Beware the New Body-Shaming
Grandparents may want to understand the changing cultural norms while discussing food, weight and body shapes
We'd just finished a family dinner when I pushed back my chair and announced, "Whoa! I'm stuffed. I ate too much."
Immediately, my adult daughter chastised me.

"Mom, do you mind not body-shaming in front of Annie?" she snapped, referring to my granddaughter. "I grew up hearing this all the time, and I don't want her exposed to it."
What? I was baffled by what I had done wrong. Had I called Annie — or anyone else for that matter — fat, that would be body-shaming. But commenting on how I felt after eating? How was that a problem?
Body-shaming is far broader than commenting on another person's size or shape.
Welcome to another chapter of the generation gap: special body language edition. Body-shaming, it turns out, is far broader than commenting on another person's size or shape.
"We have to redefine how we look at body-shaming," says Rachel Goldman, clinical psychologist and professor at New York University who specializes in health, wellness and weight management. "It's really any comment about anybody's body shape, size, eating behaviors or food."
Comments like, "Are you really going to eat all that?" or "Wow, you're having seconds? I wish I had your metabolism," may seem benign but are easily interpreted as a criticism. Even more general discussion on food and eating — what food is "good" and "bad," what we should or shouldn't have eaten, how we look in our clothes — is fraught with unintended messages.
Navigating New Language
Of course, grandparents are corrected on all sorts of language. The holiday we knew for most of our lives as Columbus Day is now Indigenous People's Day. "They" was a plural pronoun, not a word to describe a single gender. Racist and homophobic slurs that were once commonplace are now — very rightly — no longer tolerated.
For all the pushback against "wokeness," updating the words we use is often simply good manners. If a phrase is offensive or painful for someone, why would you insist on using it?
Yet for some grandparents, political correctness around size does veer into the absurd. Rob Clarfeld was recently reading a children's book to his granddaughter that featured a large man stepping into and overturning a canoe. The little girl asked why the boat had turned over.
Clarfeld recalls: "I told her 'Because he's a really big guy and canoes tip easily,' and my daughter-in-law calls from the kitchen, 'We don't talk about body types in this house.'" Clarfeld considered this ridiculous but in the interest of family harmony, kept his mouth closed.
Self-Critical Commentary
On the eating talk, though, I was perplexed. I particularly struggled with the idea that my saying I'd overeaten had anything to do with my granddaughter's perception of herself.
After my daughter scolded me, she apologized, saying that she didn't mean to lay the sins of an entire culture on my shoulders. What frustrated her, she explained, was the extent to which girls and women's bodies were constantly monitored and judged, often by women themselves. This policing extended to what and how much girls and women ate. She wanted me to rein in the self-critical commentary in front of her daughter.
As I began to think about this, I realized I'd been steeped in this culture my entire life. As a kid, the stick-thin model Twiggy was my beauty standard.
As I began to think about this, I realized I'd been steeped in this culture my entire life. As a kid, the stick-thin model Twiggy was my beauty standard. Overweight kids were teased mercilessly on the playground and sometimes at home, called "fat pigs" and "slobs." Department stores had "husky" sections for boys and "chubby" sections for girls.
All this was internalized. As a grown woman, even though I had a happy marriage, healthy kids, a fulfilling career, and considered myself a feminist, the number on the scale could dictate my mood for the day. A two-pound weight gain made me feel disgusting; a two-pound loss – beautiful. Two pounds, of course, is barely visible on a body, but it could make my self esteem bounce like a superball.
How many times did I walk into my daughter's room to ask, "Do these pants make me look fat?" How often did I consume a bowl of ice cream while announcing, "I shouldn't be eating this"? And most of all, why wouldn't this kind of talk have an effect on my daughter?
"Imagine a mom is looking in the mirror, and the child is playing in the background, but paying attention," Goldman says. "The mom says, 'Oh, I feel so fat.' What the child is hearing is, 'Mommy is so beautiful and perfect in my eyes, but she thinks she is fat. That means I must be fat.'"
Decades of Diet Culture
I remember my own mother's different diets: The Grapefruit Diet. The Scarsdale Diet. The Drinking Man's Diet. (And the drinking woman's, apparently.) We had Carnation Slender in the kitchen cabinet for substitute meals. She used to tell my sister and me that my father "didn't like fat women."
Susan Hodara, a grandmother of two, vividly remembers her mother greeting her when she came home from college for a visit. "She said, 'Oh, you'd look so much better if you lost 10 pounds.' My mother was not a mean mother. It was innocent. She was making a suggestion."
Yet Hodara recalls thinking that if only her butt was smaller, her relationship with a guy she liked would have worked out. Liza Waters, now a grandmother of nine, says her own mother used to gasp if young Liza reached for a piece of bread or wanted French fries. As a mother herself, Waters says, "I was so conscious of not screwing up my daughter that I rarely talked about her food choices and never weight."
"When we think about Boomers today ... we have to remember that this is a generation who was actively making food decisions for their households through the rise and fall of every one of these trends."
Now her own three kids all have different rules about how their kids eat. One of her son's children get treats for trying new things; her daughter eschews bribes. Her grandchildren seem to graze more than they sit down for three meals a day. But Waters just follows each family's rules and keeps her thoughts to herself. "Bottom line, they all eat well and are healthy," she says.
Virginia Sole-Smith, the author of the best-selling "Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture" wrote critically in her Substack "Burnt Toast" about "the rampant and unexamined fatphobia of Boomers."
After highlighting various food fads of the 1980s, Sole-Smith writes, "When we think about Boomers today — the grandparents asking for their lettuce wraps and dressing on the side — we have to remember that this is a generation who was actively making food decisions for their households through the rise and fall of every one of these trends. It's a little bit amazing they let themselves eat at all."
Generational Changes
Weight is such a freighted topic. The country does have an obesity epidemic with measurable health consequences. But there is also very real discrimination against people who exceed weight recommendations set by the National Institutes of Health. Groups like "Health At Any Size" want to "fight the oppression that fat people face in health care."
I have no interest in dipping my toe into these waters. But as a Boomer, I would ask for a little gentleness and understanding, given that we suffered ourselves and are trying to learn new ways of thinking about health, eating, bodies and all the rest. And much of the generational discussion around food doesn't concern obesity, but average weight women dealing with their own issues.
The next level — avoiding self-critique in front of others — is new to most grandparents. It takes a conscious effort to change when attitudes are so ingrained.
None of the Boomers that I've spoken to (far more than mentioned in this article) criticized their daughters' appearance when they were growing up. Mostly, we remember our daughters finding fault with themselves and picking apart their looks in painful detail. I would despair listening to my beautiful daughter talk about all the things that were "wrong" with how she looked, and no amount of reassurance from me changed how she felt.
But the next level — avoiding self-critique in front of others — is new to most grandparents. It takes a conscious effort to change when attitudes are so ingrained. Hodara points out that when Boomers were teenagers, it was considered vain and rude to talk positively about ourselves.
"You would never say, 'I look great,'" she says. "That would be conceited and wrong. But we felt like we weren't hurting anybody by saying 'I'm so fat.' It wasn't a bad thing at all."
After feedback from her daughter, Hodara now keeps self-criticism to herself, at least in front of her granddaughter.
"Early on, my daughter might have stopped me from commenting on how much I was eating, and since then I've definitely monitored myself," Hodara says. "Sometimes my granddaughter watches me put on make-up, and I make a point of not saying how old I look or how tired I look. I don't verbalize any negative thoughts about my appearance."
Though I never said a critical word about my daughter's body, by constantly worrying about my own out loud, I was sending strong messages anyway.
Today I understand this issue in a broader context. Though I never said a critical word about my daughter's body, by constantly worrying about my own out loud, I was sending strong messages anyway.
Open Dialogue
Now there is another little girl in the family. She's a delight — strong, fearless and curious. I don't want her to ever look in the mirror and find fault, let alone have her measure herself worth by a number on a bathroom scale.
Goldman, who served as a "sensitivity advisor" for the movie "The Whale," which deals with severe obesity, advises grandparents to have an open dialogue with their adult children about these issues. Even though it can feel like walking on eggshells, it's part of understanding that as the world changes, we must evolve with it.
Since that family dinner, I've become hyperaware of my relationship to food, and just how much I talk about it.
"We want our children to grow up in a world where it doesn't matter what their shape, size and weight is," Goldman says. "We can't change certain things, but we can work on building the self-confidence and self-worth of the people around us."
As my granddaughter gets older, she will be increasingly exposed to a larger world. And the culture has not evolved for girls and as much as we need it to. Social media, which my generation was spared, can work as a distorted funhouse mirror, making things even worse for girls' self-image.
Since that family dinner, I've become hyperaware of my relationship to food, and just how much I talk about it. I'm working on this not only for my daughter and granddaughter's sake, but for my own. When did the decision over whether to eat a cookie become so fraught? It's exhausting and ridiculous.
I don't want that mindset for anyone in my beloved family.
