This video, taken from the 2014 Real Housewives of Beverly Hills episode, has been viewed millions of times. In it, young Gigi Hadid tells her mother Yolanda that she is one of the stars of a reality show about the rich and famous. I ate half an almond. Yolanda, who was half numb from anesthesia, said she had just finished a breast implant.
Last October, the clip went viral. This is because several tiktokers have used this clip to make videos warning about the dangers of some form of orthorexia. Later, a new term was born and spread widely. An “almond mom” is someone who induces fatphobia in children through comments about their bodies and diet. As one of the people who helped spread the Really harmful.This Phenomenon of Almond Mama [has] It has long been rooted in a diet culture, internalized prejudices, fatphobia, fear projection, and the pursuit of thin privilege rather than health.
From that moment on, several users of the platform, mostly teens, criticized me for trying to eat too many carbs and reported that I had an “almond mama” who would congratulate me whenever I lost weight. The problem has emerged as a generational one, with many women growing up in the 1980s, at the height of diet culture, complaining about not commenting on their bodies in front of their children or managing their own bodies. I admit that I struggle with this. Young people denounce the tendency, pathological relationship with food.
Virginia Saul Smith is the author of the book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and coordinator of the Burnt Toast newsletter and podcast, analyzing food toxins. She’s interviewed them over the years, so she knows perfectly well what Almond’s mom is. Labels like “almond mama” help identify the phenomenon in terms everyone can understand, but they’re problematic, she says, mainly because they don’t account for almond dads. Solesmith believes it makes sense for people to talk about how women pass food culture on to their children, so long as men aren’t left out of the conversation.
According to the authors, what is now known as diet culture began in the 1990s when something like the battle against obesity erupted. I started promoting the idea of losing weight as the only way to achieve it. It has become a matter of morality and social responsibility. For her book, she interviewed dozens of parents who grew up in that environment and were even ridiculed for not living up to her thin ideals.
One of the conclusions of her research is that this phenomenon is common in middle- and middle-class families, where it’s common (and almost a status symbol) to talk about children not eating carbohydrates between meals. It tends to occur more frequently between The closest they come to eating candy is an afternoon snack of five raisins. will explain.
Instead of making rules, her recommendation is to let children find happiness in food and listen to their bodies about hunger and satiety. Eat enough and have a good time.
