BodiMojo Teen Health Blog – Teenage Nutrition, Fitness, Stress, Relationships & More

My seven-year-old daughter has taken to grabbing her stomach and saying, “I am so fat!” One day she even said to me, “I wish I could just chop it off!”

She’s not fat, by the way. But somewhere along the way, she got the idea that she is.

As if we mothers don’t have enough to worry about, along comes word that if we make negative comments about our bodies, our daughters can wind up with the same negative thoughts.

Recent articles in The Washington Post and numerous health Web sites caution that mothers should think twice before making offhand comments about weight and body image. If a mother looks in a mirror and says, “I feel so fat!” in front of her daughter, chances are good that her daughter will start to worry about being fat, too, say the experts.

Luckily, there’s plenty of good advice out there about how NOT to make your daughter overly weight-conscious. Author Dara Chadwick has a book due out in April, You’d Be So Pretty If…:Teaching Our Daughters to Love Their Bodies-Even When We Don’t Love Our Own. She suggests moms focus on positive comments about our hair or our smiles or whatever else we DO like about our bodies. While moms should model good food choices for our girls, we should also not be fanatic about never splurging on an ice cream cone or a couple of cookies, lest we accidentally steer our daughters toward eating disorders.

I found more good advice online at the Kotex Web site as well as womenshealth.gov, put out by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (And BodiMojo will be a source for lots of good information when we officially launch!)

I’ve been trying to recall if I’ve made negative comments about my body in front of my daughter. I don’t remember doing it. But I also know that it very well could have happened without me realizing it.

Now that I know more, I’m going to pay attention. Because I don’t want any part of saddling my daughter with bad thoughts about her body. I want her to have good “body mojo”!

– Karen Feldscher, BodiMojo project manager, is a mom with 30 years writing and editing experience.