almost ten years of trying to get doctors to listen to her, Chelsey was finally diagnosed with endometriosis at age 22. It wasn’t easy. “The doctor that ended up diagnosing me did NOT believe me but I advocated for myself, demanded a laparoscopic surgery, and he then apologized for not listening to me,” she says. 

Hormonal fluctuations

“Hormonal fluctuations have continued to contribute to my disordered eating,” says Chelsey. “I notice that I experience significant depression when I am PMSing, and it is all centered around how I feel about my body. Sometimes I’ll be feeling so low that I don’t want to get dressed, socialize or be intimate with my husband. I cry every day, thinking about how terrible my body is and questioning how my husband can be attracted to me. I experience deep, deep sadness and feel as though I will not escape it. Then, after having my period, I feel the opposite: content, proud of what my body has done, not afraid to eat certain things, and confident. It’s a struggle because it’s very up and down for me.”

“I think people need to realize that hormones and eating disorders go hand-in-hand,” says Chelsey. “For me, hormonal fluctuations heighten anxiety, depression, and OCD which then plays a huge role in your thoughts and emotions around negative body image, disordered eating, and/or over-exercise. I know that for me when my anxiety and depression are heightened, I obsess around “needing” to work out over what I ate, I pull and tug at my clothes, I am physically uncomfortable with how my body looks and feels, and the negative self-talk spirals.”

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Collection of Eating Disorder Recovery Stories

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A remarkable book about a boy, body image, and disordered eating 

A beautiful book about a boy, body image, and disordered eating

 

Jarrett Lerner author
Jarrett Lerner, Author

Following is an interview with Jarrett Lerner, author of A Work in Progress. This book poignantly illustrates the painful childhood experiences of a boy with negative body image and disordered eating. It shares what it feels like to be singled out and body shamed in elementary school, and how easy it is to slip into disordered eating in an attempt to regain dignity and control.

Jarrett’s book, which is based on his own experience as a boy with negative body image and disordered eating, touched my heart deeply. Though I’m not a boy, I was that kid. And for me, Jarret’s book beautifully describes what it felt like to believe my body was wrong and to desperately want to change it by any means possible.

This is Jarrett’s thirteenth book. A Work In Progress is written for kids aged 8-12 and tells the powerful story of a boy with negative body image and disordered eating. Here’s my interview with Jarrett:

Q: When did you first feel bad about your body? 

Jarrett: I recall very clearly as a little kid we belonged to a pool and I loved it, I was in it all the time. And then my body changed and I was not a big fan of the pool anymore. And I remember being on a trip and really wanting to go into this amazing pool with all these cool features. I would make excuses to not go in it. And when I finally did go in it, I asked my mom to take me at night and in a T-shirt. So I swam at night in a T-shirt to have that experience I wanted. 

I was worried about what would happen if I showed my body in public. And then I had a moment in elementary school where I was publicly body-shamed. And that sort of intensified it all and led to a hyper-awareness about my body and eating. I landed on this idea that I’m just going to do something to change my body by changing my eating. 

A Life In Progress by Jarrett Lerner boy body image eating
Excerpt from the book A Life In Progress by Jarrett Lerner. Image courtesy of the author.

Q: What do you think influenced how you felt about your body?

Jarrett: At the time there was nothing like body positivity or body neutrality. It didn’t exist. We didn’t have any role models in the public eye doing that. If you go back two decades, which is when much of this was going on in my life, the messages that were out there were really stark and shameful. 

You could barely see a movie or pick up a book without cheap jokes about someone’s size being used for comic relief. So that’s what I was ingesting. And then on the other side of things, there was the constant barrage of fad diets every week. It was always a new diet. It was a very intense time.

I was able to convince myself that the disordered eating and over-exercise I was doing was actually healthy because I wasn’t fully starving myself, I wasn’t bulimic. By staying on the other side of that line I convinced myself I was actually being healthy by watching what I ate and exercising. I didn’t know what disordered eating was until I was an adult.

Q: What do you think is unique about being a boy with negative body image and disordered eating?

Jarrett: Generally speaking, I think that boys who suffer from body image and eating issues have this sort of added issue to wrestle with, which is the concept of masculinity. So often growing up, the thing I heard most from my peers and even from adults in my life was man up. I can’t even count how many times in situations where either I or someone around me was showing vulnerability and were told to man up. 

So that was something that I thought I had to do when I was struggling with my body. It was man up. Man up when I wanted to shout out and cry for help. 

I think that’s changing. I think we have more models of male vulnerability in our culture, and more men who are more comfortable showing emotion. But I think it’s still an issue. I still hear “man up” or something similar when I’m in schools.

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Q: How did it feel to have body image issues and disordered eating?

Jarrett: I remember finding two books that broached the subject of eating disorders, and they were extreme cases with girls. And I’m glad those books existed, and I’m glad that today there’s more of them. But for me, who didn’t require hospitalization and was a boy, I think in some ways reading those stories actually did more damage than good.

Not seeing boys with body image and eating issues made me think that there was something even more wrong with me, that I was the only boy on Earth who was experiencing these things, that they were the territory of girls, and that I was doubly troubled because I was a boy experiencing it. 

I felt so alone and overwhelmed. Even when surrounded by people, even in a caring family, even with friends and even with things going on socially, I felt very alone. I was overwhelmed by the intensity and consistency of the negative thoughts in my head. And I felt incapable of getting help. I convinced myself that the destructive things I was doing were constructive and positive.

My parents would have been the perfect people to open up to about it. I wish I had spoken to my parents and my friends. I wish I had felt comfortable and said what I was thinking and feeling, but I didn’t.

Q: How would you describe your journey out of disordered eating? 

Jarrett: In the book, it’s Will versus the Will Monster and thinking he has to tame it. But he realized that fighting wasn’t working. Like Will, I had to stop fighting and sit down with these thought processes and obsessions and confront them. And instead of trying to slay this monster, I had to accept it and sit down with it and say, this is me and it wants something. It needs something, and maybe there’s another way to get it. 

My best therapy was writing. I discovered my own sort of cognitive behavioral therapy, where writing things down helped me release my thoughts and helped me grasp them in a way that I could get beyond them and write myself a new story. 

I also discovered a new group of friends that was much more accepting and open minded and much like Markus in the book. They were radically accepting and offered love to everyone, no matter the differences of their body or outlook or background. And I think all of that instilled confidence that allowed me to manage it better. 

Q: How do you view recovery from disordered eating?

I’ve come to think of myself as in recovery. It helps me greatly to remind myself that it’s okay to have bad days when food and body stuff crops up. On days when it’s harder to quiet that voice and be nice, I remind myself to give it a hug instead of trying to chase it away, because that only leads to worse outcomes. 

And thinking of myself like that has allowed me to extend myself the same sort of grace that I would any friend or family member. And that’s really the whole theme of the book, this idea of being a work in progress, that you might look at yourself today and say, “oh, man, I don’t love this thing I did or this part of me or the way I acted. But tomorrow is a new day, and I’m never going to be perfect. I’m always evolving. I’m always changing.” 

Q: Why did you write this book?

Jarrett: I think the greatest opportunity I have right now is to openly say to kids “I’m going to talk to you about disordered eating and body dysmorphia and how I struggled with it for years.” I think the act of sharing encourages and inspires other people to share their stories. I hope that I serve as a model for kids who can maybe feel much more comfortable and even eager to share.

And that’s what compelled me to finish putting this book together. It was my motivation to finish this book and go on tour with it and stand in front of auditoriums of kids making myself vulnerable. I know in every auditorium I step into, there will be kids who are silently suffering and who feel like I’m speaking right to them. And if I’d had someone in 5th, 6th, 7th grade talk about it publicly in front of me, it would have been amazing and I think it would have gotten me into a healthier place much sooner.

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Q: How do you think your experience has informed how you parent your own kids?

Jarrett: I hope that I model vulnerability and openness and sharing of difficulties, external and internal. In terms of eating and food and body image, I think I’m extremely sensitive and careful about what I both don’t do and what I do. And I try to make sure that none of the hang ups that I continue to have and continue to struggle with seep out into my own language and my own responses to anything that they’re doing. 

If you look at the data, chances are that my children will feel insecure about something or other. Maybe it’s the quality of their skin once they hit puberty. Maybe it’s their hairline, or it can be anything. But I think it’s exceedingly rare that someone gets through life without some sort of insecurity. 

So I hope I’m just sensitive to that, that I’m both a good role model and a supportive parent, and that I can provide information should anything ever crop up or at least I get a sense that something’s cropping up. 

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To Body Image And Eating Disorders

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True (and painful) stories of complex trauma and eating disorders

True (and painful) stories of complex trauma and eating disorders

Complex trauma is trauma that happens over a long period of time, often beginning in early childhood, and it’s strongly associated with eating disorders. Traumatic experiences range from physical and verbal abuse to less-obvious but still deeply damaging behavior like criticism, emotional neglect, weight teasing, food insecurity, and food shaming. 

Complex trauma can lead to a syndrome called C-PTSD or complex post traumatic stress syndrome. PTSD, which is more commonly discussed, is event-based. It shows up following events such as an accident, assault, or natural disaster. However, C-PTSD is layered into a child’s life, sometimes from birth. 

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How complex trauma leads to eating disorders

People who identify as having complex trauma are affected as much by what did happen, such as teasing, criticism, and physical violence, as what did not happen, such as unconditional positive regard, emotional caregiving, and support. 

All children need emotional caregiving from parents. However, many parents aren’t raised in an emotionally nurturing household and therefore don’t have the skills to provide it to their own children. Thus, complex trauma often happens even when parents have the very best intentions. Almost no parents intend to cause complex trauma, and yet its effects are devastating and can lead to eating disorders and other problems.

Both PTSD and C-PTSD have chronic symptoms, including flashbacks, depersonalization, and dissociation. A person with these symptoms will naturally reach for coping methods, which range from zoning out, avoiding events, people, and situations, and behaviors like eating disorders, substance use, and self-harm. 

Researchers say that “the eating disorder may function as a survival mechanism, and may have a protective function to avoid the emotional confrontation with the trauma experience.” Here are a few true stories of complex trauma and eating disorders:

Jenn’s story

Jenn’s eating disorder started, as so many do, with a diet. Her mom took her to Weight Watchers starting at age 9. Today, at age 38, she is married and has a 3-year-old son, and she started serious treatment for her eating disorder last November. “I see an eating disorder therapist and a dietitian, which is required by my therapist, twice per week,” she says. “This takes the food out of therapy so we can focus on the trauma.” 

Jenn believes that complex trauma was the catalyst for her 30-year eating disorder, which began at age 9, alongside those Weight Watchers meetings. She’s now in recovery and is working on her PTSD. She didn’t believe she had PTSD at first. “My therapist said ‘you have complex PTSD,’” says Jenn. “And I said ‘that’s not a thing, I wasn’t in a war!” 

Yet after further work with her therapist and reading about C-PTSD all the symptoms lined up. “Getting help consistently has been the best thing I’ve done,” says Jenn. “I’m someone who’s experienced significant trauma and experiences intrusive thoughts all the time – all day, every day. I thought this was all part of my personality. Growing up I thought this is just who I am. Now I realize there’s so much more going on.”

Like so many adults with long-term eating disorders, Jenn is dealing with paying for treatment herself. “My therapist is extraordinary,” says Jenn. “I’m paying for both her and my dietitian out of pocket, which isn’t great, but it needs to happen. I have a son and it’s really important for him to not have to worry about the things I’ve dealt with.” 

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Tina’s story

Tina remembers first restricting food at around 9 or 10 years old. “When I did eat I had very few safe foods and I’d almost always eat alone,” she says. Today, at age 37, she says she’s healing from both her eating disorder and complex trauma. “I am 37 and I finally, for the first time in my life feel free of my eating disorder,” she says. “I don’t like ‘healed;’ that feels false. My anorexia and body image issues will likely always be with me in some way but I don’t believe my anorexia-driven thoughts and feelings anymore.” 

Tina sees her eating disorder as intrinsically linked to the complex trauma she experienced. “Given the situation at home, I was going to develop a coping mechanism,” says Tina. “My eating disorder is how that manifested for me. My sister is a perfectionist who attempted suicide in high school. And my brother struggled with alcoholism and self-harm and died by suicide last year. My eating disorder may very well have saved my life.”

While this idea may surprise you, many people with complex trauma and an eating disorder see their disorder as the only way they could cope with their life. Tina describes her eating disorder as a way to “not know” about how bad things were for her and her siblings at home. “The not knowing made it tolerable,” she says. “If I knew how love should feel I would have known I was starving in more than one way.”

Tina began healing from complex trauma and her eating disorder by reaching out to her sister. “We were able to hear and validate our experiences as children and as adults with our parents,” she says. “This was invaluable. We sought out literature together and slowly learned about emotional neglect, abuse, and complex trauma. We are both in therapy now.” 

“Healing has felt emotionally what I assume waterboarding must feel like physically,” she says. “At every turn I feel like l will surely die, that the pain is too great and then, I do not die. I learn I have more capacity than I knew and I can trust my body.”

Tina has found validation, meditation, breathwork, and finding ways to feel safe in her body most helpful. “Emotional flashbacks are so difficult,” she says. “Meditation and being present in the moment, in my body, is my lifeline.”

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How parents can help kids with complex trauma and eating disorders

If your child has both complex trauma and an eating disorder, you can make a big difference. Your child’s mental health and eating disorder recovery will depend on their ability to process their complex trauma. Keep the following ideas in mind as you help your child heal:

  • Do not debate the validity of your child’s memories of their childhood. That will only hurt them more. 
  • Listen and be compassionate to their experience of their childhood.
  • Your job is not to correct your child’s memories, but to compassionately witness their memories and hold them in ways you were unable to before.
  • If your child asks you to go to therapy with them, go.
  • Get yourself a therapist or coach who can work through your own trauma of supporting a child who has complex trauma. You deserve a safe space to work out your feelings about this. You will be better able to support them if you get support for yourself. 
  • Keep in mind that most children who have complex trauma have parents who have complex trauma. It tends to run in families. Have a lot of compassion for yourself in this process. It didn’t start with you, and together you and your child can end the cycle of complex trauma.

This is hard for everyone, but never doubt the transformative potential of sitting with your child in their pain and grief. Your ability to do so is beyond powerful. And while you may not want to face this, doing this can result in a deeper, more meaningful relationship with your child.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

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Parent’s guide to neurodivergence and eating disorders

Ultimate guide to neurodivergent causes of eating disorders

There are many different pathways to eating disorders that we’re still learning about, especially when it comes to neurodivergence. In these cases the symptoms may not fit what we consider to be a “typical” eating disorder. They may not begin by dieting to lose weight or include body image issues.

If your child is neurodivergent and has an eating disorder, it’s important to work closely with your child’s providers to make sure eating disorder treatment takes that into account. Working with a therapist and/or dietitian who understands neurodivergence is essential.

Up to 37% of people with eating disorders have autism, and 31% of adults diagnosed with eating disorders also have ADHD. Research indicates that people with neurodivergence benefit less and have poorer outcomes from traditional treatment for eating disorders. Unless we address the neurodivergent symptoms involved in some eating disorders, it’s much harder to achieve recovery. I put together the three symptoms I see most often when working with parents who have neurodivergent kids.

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Picky eating/food aversions

The neurotypical approach to food assumes that everyone enjoys eating and will eat most foods. We assume that most people can eat almost anything and that any quirks or preferences can be overcome by circumstance and social pressure. For example, we expect that if you don’t like cantaloupe, but that’s all there is, and your parents are telling you to eat it, you will eat cantaloupe. 

However, while this may be the dominant attitude towards food, it is far from universal. There are many people, particularly those who are neurodivergent and especially those with autism and ADHD, who have highly sensitive palates who are not just mildly averse to certain foods but who develop severe aversions to food based on their five senses (sight, smell, sound, taste, texture) as well as their memories of being pressured to eat the food even when they don’t like it. Combined, these aversions take a tendency to be picky about food to a full-blown food aversion. 

Once a person develops a serious food aversion, eating that food is not as simple as being hungry or receiving well-meaning pressure to try it. These people are strongly opposed to that food and may have physical symptoms like a racing heart, sweating, nausea, and even vomiting when faced with that food. Their list of “safe foods” may dwindle as they become more sensitive over time. This is how picky eating and food aversions can tumble into disordered eating and an eating disorder.

How to help

Parents can support recovery by feeding their child regular meals, having family meals, and gradually exposing them to more food variety in a non-pressured environment. They can support a child in exploring their food-based sensory and emotional issues and soothe them when emotional dysregulation makes eating hard. 

Recovery does not have to mean a person becomes a “typical” eater. Parents and providers can help kids learn to feed their bodies in light of their unique neurobiology and psychology.

Forgetting to eat/procrastinating eating

The neurotypical approach to food assumes that when you are hungry, you will eat. This idea assumes that anyone who skips meals or procrastinates eating is doing so because they want to lose weight. However, while this may be the neurotypical response to hunger, it is far from universal. Sometimes people assume a child who doesn’t eat is being stubborn, defiant, or lazy. However, there are many people, particularly those who are neurodivergent and especially those with ADHD, who don’t notice their hunger cues and/or are not motivated to interrupt what they are doing to eat. This is a neurological difference, not defiance or a choice. 

These people may skip meals because they completely forget to eat or put eating off for a later time. This is a form of unintentional food restriction that can lead to a cascade of other eating disorder behaviors, including negative body image, more restriction, binge eating, and purging. It’s very easy to create the story that the reason they don’t eat is for weight loss. However, if we miss the essential lack of hunger cues and drive to eat, we will not truly address the cause of disordered eating.

How to help

People who don’t notice and respond to their hunger cues can use intentional (vs. intuitive) eating to recover. Parents can support recovery by serving food regularly, having family meals, and prompting eating, especially when distraction is involved. They can also teach kids to prioritize eating and recognize non-typical signs of hunger.

Recovery may not have to mean intuitively feeding their body based on typical hunger cues. Instead, parents and providers can support kids in learning to feed themselves given their unique situation. 

Oppositional assertion of independence

When a child is picky and/or forgets to eat, parents tend to increase their focus on food and eating. This is appropriate, as we are responsible for helping our kids get the nutrition they need. Unfortunately, many times the way we go about this backfires. While parents need to support kids in eating, power struggles about eating are very common. They can compound the original issue that leads to picky eating and/or procrastinating eating. 

Psychiatrist William W. Dodson, MD, says that by age 12, kids with ADHD have heard about 20,000 more negative messages from adults compared to kids who don’t have ADHD. Since they are already highly sensitive to negative feedback, the level of negativity that they receive based on their neurodivergent qualities can be devastating and lead to oppositional defiance. 

Because they feel so criticized and marginalized, neurodivergent kids are often more resistant to even the mildest prompting from parents. Additionally, when food becomes an issue, parents can become hyper-focused on it, making eating even more stressful and, therefore, unlikely.

How to help

Parents can help a child who is oppositional and engaging in extended power struggles over food by learning how to co-regulate with their child before offering instruction. This means slowing the whole process of feeding down to attend to the child’s core need to feel connected to the parent before the parent tells them what to do.

The good news is that when parents learn to feed neurodivergent kids based on their unique symptoms and patterns, they can make a huge difference in eating disorders. A cookie-cutter approach doesn’t really work for anyone with eating disorders, but this is particularly true when neurodivergence is a factor.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To Mental Health And Eating Disorders

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Depression and your child’s eating disorder

Depression and your child's eating disorder

Your child’s eating disorder and depression are likely linked. Depression is both a risk factor and maintaining factor of an eating disorder. This is important, because both eating disorders and depression are common and increasing among all populations, particularly children and teens.

As with anxiety, your child’s treatment for depression first and foremost needs to focus on eating regular meals containing enough nutrition. If your child is weight suppressed, restricting, purging, and/or skipping meals, then the lack of nourishing food is likely contributing to and maintaining their depression symptoms. Even with treatment, it is unlikely that your child’s depression will decrease if they lack nutrition.

Additionally, depressive symptoms are strongly associated with both stress and a lack of sleep. Evaluate your child’s lifestyle right now and determine whether you need to take things off their plate to reduce stress and ensure they are able to get the hours of sleep recommended for their age. Few people get enough sleep, but impaired sleep is both a risk factor and a symptom of depression, and it must be addressed for any other attempts to treat depression to work.

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Psychological symptoms of depression

Depression is both physical and psychological. Most people are familiar with and look for the psychological symptoms of depression, which include:

  • Feelings of sadness, tearfulness, emptiness or hopelessness
  • Angry outbursts, irritability or frustration, even over small matters
  • Loss of interest or pleasure in most or all normal activities
  • Anxiety, agitation or restlessness
  • Feelings of worthlessness or guilt, fixating on past failures or self-blame
  • Trouble thinking, concentrating, making decisions and remembering things
  • Frequent or recurrent thoughts of death, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts or suicide

Physical symptoms of depression

Parents should be aware that physical symptoms of depression are common. In fact, physical symptoms may be your child’s only symptoms of depression. There is a strong link between increased sensations of pain and depression based on a shared neurologic pathway. Physical symptoms of depression include: 

  • Headache
  • Joint pain
  • Limb pain
  • Back pain
  • Fatigue
  • Sleep disturbances
  • Slowed thinking, speaking or body movements

Importantly, other physical symptoms of depression include gastrointestinal distress (stomachaches, nausea, etc.) and a change in appetite (either high or low), which makes it a major risk factor and maintaining factor for eating disorders.

Depression affects the way your child perceives food. Some kids with depression find that food looks and tastes “gray” and dull. This can exacerbate restrictive eating issues. Other kids will seek comfort and solace in food when they are depressed. It may be the one way they can “feel” something, which may lead to increased binge eating. In other words, your child’s depression is very likely interacting with their eating disorder behaviors.

What causes depression?

Many different factors cause depression. Like eating disorders, depression is a biopsychosocial disorder that combines biological, psychological and social risk factors, including:

Biological risk factors: Reduced production of the neurotransmitters in the brain including serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, gamma – aminobutyric acid (GABA), cerebral nerve growth factor and more.

Psychological risk factors: Other mental disorders including anxiety, eating disorders, and depression (people who have one depressive episode are more likely to have another). Low self-esteem, emotional repression, cognitive distortions, a lack of emotional regulation, and low self-efficacy or agency.

Social risk factors: Adverse childhood events, childhood trauma, early adversity including food insecurity, stress, parental depression and substance use, non-supportive school or family environments, and social forces of oppression like sexism, racism, weight stigma, etc.

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How depression works

Like anxiety, depression occurs along a spectrum. Most people feel sadness and even despair regularly – even daily. Sadness is a natural human emotion that is ideally noticed and processed when it arises. However, if a person avoids feelings of sadness and represses their experiences of sadness, leaving those feelings unprocessed, they may experience a depressive episode.

“I often think of depression as “stuck sadness.” In fact, when clients come in for therapy and tell me that they are depressed, my first thought is, “What is the sadness they are not allowing themselves to experience?”

Elaine Carney Gibson / Your Family Revealed

In a depressive episode, clinically called “major depression,” a person has persistent symptoms for at least two weeks. However, if the episode extends to two years, it is called persistent depressive disorder. Depression is the most common psychiatric disorder in people who die by suicide, making it an important condition to treat, especially when combined with an eating disorder.  

Treating depression and your child’s eating disorder

If your child is in a depressive episode, they should receive therapy to treat it. The most common treatment for depression is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Another evidence-based treatment for depression is interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), which focuses on improving interpersonal functioning.

I have seen success in treating depression with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy as well as somatic therapies. Your child’s doctor may recommend psychiatric medications. These medications are short-term interventions and should be used in conjunction with psychotherapy and emotional development. If your child does not learn emotional processing skills they remain at risk for future depressive episodes.

Keep in mind that feeling sad sometimes – even every day – is not the same as being depressed. Sad is a core human emotion and is both normal and natural. Support your child in feeling their feelings and emotions during eating disorder recovery. Most feelings, even the hard ones like anger, jealousy, and sadness, pass in about 30-90 seconds. The danger is not feeling sadness, but rather repressing or getting lost in it. If your child’s sadness is persistent and feels hopeless for two weeks, seek professional support for depression. 

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To Mental Health And Eating Disorders

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Anxiety and your child’s eating disorder

Anxiety and your child's eating disorder

Anxiety disorders, which very often show up with an eating disorder, are both the most common and the most treatable mental disorders. And parents who have been trained in how to respond to kids’ anxiety are the most powerful treatment providers.

The biggest barrier to recovering from an anxiety disorder is the belief that “being anxious” is a personality type rather than a pattern that can be changed. When we have a child with an anxiety disorder and we say “oh, that’s just how they are,” we miss an important opportunity to help them learn the skills that will free them from the tyranny of an anxiety disorder.

Anxiety is a common underlying and co-occurring factor in eating disorders. And like eating disorders, anxiety is on the rise. Almost 12% of kids had anxiety in 2012, up 20% from 2007. In 2020, those numbers nearly doubled, with reports showing that more than 20% of kids struggle with anxiety symptoms.

The good news is that there are things that parents can do to reduce kids’ anxiety, and this work will benefit eating disorder recovery. The more parents understand and respond to anxiety strategically, the better their chances of success.

What is anxiety?

Anxiety is a feedback loop between the body and mind.  All animals have anxiety because it’s essential to survival. However, our modern lifestyles bear almost no resemblance to the environments in which our brains evolved. Today our most common threats are not to our bodies (predators, enemies, and natural disasters), but our emotional safety (attachment and self-worth). Instead of protecting us from physical danger and death, as they were designed to do, today our anxiety system reacts to non-deadly threats to emotional safety.

Our incredible minds are what makes us susceptible to anxiety disorders, and they are also the solution to anxiety disorders. Here’s how anxiety works:

1. Body-based anxiety

Anxiety is an emotion we feel in our bodies. It comes from the nervous system and is a body-based alert to perceived danger from things we see, smell, taste, touch, or hear, the sensation of our internal organs, and even other people’s emotional states.

When alerted to danger, our nervous system automatically sends an alert to the thinking mind. Think of it as a smoke alarm. There may be smoke, there may be fire, or the smoke alarm may be over-reacting. Regardless, the smoke alarm makes a noise to get the mind to pay attention to the risk and take action.

Something to consider is that a major reason for a smoke alarm to overreact is hunger. A hungry brain is an anxious brain. If your child is weight-suppressed, restricting, purging, and/or eating chaotically, this needs to be addressed immediately in order for anxiety symptoms to reduce. If you need help getting your child weight-restored, consider increasing their level of care. Weight gain and consistent eating should be a priority, since weight suppression and chaotic eating will interfere with all other treatment approaches. 

2. Mind-based anxiety

When the smoke alarm is triggered, the mind responds. This is a healthy response to feeling anxious. After all, if there’s fire, you need your mind to kick into action fast. If you are in physical danger, you need your mind to respond and tell your legs to run. But if there’s not actually a fire, the body and mind can get stuck in a loop of anxiety, ramping each other up. Here’s what this looks like:

Body: I sense danger!

Mind: We’re in danger!

Body: We’re in serious danger!

Mind: We’re going to die!

Body: Run!

But since we’re almost never in true physical danger, this is an over-reactive pattern. Here’s a more mindful response:

Body: I sense danger!

Mind: OK – let me look around and see if we’re in danger

Body: I feel nervous

Mind: Makes sense, but we’re actually safe. Thanks for the warning though!

Body: OK

Our bodies are going to alert us to danger because that’s what they are designed to do. Recovering from an anxiety disorder means learning to use the power of our minds to evaluate the risk rather than overreact to the body’s alarm system. Over time, our body’s alarm system learns that it doesn’t have to be quite so reactive, and our anxiety reduces though it never disappears because that would be dangerous. Anxiety is a feature, not a flaw. We just need to learn to work with it.

Luckily, there is a lot parents can do to reduce kids’ anxiety. Studies show that parents have a tremendous impact on kids’ anxiety. And the good news is that parents can learn to reliably reduce their kids’ anxiety by acknowledging it and helping kids mindfully engage with anxiety rather than automatically reacting to it. You can help your child interrupt the anxious body-mind loop and teach them to step back and recognize false alarms. With practice, the smoke alarm gets less alarming and life gets a lot easier.

What doesn’t work

There are a lot of things that parents do when anxiety shows up that are well-meaning and automatic but simply don’t work. If they worked, they would decrease anxiety, stress, and worry over time, but that’s not usually the case. They include:

  • Reassuring, rescuing & overprotecting
  • Providing certainty and making promises
  • Identifying your child’s anxiety disorder as a personality trait rather than a treatable condition
  • Allowing behavior like yelling, swearing, tantrums, hitting, refusing to eat, over-exercising, and purging because it’s driven by anxiety 
  • Responding to your child’s anxiety with your anxiety 
  • Pushing too hard to shut anxiety down, becoming angry, explosive, and punishing 

Unfortunately, most of the time, when we respond in these ways, our kids’ anxiety gets bigger (not smaller) over time.

An example of anxiety in an eating disorder

Anxiety feels terrible. There’s no fire, but the body and mind are activated. They want to take action. The want to DO SOMETHING! There are two ways people with anxiety disorders try to calm their anxiety. First, they seek certainty, and second, they seek reassurance. 

Seeking certainty typically looks like trying to control what’s happening or what could happen. For example, your child may feel anxious in fast food restaurants so they refuse to go into fast food restaurants. It seems like if they follow this rule, they will not feel anxious. But it doesn’t work. Soon it becomes all restaurants, then parties, then family meals. Their anxiety keeps expanding despite their best efforts to control it.

Seeking reassurance looks like getting people around you to tell you things are OK. For example, your child may complain about their body. You respond by engaging in long, fruitless conversations about their body, but it doesn’t make the anxiety go away. In fact, the more you debate, the worse it gets.

The key with anxiety is that the more your child tries to control things and seek certainty, the more anxious they will become. This is why anxiety and eating disorders typically worsen over time if this anxious pattern isn’t interrupted. 

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An unintended impact

Well-meaning parents don’t want their kids to be anxious. Of course we don’t! Anxiety is terrible! But when we accommodate anxiety’s demands for certainty and control, we accidentally make it more likely the anxiety and eating disorder behaviors will get stronger over time. 

Parental accommodation looks like this: if the child is seeking certainty by not eating carbs, parents allow them not to eat carbs. If the child seeks reassurance by body-bashing themselves, parents engage in long, drawn-out conversations about how beautiful their child’s body is. 

Again, if these responses worked and made the anxiety and eating disorder better, that would be great. But typically, we see an increase in symptoms when we accommodate anxiety-driven eating disorder behaviors.

How parents can respond to anxiety differently

To help kids recover from their eating disorders, parents can respond to anxiety differently and ensure they aren’t accommodating certainty- and reassurance-seeking. Instead, try this:

  1. Expect anxiety to show up. Stop being surprised by each new occurrence of anxiety. Look for anxiety, especially when your child is eating or thinking about their body.
  2. Manage your emotions first. If you are anxious, your child’s anxiety is likely to get worse. Learn how to recognize your anxiety and respond to it with self-compassion.
  3. Validate your child’s feelings of anxiety. Don’t ignore anxiety or jump into action with certainty and reassurance. Acknowledge that they are having feelings like worry, stress, and anxiety.
  4. Support your child in doing and thinking things that make them feel anxious. Don’t accommodate them and help them avoid doing or feeling the things that make them feel anxious. 

My favorite phrase when validating and supporting a child through anxiety is: I get it – this is hard, but you can handle it.

Anxiety disorders are both the most common and the most treatable mental disorders. Anxiety disorders do not need to be a life sentence. Changing your natural, loving, and understandable accommodation patterns when your child is anxious is really hard. But it can also transform recovery and support your child in feeling much better. If you’d like to learn precisely how to stop parental accommodation, check out Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE). Also, you can see our guide to psychology and eating disorders.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To Mental Health And Eating Disorders

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Almond moms and eating disorders

Almond moms and eating disorders

The recent TikTok trend of calling out mothers for being “almond moms” brings up the obvious question: are almond moms related to eating disorders? The answer is nuanced.

The almond mom trend blew up on TikTok in late 2022. It’s primarily driven by teens and young women posting videos that mock their moms for diet behavior like undereating and overexercising. These posts parody the mothers as being stuck in diet culture and eating disorder behavior. The mothers are presented as being rigid and ridiculous in their own weight control behavior. They also blame these mothers for inflicting diet culture on their daughters, even causing disordered eating and eating disorders. 

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Almond moms are parodied saying things like:

  • “Are you sure you’re still hungry, or are you just bored?”
  • “I’m starving … I’ll just eat a few almonds, and that’s plenty.”
  • “Sugar is the devil.”
  • “A moment on your lips, a lifetime on your hips.”
  • “I want you to eat healthy, so no junk food.”
  • “No chips for you – have a couple of almonds instead.”

Is an almond mom helpful or harmful?

In the TikTok videos, an almond mom is presented as being silly, harmful, and sometimes traumatic. Almond moms are shown using classic diet behavior that were actively taught to girls and women in the 1990s, like cutting food into tiny bites, ignoring cravings, substituting desired food for less-palatable low-calorie food, ignoring hunger cues, counting calories/points, and believing that being in a small body is essential.

In the parodies these moms are passing these diet culture beliefs onto their kids. They teach their kids diet behaviors and restrict the food available in the home (e.g. no junk food). Almond moms also critique their kids’ hunger and appetite.  

Can almond mom behaviors be linked to kids’ eating disorders?

Diet culture is a known contributor to eating disorders. Therefore, perpetuating and modeling diet culture at home can be linked to eating disorders. We know that how a family talks about eating, exercise and weight impacts how kids feel about them. 

As biopsychosocial disorders, eating disorders are highly responsive to the home culture. So yes, almond moms may be linked to eating disorders, but it’s not a simple cause and effect. Eating disorders affect about 10% of the population. But I estimate that almond parent (diet) behavior is present in at least 80% of American households. 

Not everyone with an “almond mom” will develop an eating disorder. And, of course, people who don’t have an “almond mom” may develop an eating disorder. In other words, having an almond mom may be a risk factor for an eating disorder, but it’s not the sole cause.

Do almond moms have eating disorders?

Many almond moms may be women with disordered eating and/or an unrecognized/undertreated eating disorder. Remember, moms today were raised in a highly body-toxic environment that actively taught girls and women to adopt diet culture. Women are both the primary target of the ~$80 billion diet industry and are mocked and vilified when they follow its rules. Ouch. 

Surveys have identified disordered eating behaviors among at least three out of four American women. In 2013–2016, 49.1% of U.S. adults tried to lose weight in the last 12 months. All weight loss efforts utilize eating disorder behaviors, and intentional weight loss is a significant risk factor for developing an eating disorder. 

Many adult women have active eating disorders that have never been identified or treated because they follow what the diet industry calls a “healthy lifestyle.” It is effortless for eating disorders to fly under the radar in our body-toxic diet culture.

It is impossible to diagnose strangers on the Internet, but I think we can have compassion for women being called almond moms because they may be living with some form of disordered eating, if not full eating disorders.

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My opinion on the almond mom trend

I think the almond mom trend exposes a dangerous thing that we know is common in homes. It’s a conversation we must have. However, I don’t think publicly shaming women is a helpful way to resolve the pernicious nature of diet culture.

The truth is that when parents (including dads!) are stuck in disordered eating and diet culture, they can’t help but model that for their kids. Even parents who say they are focused on health, not weight, show their kids that weight is a huge deal by controlling their own body size with disordered eating and exercise patterns.

The fact is that when parents are stuck in diet culture, their kids are at higher risk of eating disorders. So I think we need to have more conversations about how parents’ attitudes towards food and weight issues need to change. 

At the same time, I’ve seen some really upsetting TikTok videos in which “almond moms” are filmed without their knowledge and mocked for their disordered behaviors while eating. I’m absolutely not a fan of public shaming or invasions of privacy, especially when it comes to something as personal and fraught as a woman eating. 

If you’re an almond mom

If you think you might be an almond mom, thank you for being vulnerable to notice that! It’s hard to look at ourselves in a negative light. If you have been accused of being an almond mom, I’m sorry. It’s not nice to be called names. 

Either way, being an almond mom is a call to action. I invite you to explore your beliefs and behaviors about eating, exercise, and weight. Diet culture is virtually invisible when we’re stuck inside its tangled web. I know – I’ve been there! But it’s essential that you do the work to uncover diet culture beliefs and heal from your harmful behaviors, for your kids’ sake and your own.

Here are some steps to get started:

  1. Learn about diet culture and a non-diet approach to health
  2. Talk to a non-diet dietitian, therapist, or coach for expert feedback and advice
  3. Ask yourself how your beliefs about your weight have shaped your health behaviors
  4. Consider the impact of your weight-control behaviors on your child(ren)
  5. Heal your relationship with eating, exercise, and weight so you can pursue a healthy lifestyle without weight control
  6. Talk to your child about what you’re learning and apologize for past behavior if necessary
  7. Don’t stop exploring! Diet culture is deeply ingrained. Keep working to counteract weight stigma and weight control beliefs and behaviors.

While I don’t like the method, I think the almond mom trend on TikTok has a lot to teach parents everywhere. Our kids are watching us all the time, and they are affected by our beliefs about weight, eating, and exercise. If you think you might have an eating disorder, please reach out for help and support. You deserve it!

Non-Diet HAES Parenting Tips

Non-Diet/Health At Every Size® Fact Sheets, Guidelines, and Scripts

  • Fact Sheets About Weight Stigma, Diet Culture, Kids and Diets, and More
  • Non-Diet Parent Guidelines
  • Non-Diet Parent Scripts About Responding to Fat Talk, Diet Talk, and More
  • What to Say/Not Say When Talking About Bodies and Food
Learn More

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To Diet Culture And Eating Disorders

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How to fight weight stigma for your “big kid”

How to parent a “big kid” and counteract weight stigma

If your child is considered a “big kid,” they will very likely be subject to harmful weight stigma.

A big kid may spend their life feeling objectified and criticized for merely existing in their body. Your child may be called names like “fat” and told they need to “watch” their weight. This is psychologically painful, but it also has serious physical consequences that have nothing to do with the weight itself, but rather our society’s vast and deeply embedded weight stigma. 

How you parent your big kid can make a huge difference in their lifelong health. All parents should learn about weight stigma, but it is especially important for parents who have kids who are at the higher end of the weight spectrum. 

Non-Diet HAES Parenting Tips

Non-Diet/Health At Every Size® Fact Sheets, Guidelines, and Scripts

  • Fact Sheets About Weight Stigma, Diet Culture, Kids and Diets, and More
  • Non-Diet Parent Guidelines
  • Non-Diet Parent Scripts About Responding to Fat Talk, Diet Talk, and More
  • What to Say/Not Say When Talking About Bodies and Food
Learn More

What is weight stigma?

Put simply, weight stigma is the belief that people in larger bodies are bad, and people in small bodies are good. The most common emotion associated with weight stigma is disgust. The greatest challenge with weight stigma is that it is largely unconscious. This means that many people who would never openly criticize someone for being larger still feel disgust when looking at a larger body.

“People can’t change the color of their skin, but there’s this perception that people can diet their way out of obesity—that if somebody has a larger body, it’s 100% their fault.”

Janet Tomiyama

Like other forms of discrimination, weight stigma is based on false beliefs that are both conscious and unconscious. Despite being incorrect, these beliefs are overtly and subtly perpetuated at every level of our society. Like racism, ableism, and homophobia, weight stigma is wrong on every level. However, it is barely recognized as a form of discrimination and is legal in almost all states.  

  • More than 40% of U.S. adults report experiencing weight stigma at some point in their life (International Journal of Obesity; PLOS ONE) 
  • Forty-two percent of U.S. adults say they have faced some form of weight stigma, such as being teased about their weight or treated unfairly because of it, with physicians as one of the most common sources (International Journal of Obesity; International Journal of Obesity)
  • Among children, weight-based bullying is more common than bullying based on race, sexual orientation, or disability status, and family members and romantic partners are high on the list of perpetrators. (Journal of Adolescence)

Why do parents need to learn about weight stigma?

Weight stigma is woven into the fabric of our culture. Parents, coaches, teachers, and doctors are the most common adults to perpetuate weight stigma with children. And this is deeply problematic because it means that these adults who are meant to be guiding and supporting a child are feeling disgust about the child’s body.

And children are finely attuned to how adults feel about them. Adults can say all the right things and outwardly approve of a child, but if weight stigma is below the surface (and it almost always is), the child will sense how the adult feels about their body. 

Children lack advanced cognitive reasoning skills. So while they can sense the adult’s disgust, they don’t have the cognitive ability to know that it’s wrong. Instead, they internalize the sense that there is something wrong about who they are. They automatically internalize that an adult’s negative feelings about their body means they (as a person) are bad. When adults feel disgust about a child’s body, children internalize low self-worth and shame.

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⭐ Support your child in developing a healthy body image

⭐ Learn the essential steps and family rules you need to have in place for positive body image.

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The dangers of weight stigma for heavier kids

Low self-worth and shame are deeply corrosive and impact every aspect of human development. They are associated with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, suicidality, and many other challenging mental disorders. They are also correlated with poor health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, some cancers, and autoimmune diseases. 

“There’s a perception that weight stigma might feel bad but [that] it’s tough love and it’s going to motivate people. But research shows that this isn’t true.”

Sarah Novak

That’s right. Adults worry about fat cells. But the real danger to kids’ lifelong health is weight stigma. And ironically, kids who are exposed to weight stigma are more likely to gain weight than those who are not. That’s right. When adults worry about kids’ weight, they create conditions that make it more likely a child will gain more weight than they would without that worry.

  • Weight stigma undermines health behaviors and preventive care, causing disordered eating, decreased physical activity, health care avoidance, and weight gain (Appetite) 
  • Children who are victims of weight stigma tend to gain more weight than those who are not (Obesity, JAMA Pediatrics)
  • Over the long term, weight stigma increases the risk of mortality (Psychological Science)
  • Weight stigma increases a person’s risk for mental health problems such as substance use and suicidality (Obesity; International Journal of Obesity)
  • Weight stigma leads to a decrease in health-seeking behaviors and an increase in weight. Regardless of their body mass index (BMI), people who face weight stigma are more likely to engage in disordered eating. They are also more likely to avoid exercising and to report feeling uncomfortable exercising in public (Appetite; Obesity)
  • It also increases risk for psychological problems including depression, anxiety, substance use, and suicidality (Obesity Reviews)

What parents can do if they have a larger kid

1. Learn about weight stigma

The first essential step in protecting your child who is a big kid from the dangers of weight stigma is to educate yourself. Remember that the greatest danger of weight stigma is that it is often unconscious and therefore invisible. You must dig deep to uncover your unconscious biases and disgust about fat bodies to raise a healthy child. The basics are: bodies are naturally diverse; fat bodies are not bad; body weight is largely out of an individual’s control; weight stigma is wrong; and intentional weight loss is dangerous.

2. Invest in unlearning weight stigma

Because weight stigma is invisible to most of us, you will need help learning a new way of thinking about bodies. Just like the idea of being “color blind” was an abject failure in the anti-racism movement, mainstream body positivity will be inadequate if you want to protect your child from weight stigma and counteract its harmful effects. Find a coach or therapist who can work with you on your conscious and unconscious beliefs about fat. This is an investment in your child’s lifelong health. Think back on your life: how much have you spent on diet programs, weight loss books, and diet foods? Apply at least that much time, money, and effort to unlearning weight stigma.

Non-Diet HAES Parenting Tips

Non-Diet/Health At Every Size® Fact Sheets, Guidelines, and Scripts

  • Fact Sheets About Weight Stigma, Diet Culture, Kids and Diets, and More
  • Non-Diet Parent Guidelines
  • Non-Diet Parent Scripts About Responding to Fat Talk, Diet Talk, and More
  • What to Say/Not Say When Talking About Bodies and Food
Learn More

3. Discuss weight with your child safely

All parents should talk about weight stigma with their children. But if your child is at or above the 50th percentile on their weight chart, then it is even more important. It’s best to avoid having conversations about your child’s weight until you have invested the time and resources in unlearning weight stigma. Talking about your child’s weight is a delicate, sensitive issue. Not because there is anything wrong with their body (there isn’t!) but because we live in a body-toxic culture that is full of weight stigma. Talking about weight without stigma is an essential skill that parents need to learn.

4. Protect your child from weight stigma

You should be actively watching for weight stigma in your child’s life. Start with your own home. How do people talk about bodies in your home? Make sure that weight stigma isn’t normalized or accepted in your home. That includes when relatives are visiting. Don’t keep diet books in the house, and don’t have magazine covers that glorify thin bodies and vilify fat ones. Watch out for TV shows, social media, movies, and video games that perpetuate weight stigma. Next, keep an eye on your child’s doctors, coaches, and teachers. Intervene in situations in which you believe your child is a victim of weight stigma from these important adults.

5. Teach your child to respond to weight stigma

Once you have done your own work around weight stigma, it’s time to teach your child to respond to weight stigma assertively. Your child should be able to recognize weight stigma when it comes from friends, peers, family members, doctors, coaches, teachers, and other adults. They should have a variety of responses they can use to shut weight stigma down when it happens. No child should be expected to endure weight stigma from anyone. Rejecting weight stigma is an essential health activity!

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

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Risks of TikTok and how to protect your child’s body image

TikTok is dangerous to kids' body image and likely increases the risk of eating disorders.

A new study found that TikTok videos focusing on “health” are dangerous for body image, promote weight loss, and may encourage eating disorders.

TikTok’s most-viral “health” videos overwhelmingly say that weight loss and thinness are achievable and desirable for all. TikTok is a major force in our kids’ lives, and it perpetuates harmful weight stigma and diet culture. It’s no surprise that the rise of social media coincides with the fact that eating disorders are skyrocketing.

Research has linked social media usage in adolescents and young adults to disordered eating and negative body image. This is most likely due to the prevalence of diet culture themes on social media, a primary source of information for many kids, teens, and young adults. Additionally, adolescent girls who report more time spent on social media are more likely to have high internalization of the thin ideal, a risk factor for eating disorders. TikTok is dangerous to kids’ body image and likely increases the risk of eating disorders.

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The dangers of TikTok

“Each day, millions of teens and young adults are being fed content on TikTok that paints a very unrealistic and inaccurate picture of food, nutrition, and health,” said Lizzy Pope, PhD, RD. Pope is an associate professor and director of the Didactic Program in Dietetics at UVM.

Kids, teens, and young adults who create and engage with weight or food-related content on TikTok are at higher risk of having internalized body image and disordered eating behaviors. TikTok’s viral weight loss content is a powerful megaphone for diet culture. TikTok videos spread common beliefs: 1) you should lose weight; and 2) you should eat less and move more to lose weight. However, the data shows that these beliefs are inaccurate and harmful. Also, they are the foundation of eating disorder beliefs and behaviors. 

Eating disorders are pernicious and deadly. The last thing we need is a powerful social media app feeding our kids warped messages about health and wellness. But that’s what we’ve got. Here’s some more information for parents about TikTok and the risk it poses to body image and eating disorders. Keep reading for guidelines to protect your kids from the dangers of TikTok.

In interviews with NBC News, young women in their teens and 20s said that TikTok content has a significant and damaging impact on their relationship with diets and exercise. They said they became increasingly obsessed with their eating habits, workout routines, and weight to a dangerous degree. Meanwhile, eating disorders experts have been raising the alarm on the dangers of social media on body image for years.

Risks of TikTok and how to protect your child's body image

What is TikTok?

TikTok went worldwide in 2018 and has been downloaded over two billion times globally. Most TikTok users are Gen-Z (born in the mid-1990s to mid-2010s). In July 2020, TikTok reported that one-third of its 49 million daily users were at or below the age of 14. This youthful market means that TikTok is an important driver of cultural trends. 

TikTok is like Instagram or Twitter in that you can follow and like posts from specific accounts. But the app doesn’t require a person to follow certain accounts to view posts tailored to them. The default page for the app is a “for you” page with endless, algorithmically curated videos that the app has determined fit your preferences. Users report that the “for you” page on TikTok is eerie in its ability to create a crave-worthy feed that feels custom-made. 

TikTok is driven by a powerful algorithm that learns a person’s likes and preferences. That means the more a person interacts with kitten and puppy content, the more kittens and puppies they will see. Similarly, the more they interact with diet culture and weight-stigmatizing content, the more of that they will see. This is why TikTok is so risky to kids’ body image and promotes eating disorders.

Pro-Ana content on TikTok

In fact, experts are deeply concerned about so-called “pro-ana” content being actively promoted on TikTok. Pro-ana is a colloquialism for “pro-anorexia,” and involves people who have anorexia competitively sharing tips and tricks for maintaining their disorders. Essentially, content that is coded as “healthy” is actually glorifying eating disorder behaviors by promoting severe food restriction, extreme weight loss, and rigid exercise programs.

“Content that supports or encourages eating disorders is strictly against our Community Guidelines and will be removed,” said a spokesperson for TikTok. However, eating disorders professionals have repeatedly complained that the algorithm sends disordered messages to people who have eating disorders.

TikTok and body dysmorphia

Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), also known as body dysmorphia, is a severe psychiatric disorder that is strongly associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and other serious mental illnesses. People with body dysmorphia have obsessive and compulsive thoughts about one or more perceived defects or flaws with their body.

Experts predict that between 5-10 million people in the United States have body dysmorphia. However, it’s likely the numbers are much higher given that it can be a difficult condition to diagnose and study. Because our culture has normalized the idea that people, especially women, hate their bodies and obsess about changing them, diagnosis outside of an eating disorder is uncommon.

Previously, mass media like magazines and television were accused of creating unrealistic body standards. But today using apps like TikTok is the greatest risk for body dysmorphia, negative body image, and eating disorders. It perpetuates harmful stereotypes about what is a “good” body and teaching eating disorder behaviors like extreme restriction, weight loss, and exercise programs in pursuit of the “perfect body.”

What is a hashtag?

Hashtags are a way that social media algorithms group similar content together. It’s the # symbol followed by a word or phrase. On TikTok, users can add hashtags to their captions to help the algorithm direct people to their content. Hashtags are a serious driver of the powerful TikTok algorithm, which is credited with its massive popularity among young people. However, hashtags and the algorithm are also why TikTok is especially dangerous when it comes to eating and body image. If someone starts liking content associated with weight stigma and diet culture, they will receive much more of that content. 

The following data about TikTok is from this study: Weight-normative messaging predominates on TikTok—A qualitative content analysis, published November 1, 2022, in PLOS One

Glorification of weight loss

“The majority of posts presented a weight normative view of health, with less than 3% coded as weight-inclusive,”

Weight-normative messaging predominates on TikTok—A qualitative content analysis  

Nearly 44% of all videos examined in the study had content about weight loss, and 20% showed a weight transformation in the video. A recurring theme is that if you just try hard enough, you can lose weight. These messages are often wrapped up with health claims that weight loss and low body weight are healthy.

The weightloss hashtag alone has almost 10 billion views at the time of the study. Many videos depicted weight loss transformation achieved through exercise routines and diet plans, often showing weigh-ins and clothing “downsizing.” Exercise was portrayed not for its many health benefits but for its potential to aid weight loss. 

The videos use phrases like “no excuses,” “get up,” and “if you want it bad enough, you’ll do it.” This is a siren song for anyone with an eating disorder, cheering on the eating disorder behaviors and exacerbating the illness.

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Diets and fads

Thirty-eight percent of videos explicitly showed food (cooking, eating, getting take-out, etc.), and 11.9% of videos featured active cooking. However, there was a clear theme that food was seen as a way of pursuing health or wellness rather than something fun and enjoyable. 

In 47% of videos with the hashtag “nutrition,” the video provided nutrition advice about what foods to eat. As expected, most offered advice about how to eat for weight loss. It was common for the video to pair a weight loss transformation with a “what they ate” sequence showing how they achieved their weight loss. 

Diets were presented as a way to achieve a “body goal.” About 14% of videos mentioned a specific fad diet or dieting behaviors. The most popular fad diets on TikTok are: 

  • High-protein
  • Low-calorie
  • Liquid cleanses
  • Intermittent fasting
  • Weight loss or detox teas or drinks

Another popular trend on TikTok is to make “healthy” versions of “junk” food. This messaging perpetuates the myth that food carries the moral qualities of being either good or bad.  

Who is creating viral body-toxic content?

“Most posts were created by white, female adolescents and young adults.”

Weight-normative messaging predominates on TikTok—A qualitative content analysis  

The study found that 42% of the most popular posts were created by college-aged young adults, 28% by millennials and 11% were created by high school students. More than 64% of the videos were created by female presenting users and 56% by white-presenting individuals. 

There was a notable lack of body diversity. Only 16% of posts showed someone with a larger body. This means the viral content on TikTok perpetuates the thin ideal, a major contributor to eating disorders.

Of all the videos about nutrition, just 1.4% were created by registered dietitians. This means that users are sharing nutrition tips with zero qualifications to do so.

Risks of TikTok and how to protect your child's body image

TikTok guidelines for parents

TikTok is an important part of kids’ lives today. You can shut down all access to TikTok in the short term if you are currently dealing with an eating disorder crisis. However, over time you will want to support your child in learning to manage limits and manage social media since it’s likely to be an ongoing part of their life. Here are some guidelines for doing this:

1. Set social media expectations and limits

Your child will not like you setting social media expectations and limits. Of course not. But this is an essential safety issue. Explain to your child that you own their phone and can access or confiscate it anytime. 

This feels harsh, but it is a required safety action that parents must take when a child is at risk. Just like requiring a seat belt in the car, you must insist upon social media oversight to keep your child safe. 

tiktok body image eating disorders

Help your child understand that access to social media apps like TikTok is contingent on healthy consumption of TikTok. Let them know you’re going to monitor their use to ensure safety. You will need to do random checks of your child’s TikTok “for you” feed. The benefit of TikTok’s powerful algorithm is that your child can’t hide the type of content they are engaging with. If they engage with diet and weight loss content, their “for you” feed will be full of it. If they aren’t, it won’t.

2. Set up a phone contract

Some basic rules for phone use should be: 

  • You may not actively engage in diet and weight loss content or content that I believe is weight shaming and harmful. We’ll keep talking about this, so you understand what I mean.
  • You’ll hand me your phone on request without protest as often as I ask. Failure to give me access to your phone will result in me confiscating it for hours, days, or a full week, depending on the situation.
  • You will not turn off or change the parental controls I set. If you believe something should change, talk to me and gain permission. If you make changes without permission, I will confiscate your phone. 
  • I will open and review your apps, for example, to see what’s in your “for you” feed on TikTok.
  • If I can see that you are unable to resist diet and weight loss content, I will remove TikTok and other social media apps from your phone indefinitely. If you add it back without permission, I will confiscate your phone.
  • I will not open and read your DMs unless I am concerned.
  • I will not open and read your text messages and emails unless I have reason to be concerned.
  • The more I see that you are using social media in a healthy way, the less I will check, but it will never be never.

If you’d like a complete list of rules you can edit and present to your child, you can get it here.

3. Set up parental controls

You can set up the following parental controls. 

  1. Set the account to private. Tap the menu icon in the upper-right corner of the profile and select Settings and Privacy, and choose Privacy. On the next screen, tap the button text to Private Account. 
  2. Set a time limit. Set daily time limits on using TikTok, schedule mandatory breaks that lock your child out of the app, and see a summary of how much time was spent using the app.
  3. Filter keywords. Within settings, go to Content Preferences to set the app to block videos containing certain keywords. Tap Filter Video Keywords to add keywords and hashtags you want to be restricted. You can also choose which feeds to filter.
  4. Restricted mode. Within settings, go to Content Preferences to enable the password-protected Restricted Mode. This attempts to limit exposure to videos that the platform deems unsuitable for all ages. You can enable the mode by selecting it on the Content Preferences screen and setting a password so it can’t be easily disabled.
  5. Link your account to theirs. The Family Pairing feature allows you to link your TikTok account to your child’s for remote supervision and management. You can control who can send your child direct messages and who can comment on videos.

Note: you may also want to set parental controls on your child’s phone.

tiktok body image eating disorders

Hashtags to restrict/avoid on TikTok 

  • #thinspiration
  • #fitspiration
  • #cheatmeal
  • #weightloss
  • #quarantine15
  • #diet
  • #weightlossjourney
  • #fatloss
  • #weightlosscheck
  • #whatieatinaday

4. Increase media literacy

A condition of using social media must be ongoing conversations about the risks and impact of social media. I suggest you talk about social media at least once per week. Ask your child questions like: 

  • Who do you follow?
  • What do you see on your “for you” page?
  • How do you feel when you look at diet and weight loss content?
  • Do you think the people who go viral with diet and weight loss tips are credible sources of health information?
  • Why do you think diet and weight loss content is so popular on TikTok?
  • What do you think is the formula for a viral video on TikTok?
  • How can you protect yourself from harmful content on TikTok?
  • What is some TikTok content that you think is healthy? Why? How can you get more of that in your feed?

Participation in these conversations should be a condition of continued social media access.

5. Teach your child to tell TikTok not to show more diet and weight loss videos

The best thing your child can do is not engage with body and food content. But TikTok’s algorithm will likely continue to add diet and weight loss content to their “for you” page. Ask your child to actively select “not interested” when this content appears. This is how to do it:

tiktok body image eating disorders

I wish we could trust our kids to use social media safely, but that’s unrealistic. TikTok is dangerous to body image and increases the risk of eating disorders. It’s built on a compelling algorithm. And just like we don’t let kids jump in the car when they want to go somewhere without oversight and conditions, we can’t let them go on TikTok without safety measures to protect them.

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To Body Image And Eating Disorders

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What to do when your child feels body shame

What to do when your child feels body shame

Eric has noticed that his child Mackenzie feels a lot of body shame. “It started with a few comments here and there,” he says. “But now she is constantly talking about how terrible her body is. She compares her body to everyone else’s and spends hours looking at herself in the mirror, pinching and criticizing herself.” 

Eric is not alone. Unfortunately, body shame is a common side effect of living in our culture. We have the perfect conditions for kids, particularly female and nonbinary kids, to feel self-conscious about how their bodies look. 

While many parents assume this is normal and a passing phase, Eric has good reason to be worried. Body shame is linked to low self-worth. It is a precursor to many mental disorders, including anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and eating disorders. While we can say that body shame is normal in our society, it is definitely not healthy. And parents can and should intervene to support their kids’ lifetime health and wellness. 

Body Image Printable Worksheets

Colorful, fun, meaningful worksheets to improve body image!

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What is body shame?

Shame is a feeling that your whole self is wrong, not related to a specific behavior or event. When a person has body shame, it means they believe their body is intrinsically, essentially wrong and bad. They may attempt to make themselves feel better by manipulating their appearance. But it doesn’t work because body shame runs much deeper than appearance.

1. Understand our society and culture

Our society and culture are cruel to bodies. Bodies are constantly criticized, dominated, and treated as subservient to our brains. In our culture we worship at the altar of diet culture. This says that bodies should be thin, and that not-thin bodies must be controlled with diet and exercise. Diet culture also says that people who are not thin are less intelligent, beautiful, and worthy of time, attention, and love.

There is zero evidence of success in maintaining weight loss following a diet. And there is substantial evidence that dieting predicts weight gain. Yet the U.S. weight loss market reached a record $78 billion in 2019. Meanwhile, eating disorders are skyrocketing. And it’s no surprise: diet programs are basically how-to manuals for eating disorders. 

⭐ If your child feels body shame, you need to understand the cultural context. Body shame is baked into our society. Parents must consciously and intentionally counteract society’s discrimination against and domination of bodies. Parents also need to monitor social media use. They should limit overall time and reduce the number of body-toxic accounts that kids follow.

2. Understand your family’s culture

Families are the mini-culture in which our kids live. So how families feel about their bodies has a significant impact on how kids feel about their bodies. Families that criticize and dominate their bodies in the pursuit of thinness are more likely to have kids with eating disorders and disordered eating. They are also more likely to raise kids who diet. Dieting and weight control in childhood and adolescence predict higher BMI in adulthood.

Family cultures that assume that thin bodies are better than fat bodies cause significant harm to kids’ body image and lifelong health. This can be done actively, by telling kids that thin people are healthier and smarter than fat people. It can also be done passively, by never counteracting the societal messages that say those things.

⭐ If your child feels body shame, look hard at your family culture. This is not coming from a place of blame. If your family culture is body-negative, you are part of the vast majority of our culture. However, a body-negative family culture is a serious risk factor for kids. So take action to change your family culture around food, eating, and weight.

A word about the word “fat”

The word fat can be used as a negative or a neutral descriptor. In its neutral form, saying fat is the same as saying thin, tall, or brown-eyed. Other words for fat bodies, such as overweight and obese, are currently considered to be stigmatizing. Many fat justice leaders have reclaimed the word fat as the preferred neutral descriptor for their bodies. As such, I typically use the word fat when referring to body weight as a physical feature.

However, due to our culture’s terrible history of weight-shaming, we should not call an individual fat unless we 1) are doing so kindly 2) have zero thoughts that they should lose weight; and 3) clearly have their permission to do so. And nobody should ever use fat as an insult. It’s always best to let people who live in marginalized bodies to define themselves rather than assuming a label on their behalf. And never tell a person in a larger body that they are not fat or should be proud to be fat. It’s their body and their choice to define themselves on their own terms.

3. Understand the link between body image and self-image

Two things are true. First, body image is a reflection of self-image. And second, self-image is often directly tied to body image due to our body-negative culture. Therefore, we simply cannot separate a child’s body image from their self-image, and vice versa. A child who feels shame about their body also feels shame about who they are as a person. Because our body is our physical manifestation of our personhood.

It’s a mistake to assume that body image is separate from self-image. This is why our body-negative culture is so deeply damaging to kids. A child who grows up in a body-negative culture is more likely to feel shame about themselves as a person. And shame is toxic to physical and mental health. 

⭐ If your child feels body shame, then remember that it’s not only about their body. Body image is directly linked to self-image, and the two cannot be extricated from each other. Don’t assume that you can “fix” body image without going deeper and addressing self-image and self-worth. Body image isn’t ever fixed by working on outside appearance. It will not be improved with a diet, weight loss, or exercise program. A fitness class or personal trainer can only superficially improve your child’s body image. Body image is an inside job. If necessary, get your child a weight-neutral therapist, coach, or counselor who can help them develop a healthy sense of self.

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4. Change how you talk about bodies

Because we live in a body-negative culture, most people speak poorly of bodies. We were raised in these conditions and will unconsciously perpetuate them unless we actively work to overcome toxic patterns. Speaking as if weight is a moral responsibility, as if weight is within people’s control, and as if weight is directly linked to how much a person eats and exercises is harmful. This sort of language encourages eating disorder behavior and body shame. It also encourages discriminatory and incorrect beliefs about larger people. 

Learn why a non-diet approach to health is the healthiest. Find out why weight is largely out of individual control. And why it’s better for our health never to diet than to attempt to change our weight on purpose. Next, change your language about bodies. Remember that body image and self-image are the same things. And never speak about another person as if their body is an object to be manipulated. The body is an essential part of each person’s existence as a human being. All bodies deserve to be spoken of with dignity and respect. 

⭐ If your child feels body shame, they may bring up a lot of negative self-talk about their bodies. They may cry and scream about their bodies. Do not accept this as “normal” and wait for it to pass. How you respond to negative self-talk makes a huge difference, and it’s not easy. Learn how to respond to body bashing and negative self-talk to help your child build self-worth. 

Support your child’s self-respect and body respect

We live in a body-toxic culture. If I could change the culture, I would. But since cultural change starts at home, let’s focus on our families and the people we love. Learn to talk about bodies with respect. Stop dieting and trying to control bodies. And actively counteract our society’s harmful messages about bodies to help your child stop feeling ashamed of themselves. Your actions really make a difference!

Non-Diet HAES Parenting Tips

Non-Diet/Health At Every Size® Fact Sheets, Guidelines, and Scripts

  • Fact Sheets About Weight Stigma, Diet Culture, Kids and Diets, and More
  • Non-Diet Parent Guidelines
  • Non-Diet Parent Scripts About Responding to Fat Talk, Diet Talk, and More
  • What to Say/Not Say When Talking About Bodies and Food
Learn More

Ginny Jones is the founder of More-Love.org, and a Parent Coach who helps parents who have kids with disordered eating and eating disorders. Combining science, compassion, and experience coaching hundreds of families, she helps parents understand what’s going on with their kids’ eating behaviors and teaches them the science-backed skills to heal kids’ relationship with food, improve their body image, and feel better about themselves, their relationships, and life in general.

Ginny has been researching and writing about eating disorders since 2016. She incorporates the principles of neurobiology and attachment parenting with a non-diet, Health At Every Size® approach to health and recovery.

See Our Parent’s Guide To Body Image And Eating Disorders