I’m here today to write a blog post that I wasn’t expecting to write, but I got so triggered last week by TW: diet culture and kids being forced to diet (or now potentially kids being forced into weight loss surgery) that I had to interrupt your normally scheduled blog programming.
WW (the artist formerly known as Weight Watchers) has released a new app and diet program. For CHILDREN. called Kurbo. ALL THE WHILE. We are now dealing with mouths being forced shut with magnets and weight loss surgery becoming newly available for children. I’m officially SO TIRED and SO OUTRAGED that I feel compelled to share some truths from my youth.
I was forced into diets for what felt like my entire childhood. I was always either starving or secretly binging. I was an overweight kid. My doctors hated that and it embarrassed my father and so everyone went along and I was forced to diet.
At nine, I was counting calories and worrying about my appearance over everything else. At nine, I was taught to hate myself. At nine, I was taught that I was worthless the way I was and I better change or no one would love me. I had daily weigh-ins and ate dressing-less salads with bare chicken breasts while the rest of my family had full meals. Forget fractions or stickers or crushes, I was worried about my thighs.
I was hungry all the time when I was a kid. I was restricted to as low as 500 calories a day at some points. I was constantly starving. I would scarf down sugar-free jello by the tub-full because it was one of the only “free” foods I could eat. My diets were all doctor-supervised by Kaiser Permanente, and were all sold to my parents under the guise of being “a lifestyle change” and “not about looking skinny, but about being healthy.” Healthy was starving and sugar-free jello.
Spending so much of my childhood dieting stripped me of having one. It was torture. It gave me an eating disorder that I still deal with today. I was playing every sport and was super active, and yet I needed to lose 5 pounds or it felt like everyone thought I would die. Dieting was incredibly detrimental to my mental and physical health.
I was taught to be afraid of food. I was told that I was weak and lazy and worthless unless I could survive on a calorie count that was well below what the U.S. legally considers starving. I was taught that feeling good, energized, and satiated was wrong and unhealthy. That in order to be healthy, I needed to be starving. I was taught to ignore my body and my feelings. I was taught that how I looked was more important than how I felt.
Dieting is detrimental to everyone’s mental and physical health. 90% of eating disorders begin with a diet, 30% of all diets end in an eating disorder, 99% of all dieters gain back all the weight and more, and yo-yo dieting increases your chance of high blood pressure, diabetes, and early death. In the 90s, BMI charts were slashed to sell diet products. There is not an obesity epidemic. There have always been fat people. Weight is not an indicator of health. It’s widely accepted that staying at an originally considered “overweight” weight is much healthier than losing a bunch of weight and then gaining it back, yet people still don’t understand that dieting is dangerous. ESPECIALLY for a CHILD who is not able to give CONSENT to the DIET.
Weight Watchers can rebrand themselves as being about “wellness” and “healthy lifestyles” all they like. Consenting adults who enjoy the community and help that Weight Watchers gives them should go and enjoy! The truth of the matter remains though, that the WW launch of The Kurbo Dieting App for Children is about profit. They know diets don’t work. They know that this app will turn dieting children into dieting adults. Weight Watchers is a company that wants to make money. (The US weight-loss industry grew to $72.2 BILLION dollars last year.) By releasing Kurbo, they are able to turn children into lifelong customers. *a Ka-ching sound chimes over and over again across the USA*
Please. Think about the message you’re sending a child when you force them to diet or talk about a diet in front of them. Think about the mental damage. Think about the physical damage. It’s child abuse. It can be hard to stand up for yourself or a loved one to a Doctor, but think of the cost of not. Let’s teach our children to eat food that makes them feel good. Let’s teach our children to listen to their bodies. Let’s teach our children that they are worth more than their measurements.
Were you forced into diets as a kid? What do you think of this new Weight Watchers ap, Kurbo? Tell me on Instagram and Facebook.
