Your Holiday Dilemmas Answered

This month, instead of the usual Dear Laura column, I asked my good pal, Body Trust Provider and therapist-in-training, Kristen Scher to share her take on some holiday-related dilemmas that so many of us run into while navigating anti-diet parenting with family who don’t totally get it (yet). For those of you who don’t already know Kristen, check out these episodes of Don’t Salt My Game where she joined me for a deep-dive into the Division of Responsibility in Feeding and we also tackled some of your questions together. Today she’s unpacking how to handle scenarios where family may say and do unhelpful things that are counterproductive to them having a positive relationship with food and their body including sugar-pushing grandparents, families who comment on kid’s ‘picky eating’ and how to handle conversations where family presume you don’t know how to feed your kids because of their own anti-fat bias. I love everything Kristen has to say and I think you will too. Happy holidays team - catch you in Jan!

The holidays are right around the corner! This is an exciting time filled with busy schedules, planning of holiday dinners, not to mention, stressing about the interactions we might have with family members at those dinners. Many people find that just when they are getting the hang of eating intuitively or feeding their kids without guilt - the freaking holidays show up out of nowhere with fatphobic uncle Stan and a mother-in-law who won’t shut up about her new “anti-inflammatory” diet. It can feel like someone took the wind out of your Body Positive sail when you are confronted with these types of interactions. Where is the freaking map for navigating Diet Culture at the holidays? Well, you’re in luck because Laura asked me to guest-write for her about this subject and I’m here to start charting your course! I reached out on Instagram and asked you for your biggest holiday dilemmas and you all delivered!

The first question was this:

How do I navigate Intuitive Eating conversations with family when I’m in a bigger body. They see me and their fatphobia gets in the way. “You can’t know how to feed your kids right because….look at you.”

This one is so hard. It is so hurtful to have your body size held against you. Too often fat parents are stigmatized for their size, and unscientific and cruel correlations are made about the quality of our parenting. It sounds like there is a lot of unacknowledged fatphobia in your family. Fatphobia cloaks your relatives’ ability to see how wonderful it is that you and your children are in tune with your bodies, regularly and reliably feeding yourselves.