e so before i get started with my spiel i really want to make sure that tonight is what you need it to be so while we have time set aside at the end for like official comments and questions i do not want you to wait until the end to ask questions or tell me what you want  talk about i could talk about this stuff for days on end but i want you to get what you need out of tonight so any time you have a concern or right off the bat you know like i need to talk to about this just shout that out raise your hand if you want to but you don't have to please don't hesitate so if no one had does anyone have anything that you need to talk about right away so i'm actually going to start with the title because it turns out the titles are really contentious and when i did a little market testing the very strong reaction flows last couple of words the whole body framing world thing and people either love it and feel like you're really calling something else it's important for people to like that really harsh you should probably not say that but i chose to leave it in because i think that if you get nothing out of tonight's talk except for this what you do have to take home is that when you talk about body image or doing so in context in a context in our culture is is actually quite shaming and when i say our culture i'm just going  that we've kind of spread it out everywhere else but in our culture we have a standard of beauty that's completely unrealistic and then we go one step further and send this message that if you can't meet that standard then that something's wrong with you like not working hard enough right so all of these these are all pics like what have you done to earn this as if you just did the right things that you could look like that and for the majority of us no matter what we did we're not ever going to look like that and so it's shaming is telling someone they're not good enough or not valuable enough because they're not doing something right and that is exactly what our culture does it's not always as explicit as that and it's not always intentional but that message is there sort of in the images that we present in the toys that we bring home in the casual conversations that your kids over here and in the behaviors that you model is just go about your life and sort of absorbing all of that so i think it's really important to leave that stuff in there and make sure that we realize that we are talking about this in context so i know that we probably have people of different like professional backgrounds and experiences so i'm going to start by just giving us all a simple definition for the word body image because i'm going to throw that out a million times today so when i say body image i mean thoughts feelings and behaviors that you have about your body and there are  four qualities that that can take one is positive or what i'm calling healthy tonight now it's when you feel good about what your body looks like negatives when you don't feel good about how your body looks distorted is when what you see in the mirror and what you think you look like is really off from what other people see when they see you and then the other piece of that that's important is how much does it actually impact your self esteem because you can not like your body and still think well i'm pretty much a rock star everything else that doesn't matter so much that i don't like my body or you can think there's something slightly off about your body and so therefore you feel like nothing you could possibly do would be ok and you have a really low self image based on just that one aspect of you know to hold all that stuff in our heads as we as i talk today so why should you care about body image well because it's not really just about someone's body what research shows is that how you feel about your body and the degree to which that impacts you hits lots of different areas things like anxiety disorders mood disorders depression social relationships social anxiety self esteem and of course eating disorders which are the deadliest psychiatric disorder we have so far going to have a psychiatric or that's not the one you want to get so the next question i usually get is like ok so i have to care about it but when my kids too young right and i have to worry about this yet and whenever i get prompted to do one of these talks it's usually by like the junior high or the high school i say well you should really probably call the elementary school because turns out your kids are probably old enough for you to worry about it so i think a picture is worth a thousand words so if you would be willing and comfortable and able to end up where you are and just like you were at yoga class you can take a deep breath and raise your hands up overhead and then exhale then back down so you have magically been transported to the land of two and three year olds and what i noticed as you did that is that some of you kind of shifted an angled your body some didn't you put your arms up in slightly different ways so that you didn't hit your neighbor right and that is what you and three year olds are beginning to learn they're learning to figure out about the size of their body in the way their body takes up space and at two or three that's the very beginnings of body image and they're just discerning this stuff right there figuring it out and i tall enough to get that shiny knife that they put the back of the counter in my strong enough to lug the chair over so that i can climb up to the counter to get that good stuff they're now going to magically transport you a couple years you're now five or six and i'm going to have this side of the room sit down and you know and you can sit down to so if i have any like c p a s my math is really fuzzy right now just an idea so now you're like five or six and i've left hopefully about one third of you standing that one third you're the you're the one third of five or six year olds that would actually choose to have a thinner bodies and when you think you have a typical belmont kindergarten i think you have about twenty kids in a class not in a year so that's like six or seven of those kindergarten kids thinking body is too big the way it is i'd like it to be smaller  down and have now all magically become seven so your first graders are finishing up your first grade year and about one quarter of you has actually tried dieting so now you all complain that your kids lunch time is not long enough to actually like get to lunch have some time to talk to their friends eat we've got a quarter of those first graders it's maria we've got a quarter of those first graders that are actually kind of thinking that led to so short because they didn't want to eat all that stuff you sent with them anyway because they're trying to lose wheat and you can all sit down eighty percent of ten year olds so that's why kids finishing up fourth grade this time of year eighty percent of them are afraid of getting fat they don't necessarily think they are fat and that's only about one fourth of them probably but they're afraid that they've learned that fat is a bad thing to be feared so i wear like nervous that they might be fearing like you know not getting picked for soccer or something happening in the world that they've learned about actually they're just afraid of getting fat when we look at that statistic it's both you can break it down and if you just look lower like obviously we've probably experienced this gender divide where it's an elementary school so  prion entry school preschool kids self esteem is not dependent upon their gender or how they then if i once we get into the elementary school years we start to see that divide where it's forty percent of girls that are feeling uncomfortable with their bodies about twenty five percent of boys so it's not a small portion of our boys that are worried about this stuff but it's a much larger portion of our girls and unfortunately for those who identify as girls this is never going to go back the other way the segment of the population that is more concerned about this body image stuff is has instituted it for them so there definitely is a population right there where parents are really concerned about their kids weight and they know that like you know it's not people are going to you're going to get bullied more if you're overweight that's absolutely true those parents are not wrong and so i haven't seen the there's precipitating factors things like trauma stressors and then there's a socio cultural component of that as well so when we think about the body image component that really is going to be socio cultural that's if you're when you start thinking about eating disorders that's where the genetic link comes in and so like nothing i am saying today in no way want to like parent blame for like saying the wrong thing or not doing the right thing you could do everything perfect and still have a child that feels negatively about their body or has a child that develops an eating disorder you could do everything wrong and have a child that feels really good and has high self esteem and is perfectly healthy so please when i'm talking about like how they're impacted by the environment around them it's in no way a blaming thing it's what can we do to sort of counteract whatever precipitating factors might be there or whether their genetics or other environmental stressors there yeah i mean for all of these things for like body image sort of remediation it's much easier to form a positive body image than to have to go back at it but it can absolutely be done treatment is successful in treatment a successful for eating disorders as well it's long and expensive insurance tries not to pay but we can actually do it of people will recover to some degree a lot of them recover fully you're welcome good questions other question but haven't quite reached the severity that we would say eating disorder and like you know if we actually look at what the levels of clinical eating disorder rather going to be really tiny still in the population rising into high but pretty small the level of people who have disordered eating is actually pretty huge and that can have pretty negative impacts on health even though we haven't sort of reached that magical point other questions these are really good questions people come so i talked about sort of why how my how prevalent it is is a very simplified version of how body image develops in the pieces that we have some control over so what i've left out here is the predisposition in precipitating factors that we just have no control over like if you get exposed to sort of like an earthquake there's really nothing you can do it's going to make you susceptible to a whole lot of other things so with the pieces we have control over the socio cultural stuff and so i brought that down to media and we're thinking social media online stuff print family messages peer messages the younger your kid is the more control you have this family messages the older they get the more influence peer messages have over family family doesn't ever lose control completely but the older kid gets the less influence you have and then from all of the stuff that we're exposed to some of those messages get internalized those internalized messages that we hold on to believe become what sort of our body image is and so i feel like our job as educators or parents is to kind of help kids figure out you're going to get a whole ton of messages out there from people which ones you're going to hang on to internalize them which messages we want to kick out because they're not healthy for us and that's what i think that's why we have a lot of power because it's really hard to change the media but we can change how we take into account the risk factors for dissatisfaction b m i b m i is a horrible number your pediatrician probably tells you what your kid's b m i is b m i is the ratio of body weight to your squared height it was a statistic developed to define populations which is why it's not a good idea to use it as an individual number but people will so the higher your b m i the more likely you are to be dissatisfied with your body try to ignore that stuff and try to have your kids ignore it and then the soci comments so i mean this is probably not new to you guys that is not good for kids but just to get an idea of like how influential it is a sixty nine percent of elementary school girls who read magazines say that it influences how they think they should look and what their preferred look is and then you know most of them almost half think that it makes them want to lose weight so that's why i have these pictures up here because these are actually the magazines that are pretty prevalent out there so these  girls life if you are in girl scouts or boy scout sometimes they get sent to your house you see there on my public library not too far from here and then these are some of the ones that i've seen kind of like just checking out the grocery store so if you ever take your kids out in public and you know where else your kids see magazines doctor's office they go to other places so they're going to be exposed to this stuff in these this is what this imaging does and you can certainly feel free to come and look at these pretty pictures so a lot of times will say well like if we just tell everyone knows there's photoshop so like the pictures don't really impact us that much right as we know they're not real so some graduate students in psychology got really lucky that they started their dissertation on nine hundred ninety nine where this little island of fiji had absolutely no outside media in their country and then during the course and they did a study to see what  kinds of body image issues and you know sort of factors were going on in fiji at the time and then western t v got introduced why they were in grad school so they got to do this nice study after gee what's the difference when we import onto a novel hills the original version  on these girls in fiji who previously hadn't had any of our western t v or ideas or images presented to them lo and behold it was bad for their body image so about seventy five percent of girls felt too big or too fat and it wasn't even a measurable and percentage of them who felt that way before the study so this happens to be a culture where having more rotund shape thicker legs was actually a compliment because it meant that your family was well off you had enough food you were athletic you could bear children this is all good stuff and we import our t v and suddenly all feel not all most feel too big what's even more stunning to me is that the risk of eating disorder more than double that's like a really big amount just and the only thing that changed was their media so there was there was a risk of edi for about thirteen percent of girls in that country and that's because there is genetic things and other trauma factors that put you at risk of anywhere and we change one variable and it more than doubled so that to me shows that even though we might know it's not realistic it still could have a real impact on us and on our kids so if you completely feel your kid for media you may still have toys so my favorite toy em and if your kid doesn't have them that's great but they're probably have seen images and it's just this idea that there are so many of one type of dolls out there that it gives kids a limited vision of what's possible  when you actually look at it in a research study so that the barbie versus and as a doll that's based on a full figure model so she's going to slightly different fizzy kids that looked at books that had barbie and it displayed decreased body esteem  increased desire for thinness the kids it looked at the magazines with pictures and it had less of a decrease but still a decrease and kids who had a magazine that didn't have pictures of dolls in it had no change in how they felt about their body figured but but it's bigger than barbie and so it's hard to know what i say but my guess would be it's not that it was anything specific about the image but that it's images of bodies and you just start making comparisons it's sort of a natural thing to do to compare to group to see what the similarities and differences are and so when you're presented with a particular figure and it doesn't look like you and especially kids the whole job of being a kid is to learn how to fit in and so we get a little bit better with being able to deal with differences as we get older but it's a it's a huge part of our development to figure out what school and i'm going to do that right you want have a matching backpack you wear the right color or in my school if you don't if you wear if you're a boy and you wear pants that's a problem you better have shorts and a soccer sure and that's you know you learn how to fit in and kids pretty quickly discern you to a kid that moves to your school partway through the year it doesn't take them long to figure out what is the right way to dress because that's that's their job they're supposed to be doing yes and scale that's at one hundred ten and she was described as a full figured woman so this is usually when someone tells me that they fixed barbie right they fix a couple years ago they came out with their first barbie so if you do hearst outs there's a standard conversion you can do for toys so that if you scale them up to real life so diverse barbie curvy barbie is a five six in a size somewhere between an american size two and four i'm not a seamstress so when you tell me like twenty five inch waist and hips i really don't know how to picture that but i know what a size two looks like petite barbie is a size double zero and tall barbie is five eleven and a size zero the average american woman is a size sixteen so she's nowhere close to curvy barbie she's five four one hundred forty pounds remember only one ten and she's like five inches taller than some of these or even more so when i go to yoga class and i'm looking at people the people that are wearing a size two yoga pants are not what i call curvy so and that's it it's not so much that barbie or curvy barbie looks a particular way but they are giving your kid these choices that are really a very small range and so they're not they may not be seeing themselves represented they know you know what people in their family are represented they're getting this idea that there's a very narrow window of what's acceptable and they think that is what's really damaging is that if you want to have one of barbie that looks like this fine but there really aren't that many dolls that look other ways and having that presenting your kid with images of really w span of normal health is going to give them a much better way to look at what normal differences are ok so maybe you don't have barbies you don't have any media in your house you probably have these guys and you recognize these people so we've got a traditional lego figure here and then the one and the other one is a friend's lego figure so you have these in your packets but i think it's harder to see in the black and white  what what do you see about the differences of these two lego characters yeah friends lego's has a little curve she's actually beginning to develop breasts at a young age she's very narrow isn't s she's got a very long thin neck she's got side gap right that's that is a term that often eating disordered individuals are searching for to try to win your legs are together do you have that side gap now i will in the traditional lego fig also has a little bit of gap between his legs but it starts much slower and it's you know his legs as somebody point is like each leg is a couple of the lego friends l about these characters is that it used to be that so if you have boys at home anyone have boys and they have any female for many figs that come in their sets you know we have a cup we have a couple but they look just like that they have hair but they look just like the traditional male many so there are some they have a little make up and their bodies are similar but the ones that are so friends are specifically targeted to  preschool and young elementary school girls they don't get any of these other many they all look like that and so to me it's not just that the difference is that we clearly are messaging that they should be smaller and dainty and center and taller but that they are they limit the range of imagination that they allow a girl to use because that figure can't do quite as many different things as this one because it's sort of already narrowing your vision of what what she's doing and she's probably not playing soccer in that outfit whereas the blank m great lesson so we were to go where we got to climb and run and jump and we had like three different like sword fights that we had to maneuver through and shimon where we also got me was all of ours are a little violent of course because market boys all right so it's not just images and objects that they get messages from like human beings are also important to kids so they pick up on what we do they pick up on what people say and they also make a lot of meaning out of what you don't say so if you think about some of the typical scenarios that your kids go through in a week whether it's with you or with their friends what are some of the things that they are like you're not saying a mean thing like that that's a compliment but ok other people say stuff like that ok absolutely yeah and usually i talk about the grandparents say but my mother actually came to see me tonight so i'm not going to anything right you can do both of those things was a psychologist i just say it right then but like most people don't do that i filter almost nothing so but these are like little right then they're going to make kids make meaning of stuff whether you want them to or not and they make it accurately or interact you're really so so your sister says lucky she's tall and then just beautiful and she just loves her niece right and she thinks the world of her and so then you either say like she you know she's really smart she works really hard to get that swimming time by doing that what you've done is you haven't chastised your sister for what she said you haven't taken away that maybe that maybe that made her daughter feel good that's not a bad thing to feel good because someone gives you a compliment what you've also done is you've taken it and put value on something that she actually has control over she has no control over how taller than she's going to very little control over how tolerant should be your body is like eighty percent determined by your set weight and your genetics so being able to sort of just highlight like the other stuff that didn't get said is something you can do in that situation if you have little or kids they like get invited to a birthday party like every weekend right like kindergarten year you get twenty two invitation and this and one of the things that happens at almost every birthday party is you play for a while and then you have cake and then you have a subset of children that ask for a second piece and at that point what happens an in our circle is the host parent is like you've got to ask your parents about that because like a huge decision about whether we have the second piece of cake and sometimes it's because like maybe there's not enough for every kid to have two people get all nervous about like this is junk food if i give too much junk food i mean people say that if i give you two pieces of cake your mother will kill me and that sends a huge message about like the value of food and your worth if you what if they were starving because they just played like an hour and a half of ninja warrior obstacle course at a party or like they just had like you know dance party usa for forty five minutes and now they're like tired and hungry and that little bit of sugar would be like really good for them so they absorb all these messages like she just said that she had to ask my mom so that must be like that's a tricky scary thing and they you know they're not thinking this consciously but they absorb these messages that that's a big deal you know it's getting to be closer to summer you know in my town we've got stuff up in like the windows of the fitness places like get your beach body ready summer's well is your beach body significantly different than the body that you took to the grocery store yesterday and you know we teach our kids to read in kindergarten first grade and then they can see that like they see what goes up in the window about  and you know they might not see what they don't know what beach body is somebody has to then tell them what it means or lie to them and then they'll hear the different thing from someone else and so they're going to target that yes sure it w of influence over how these kids think most of it is implicit right it's not exactly what you say but it's all the stuff you do all the time so i think just like if a kid shared with you that like mom and dad are fighting last night you're probably not going to try you're just you're just going you know your mom cares about and she picks you up on time and like you just kind of it's a game the importance of something when you let it go by and what's important is that we don't let them go to cleanly unnoticed because you want where you're like where your power is is then turning that kid attention to what's actually maybe more valuable about her pet her mom whether her mom is chubby or not jodi is probably not the thing that matters most like it but the fact is she like picks her up consistently or like some fun thing they do together and so you're shifting the attention to what's actually of value help change that message to exercise is something you do to celebrate your body zoom is fun because you get to learn dance moves and zoom is fun because you get to like be with your friends and that's probably great so you can like add to that child's knowledge base and give her something that is maybe healthier and less problematic so this just talks a little bit about messages from actual people they know is more important than the messages they get from the media so we really can't shield them from media all the time but we do have some in from some control over what kids are exposed to not total and so i just threw out some stuff that kids are exposed to all the time and it's not so much that they get these images but then kids basically tell them that those things are important so i think that that's taylor swift on the bottom so she's popular like the three to five grades that and then those are all the disney princesses which usually are pretty popular for the k one kids and if you notice there's not a lot of differences between the bodies and all the different the princesses and taylor's body doesn't differ much from them so again it's this idea that they get a very narrow set of what's seen as acceptable and if that's what's cool to like  then it's really important for kids to actually fit in with it that because that's the major goal of childhood and so with we can expand what they see if we can help discredit some of this information then they can be a little more comfortable with where their own bodies might be  so this is the part of my presentation i hate but i can't leave it out because it's true so this sounds a lot like parent blaming to me if you make basically the rule is don't comment on your child's weight and if your pediatrician comments on your child's weight call your pediatrician after that point and tell them not to do it again because it never goes any place good it's just it just doesn't if you comment on a child's weight or express concern about their weight and this is and concern about overweight they start to judge themselves as less physically competent so you don't just not like their body and how it appears they don't think their body does stuff well anymore and for some reason when a mother tells a daughter that she's concerned about which she starts to think she's not a smart either  so it has really huge consequences so if we just want to learn to sort of ban body talk sometimes you'll say ban fat talk but we should we can ban sizes m and comparisons because they just generally don't help and if you're concerned that your child is overweight dieting doesn't help anyway so focusing on that isn't going to change that for you in a way that you're looking for on the flip side i didn't put on here is that a warm nurturing open relationship from parents is actually a good thing and is protective against this so it's not like you make one comment and you're doomed for life but you open up the lines of communication is also the room for repair and self esteem building and all of that  so what are some of the things you can do when you're bored and like what's actually interesting to you so i try to have a whole conversation with this other stuff and like well some eleven year old boy so it's interesting to me is like poking and like playing minecraft on my computer to have screen time after school so all right so you start to talk about how uncomfortable boredom is what do you do when you get bored and trying to create other activities and just leave the whole body piece out of it and paying attention to your body cues like eating when you're hungry is a really good thing to do so before you eat sometimes you check in with how your belly feels and recognizing hunger cues and things like that as a conversation that you can have with a kid right we always sort of to get a good practice before we have a snack or before we sit down for a meal to kind of think like how hungry am i and then you check in partway through it which is you know totally unnatural we don't do this all the time but if you can make this like a thing for a week and they learn like starting to yeah yeah this is a super tricky things you don't want to say i'm going to give you the rule of don't talk about it at dinner but you can't just ignore it so and the reason is they don't talk about at dinner because already it sounds like eating is a somewhat stressful process if you start having tense conversations it's going to make it an even more uncomfortable process and if you're afraid that your child's not eating enough to fuel your body then you really don't want to make mealtime something that's got to be avoided so i definitely wouldn't avoid it want ignore it but i would avoid talking about it right at that time because you don't want to get into the whole like you're an eleven year old daughter you're going to have power struggles with her probably you don't want them to be out that this like it will be easier to fight about other stuff so what do want to do in that situation again so go back to talking with her body if she says can be done throw it back at her just to teach her that she's got some control i don't know are you full you know she might she's probably if she wants to be done eating if she's afraid that she's eating too much is this going to tell you yes but eventually what you're doing is you're sending that message that how much you eat is based on how full you are not how thin you want to be and not what mom says or how long we've been sitting here and so i would kind of throw that in the moment at meals if she's asking if she can be done i would ask her if she was full and then i also and different people are sort of more idealist on this and others some people say when the mealtime is over it's over i think especially if you're worried about a kid who's a little uncomfortable about eating why does mealtime need to be over maybe she if you if you're not sure if you're full why don't you come back in a little bit or you can have something else available later i think that giving kids back control over their food is helpful because then at least you're only dealing with one power struggle at a time and then for the other then i would have the conversations about her body ask her some open ended questions about how she feels think is is she worried about what she looks like how does she feel about herself and do that a way you know driving in the car is always a good time for a walk do it away from the food so that you're starting to get a sense maybe of how she feels and you're not sort of adding another layer on to that you're welcome they don't listen and other times they listen i'm strictly talking of my mother in law other times they they do listen and they really think they're doing it but they've had like you know fifty plus years of saying certain things and you're probably not going to change that so my mother in law no actually really my mother in law not my mother this is my mom who was for a little bit and so like came to see me be at work so my mother in law taught my children how to read the back of a box with interesting labels and told them where to look for the calories and i nearly flipped my legs it's like not a new thing that i'm in this or specialist and i've been married to the same person for a while so mike why on earth would you talk to my children about worth it so you can tell them what your rules and expectations and hopes are but you might not be able to control it so what i do is i do the ad on anytime someone makes a comment in my presence whether it's to my children or to my nieces or nephews that i feel like might be someone on the verge of not a helpful comment i just add something else that i like so i happen to have some very adorable nieces and some very petite nieces and the thing that people when they girl she's adorable and she's spunky but if she's going to be healthy she's going to get bigger right like that's the job of a child is to grow and so if she's continually hearing my gosh you're so cute you're so little i love you so much well so she's going to get afraid of growing bigger she get less less valuable less loved as she grows older and bigger so i always add in something you know grandpa says oh you're so cute and adorable thing and she's like super smart look how she just figured that out or you know kids she spends a ton of time picking out her outfit she's very proud of the outfits that she creates we can talk about her creativity we can mention her you know originality with that combination something that she's got control over that she's put effort in she's a size she is because she is she is but she makes these other things so i like to do the add on because then you're teaching your children what's important to you you're giving them something to value that you might actually value rather than the size of their body and i also do kind of you know at the pending on what's what age they are you know i sometimes talk about why it wasn't appropriate that so and so made that comment and i might not do that right in front of the person but later i can say you know when so and so said that thing about your body or their own body that that felt uncomfortable to me because it's really important to me about grandma is not whether she can push the chair in what's important to me is that she is so generous with us so you can go back and kind of talk in the same way that you might have that same kind of conversation about race why is it appropriate to comment on this or not that and we can just teach kids that you're not allowed to talk about that ever we have to teach kids about respect and about what's the value behind that and i think size isn't a sort of the same type of thing other scenarios  right so yeah so i think you know we're there it's you know kids have a sort of like whether it's a sugar thing or they like fat dairy type of things right like everybody's going to have their thing so part of it is normalizing and why your kids like sugar as much while we're wired that way right so we can sort of take some of the documents out of it is in that way and then i sort of take that old analogy of like filling your you know people are like cars and we have a gas tank we fill ourselves with fuel i take that and i extend it because turns out so i got like the hand me down old car when i was in high school and everyone else is like you got to put gas in your car it won't go apparently you need other things in your car so i kept filling it up with gas and while it had gas eventually it didn't go and the engine had seized because i had never changed the oil i didn't know you needed other things and so i think our cars our bodies are like cars and that like sometimes we need  also need like antifreeze and windshield washer fluid and oil and like sometimes you put the really expensive nice gas in your car and sometimes you put the crappy gas in your car and so food is like that too and for the most part it's good to have all the things filled up and so that's why you want to make sure that we have some carbs and we have some vegetables we have some protein we have some sweets if we fill up all of the segments with just sugar really sugary things and there's no room for that other stuff and so we talk about her balance in that way and then i also think of it longer term you might have a day where it's like jump jump jump jump jump because you've had like three birthday parties and then something else and you're tired and you haven't gone to the grocery store and so it's ok to have the balance not be in a day can be ok for the balance to come over the longer it's you know in a perfect world maybe you would never ever fight about it and they would get it but it's not a perfect world and so like sometimes you'll fight about it and that's ok  yeah well so as so we look at nutrition labels in our house mostly to find out what has protein in it as my kids like eat everything but protein so i was concerned primarily it was that she had taught them about the calories she didn't look at all the other stuff on the nutrition with them just to have that many calories and therefore it wasn't worth it and so i actually think that kids don't really need to know how many calories is and something as they get older more information becomes available until the appropriate because they can process what that means  kids regulate their hunger really well until we start messing with it so the longer you can delay that process of them thinking about food as anything other than just like what fills them up they actually do a really good job of getting a v diet and they do a really good job of eating until they're satiated and stopping and then all these other things come in and sort of interrupt that so i would rather if my kids are hungry that they take a minute and step in and think what am i in the mood for rather then that has that's one hundred calorie pack and that's two hundred ten calories so i think you know my my my my favorite thing is when people kind of stop and check in because our bodies will do a really good job of telling us what are what we need and the information that comes from the outside is usually not as good so that's why that sort of like got me oh that's right great i like this like so there's all these like scary dangerous things i probably scared to do so how can we actually help we can counteract negative media which is by purposely trying to seek out the good stuff there's less of it unfortunately which is why that  playing but there is some out there so some of the stuff is in your packets as well so that you don't have to memorize like what sites are good to go to with your kids but there is some good stuff and you can purposely seek that out and fill your house with that you can g websites with your kids common sense media is great it has an awesome section on like helping you choose movies and online apps and games that are like empowering for girls and they also have really good information for parents to give you a language to talk about stuff that you might be uncomfortable talking about and then i try to seek out examples of girls doing things in different forms of dress than might more typically be shown so and i do this for my boys as well it's not it's not up to the girls the parents of girls to fix the messages that we give to girls it's up to the parents of boys and girls to fix some of that messaging because it's it's not a girl's prerogative to have to fight back all the time they shouldn't have to be fighting this so they're if you can expose boys to a widespread images of girls they too will learn that like oh hey we don't need to put them in this one little box there's also i think something that's not your package is a website run by michelle carter who is a female u s olympic shot putter and she's got a blog and a web site that is just amazing because she talks a lot about how we tend to celebrate this one sort of body form for girls but actually different bodies do different jobs and we've always had a range of bodies in our society so it's she has beautiful images in a really great stuff so if you have like an athletic girl or something like that it's nice to see yourself represented michelle carter and i might be at the back of my with my slides so we try to counteract negative media by seeking out positive stuff and also by talking to your kids about why it's unrealistic what they see they teach them to be critical viewers of the media so we all know there's photoshopping and we know that instagram is curated and things like that so if talking about that doesn't erase it but it gives them a little bit more power to question and you can also talk about what they're not seeing so if you can look at what are you seeing that seems unrealistic in the like who's missing from this picture which are very you know are there kids that you see at school that they're the way they dress or how they act or what they do isn't is picture so you're teaching them to look for what's not there promoting healthy weight so this goes back to sort of your comment about not talking about body size but thinking about function of their bodies and trying to keep their bodies healthy exercises movement it feels good it keeps their bodies flexible so trying to promote healthy weight without focusing on body shape and weight and then promoting by promoting positive body esteem which is just again that sort of idea of like what does your body do for you i said all this s the real beauty campaign is another off someone and i have here we can if you are interested later victoria's secret to the love my body campaign which is a direct and then came along and said we're going to like fix that for you if you want to come up later and look at them side by side the love my body campaign has one type of body and slight variations in skin color but it's not actually real on anyway so i love that they told them before trolling was actually a thing of seeking that stuff out so common sense media might be girls another great website that you can go to that will give you access to lots of images in book lists and things like that that you might want to  yeah sorry that's not perfect parenting so much so my boys they always want as are right and so that's fine with me and then there's also something christians will talk about like not saving dessert for after the dessert is just a part of the meal and you're not making dessert contingent on eating other things so we have talked with the iss compartments in your belly which there aren't actually really which is why i say it's not it's a perfect thing but like it's like the car thing we're like they're allowed to have dessert and it fills up a certain compartment and then we do need to fill up the other compartments of our bellies with other things and that's for real for us that's a way that it's work to kind of stop the battle of like can we have to start tonight we have dessert tonight we have dessert tonight like sure and then you can but there but you can't have it instead of dinner for me because it doesn't ever fill up the other compartments of your belly so this i think is what is really actually trickiest for parents because no parent send their kid off to school and says like your job is to look skinny and pretty and have a great day all right but what we do do is we have our own relationship with our body and we have our own relationship with food that doesn't go away just because we have kids and so this whole like modeling healthy eating behavior is i think where people get really stuck  so in reality extreme dieting is not good for anybody juice cleanses you do not need to detoxify your body because you have a colon that he talks about is your body for you eliminating food groups because like that's a new thing yes so juice cleansing is something you should never do some people have an idea that their body gets filled up with toxins or bad stuff in the food which is sort of true because when you eat your body breaks down your food into the useful components and then we have waste right so your body actually cleanses all your food for you get some of the stuff you don't need and takes in the nutrients that you do need some adults and people who want to make a lot of money off of marketing have decided that we should cleanse our body by just drinking juice all day and not eating any food which is not actually very helpful to your body it produces a short lived sense of euphoria because as your body produces ketones from being starved you get a little hyper and manic and for some people that mimics a good feeling but in reality you're creating a binge purge and restriction cycle so if you believe in evolution our hunter gatherer friends did not have constant access to food right so they would go through periods of restriction because it was winter there was a lot to gather you know i think it's probably hard to like one hundred twelve to be sort of her so like they didn't have constant access to food like we do now and so they would go through periods of restriction and then when they did have like a really big harvester they killed a really big animal they would been as much as they could and that would last for a while and they would go through these phases we have constant access to food so we no longer need to restrict bin and purge so you know a juice cleanse or something that we really don't ever need to be doing adults do them apparently because they're make a lot of money and i don't know like who is selling you shake ology on your facebook feed but if we do this if we engage in these behaviors in front of our children we're making it a thing that they can't have until they're adults right just like we do without all i can have this you can't you just wait your turn and that makes it a desired value right they want what they can't have so you know you're not allowed to deduce cleanses you're not allowed to fast unless it's for religious purpose and then obviously you've said right i'm talking about fasting to lose weight or because you have a fundraiser that night there's going to be lots of pastor d'oeuvres if you're know you certainly don't want to announce somebody is religion and you're basically to get him all in one shot because like almost every religion fasts for something at some point and if you think about you know you can if you think about so well why do different religions fast it's almost always this idea of your defragging yourself to honor god or serve god or commemorate something right so this is the idea that you're giving up something that you would normally have for a greater purpose so i don't know how much you're allowed to talk about religion in school but you can say like yeah  it what is best for your body is to eat three meals a day sometimes people do something that's really special because it's a special part of their religion and it's not necessarily what you would do for like best athletic performance or whatever but it's but it's important enough for them to maybe not be super healthy that day for their and that's you know we sort of talk about the mixed messages in that and so and you're not going to set your kid up for like an eating disorder or body image problem by for those of us without a gluten intolerance or c l a x or peanut allergies to give up entire groups of food and it's difficult to get your children to feel comfortable with eating a wide variety of food if you're having a separate meal so if there needs to be a reason for a separate meal i grew up in a house with a type one diabetic he didn't eat all the same things that we ate because it would have killed him so but we knew why like you know dad doesn't eat these things because of blood sugar insulin not because he was afraid that he was going to gain weight and so there's perfectly good ways to be able to talk to your kids about this stuff if it has to happen but if you're like a perfectly healthy person you should probably eat foods i can't see the clock  ages of five to eight that kid's body level satisfaction will match mom's so it's not just what you say about your kid's body it's also what you say or don't say about your own in avoiding dieting discussions if  to a party and the women all gather in one corner and talk about what they did or did not eat that day and the men are over here talking about all sorts of political events and who just got traded from the red sox what you're teaching is that what's important  girls is their body and their food and that's the only thing they can talk about and what's important to men is all these other things and so i think you avoid guiding discussions that opens up a whole world of other discussions you can have and kids will absolutely overhear what you say even if they never hear anything you want them to say right that they hear everything that you don't want them to hear you say insulin modeling healthy exercise like you're talking with a mom that says like i go to zoom because i'm trouble while i run because i think an hour away from my kids  but you can model healthy exercise in talking about why you do it because it gives you something to do with your friends it allows you to move your body get you get stronger it's something you can practice and see how you improve and like traditional exercise might not be for every kid i have one kid who comes from school comes home from school and drops his backpack in the mud room and then goes outside and like shoots hoops for a half an hour and then he moves on to practice his to slap shot and then he'll go in the back yard and throw against the pick back and then he like comes in for a second and goes out to do something else and i have another kid who comes home from school also drops his backpack in the middle floor i don't know why asks if he's allowed to have screen time i also don't know why he does that anymore i say no he stops and he curls up in a corner with a book and he could like not move for three hours and so getting the that that kid also needs to act like i'm a very happy that he'll read but he also needs to exercise because it's good for your heart and because if you're curled up in a corner with a book all the time of you're not going to see any other kids and finding like other forms of movement for him is like a little bit more challenging but also really important so they it's not that you have to like going out for soccer team or football but i can usually co outside if i will agree to pretend to be a knight or some sort of martial arts person and we could like run around the backyard with bats or sticks for a very long time and that's exercise no  joke and that's exercise and i will say like so i grew up i was like a competitive gymnast and i went to the gym four times a week for three hours a day like getting used the idea that like my kid wasn't going to be on a sports team was a little hard and it took me a while to get used to the idea that this actually was exercise when you just run around and like shoot demons that don't exist but it turns out it actually is and that's comfortable and feels good for his body too so you can get creative with this stuff and just  daily movement like you guys have neighborhood schools right you can walk to school you don't have to take the bus there's like a cute little town center that you can just get used to the idea of like walking places and because it feels good and actually the best treatment we have for depression which is linked to body image stuff so this is just sort of like a wrap up of hopefully i said all these things are ready a million times today if you feel like you need a refresher there they are so i think i said all of family meals while having family meals and eating in moderation and modeling a family meals are really good i know that you like this so i feel like huff post post an article on having family dinner like every day family meals do not have to be family dinner at six o'clock because that's probably not going to happen and if you set that as your marker it's going to be really hard to meet that on a regular basis but it is really useful to have family meals because it's the only time you really get to model that you're comfortable with lots of food you get to see what's going on like if you were having family dinner you wouldn't know your kids doing that pushing around food on the plate thing but it it could be breakfast it can be family snack time it can be dinner it can be eight thirty at night when you come home from baseball it can be if it doesn't have to happen seven days a week you could maybe you have family brunch once a week on sundays so let yourself get flexible with the idea of what a family meal is it just means that you're eating in the presence of your kid and you try not to fight about homework at that time because you don't want eating to be stressful and if you have concerns about their eating you try to not talk about it then but you know what it in like file it away for later so that eating becomes a thing that's actually enjoy able so i have pictures of kids being happy because i feel like i've just told you that your kids are doomed and they're not like look kids girls are actually happy  so you won't let her because you feel like she will get enough fat or protein so there are ways as a vegetarian to get plenty of fat and protein your diets little harder right so some people become a vegetarian just cut it just only vegetables other people are vegetarians that eat lots of legumes and nuts and dairy and fish sometimes so i mean i would say what you can let her try it you're not going to ruin or it doesn't also the decision you make for now does o i would do a lot of probing like how come is it and then you might need to decide and kind of do some thinking yourself about what what is it what's like how is she interpreted as if she thinks that you eat vegetarian because  killing animals was wrong but yet she's eating animals are you mad at her you know who knows what's going on in her eleven year old brain so i would do lots of asking questions like you think she was like not good enough and you've done this like cool special thing that makes you better so first i would ask a ton of questions and then i i would probably do a trial run and then i have a negotiator so i negotiate and well he's he's also a vegetarian but he eats his grandmother's brisket meatballs  so i'm not quite sure how his definition goes but he does lots of other meat that he won't eat even though i say like well like that comes from a cow and that hamburger is pretty much just a meatball flat he doesn't eat meat balls he doesn't eat hamburgers only meatballs so i also i believe that you should like to have you know give kids special stuff to eat like i don't go to the kitchen to get a separate meal after my kids rejected the first meal but i serve really weird combinations because i served with almost every meal i make it's just there because it's a protein that that child will eat he doesn't know or he just thinks that's like normal that like people have a side of pro food with everything he doesn't know he's going to a special meal replacement he just thinks you don't need meat you need protein and fat but it doesn't have to come from an animal so if you are willing to do that do that next step of making sure that she's eating like you want and farrow and black beans and spinach to get the iron that she needs if you're willing to do those things and she's willing to to try them and then you can hand her the power of saying yeah i'm a vegetarian too and this is what vegetarians do they don't just eat like carrots and potatoes yeah yeah so like a varied and vegetarian and the all the rest of the family gets this if you haven't explained your reasons for that and you may need to depending what your reasons are you might have to explain fake reasons but if you haven't given her rationale then she will make one up  and so i tend to wear a cover up on the beach because unlike terrified of getting skin cancer if i don't explain to my kids that i am covering up because i want to protect my skin from the sun they could make up other reasons maybe i cover up on the beach because i don't want people to see my belly maybe i cover up on the beach because i don't want to get wrinkles maybe i cover up on the beach because i'm lame and won't play like they're going to and less i tell them i'm putting on you know i'm putting on a shirt because too much sun is not really good for our skin then they know that it's like i'm not afraid to like the on the beach in the same body that i had last winter and so they don't make up the absolutely make up a reason if you don't give them one  that's that's an awesome comment and getting for all kids like getting involved in the food planning food prep food choice those are great ways to get kids comfortable with food to find out more about what they like or dislike and give them power it's so much about what happens between a kid their parent is this power thing and if they are involved in it having a choice about what the meal is or going shopping with you or if they're interested in cooking anything it gives them more power and that actually is a great self esteem building tool and the higher self esteem the easier all this stuff is yes right i think it's really tricky because there are co morbidities between overweight obesity and other health risks however what we know is that dieting doesn't actually lose to dieting most often does not actually lead to losing weight and that some of things even if you don't lose weight some of those things are improved right like your heart attack risk is lower with exercise regardless of whether there's weight loss so we what we often try to do is focus focus on the h so if i were actually thinking that the weight were an issue like eating a salad for dinner is not actually her best bet right her best that is actually eating still a wide variety of foods probably the same foods that she's serving the rest of the family but a smaller portion  and adding an exercise which is going to improve health whether or not it affects the weight and she can talk to her kid about you know if you see the same foods but less kids probably not going to notice but then you can talk about well i'm eating this because it's i'm i'm  feeling full now so i'm stopping and so i would focus more on sort of again the one of getting back in touch with hunger cues and explaining hunger cues to kids and that if a kid is questioning what you're eating and then you can put it in terms of that especially a four year old the more complicated that kid gets older and then really focusing again on the movement an exercise because that's going to improve health and that's going to be better for that patient than anything and if it results in some weight loss to maybe even better for like joint stress but you know really the big thing is going to an increasing exercise and if you talk about that as terms of movement and function and that that doesn't as i put a kid at risk does that help i know this is such a tricky conversation to have with patients and i'll say that most of the like yet so i find when i'm talking with kids that it's always a good idea to ask more questions first before i start telling them stuff so like if a kid comes and says well like my my mom does this or like i can't have this because we're only a lot of twenty two points a day  thought how do you feel about that what do you think about that what what what what does it mean to you that your mom does this in that you're not allowed to do this and i find if you ask lots of questions it's actually a lot of times what they're really wanting to know is much easier with what you thought you were going to have to talk about and so and and i i don't want to disparage parents that have their own history and struggle with this stuff and so i you know i won't tell a kid that what their parents doing is probably not smart because much more important than the knowledge about food is their relationship to their parent and i think that's most protective is having a really good relationship their parent if we go disparaging in telling them that their parents can't be trusted because they're do and on smart things like that's really that's more damaging than anything else  so i will talk about how you know i don't know i don't know that much about weight watchers but what i do know is that it's really important to have a variety of nutrients and what i do know is that it's important to not feel too too hungry or to too full and maybe weight watchers do enough for that person you can talk to take it away from this particular thing you know my kids absolutely know that like gimmick things and i don't know this is necessarily good but like when they when they see like expose to one side but yeah i mean i think it's ok to teach them to question the same way that we teach them to question lots of things because if you're a good investigator then you learn stuff without like coming down too hard like you know a lot of the comments i've made today is not what i do i am the first person that people text when they have a kid in my friend group they'll text me when they have an issue so i got this text saying like oh my god what do i do what happened so she's so it's a neighbor of mine she's coming home with her seven year old daughter and they're driving home in the car which is where all the best conversations happen and her daughter pipes up from the backseat and is like i am so glad that i get to play soccer and as told by my friends that you know my heart just left and i was like oh she's feeling so grateful about the opportunity she gets to have this is like such a wonderful moment and so because she's my friend she probed and said why and then her daughter said because it means i'm never ever going to get fat and that's when mom me so what would you do there's no like one right answer  yeah yeah like so what you're never going to get me yeah so like what do you mean you're never going to what it what does that mean to you like what that is might be different yeah yeah you could change the focus or is that ok that's one reason like any other reason that you might like soccer and you could shift the focus to something that you might feel like as something you want to encourage more you can't say the word until the other you get the other person to say the word and then you can say it so i think it's like that if your kid has brought it up you don't get to not talk about it you absolutely you probably wouldn't start the conversation like you need to play sports so you don't get fat like we don't do that but she's now brought it up so you not only can you talk about it you have to talk about it and i would try to talk about it in the view that like what worries you about that you don't shame her for being afraid of getting fat you also don't want to shame fat what worries you about that like is how would that affect you what is what does that even look like to you and then you can you know do some like imparting of messages that you might want to have and that like bodies come in all different shapes and sizes and people of all different shapes and sizes play soccer and i'm so glad that you enjoy playing soccer and like one of the other good parts about it so like you acknowledge that you have gotten stuck on it and you will probably circle around to it like a million more times ther site it's massachusetts disorder no now it's the mult multiservice eating disorder association they change their name it's the same exact thing but they have great resources for providers for people that struggle with this for family members  you to check that out the myth of a perfect girl is a really great book it's an easy read and then i put national eating disorders or it also has some great section for parents that give you language like it's yours on these questions of what you say if a student asks this or a kid there probably is some stuff out there i don't know it off the top of my head i do know if you look at the national eating disorders site site they do have a they have a section for like parents and maybe they have some stuff on there but i'll do some poking around if you want to send me an e mail to remind me to get back to you with some info i will do that a lot of this stuff absolutely yeah i mean the way you would talk to a boy versus a girls absolutely the same about their bodies  fat she's feeling something like fats actually not a feeling it's like what we say over and over and that is what she's feeling something she's definitely feeling either uncomfortable or sad or anxious and she's related it to something that she sees in the mirror so i would go after that other thing like i'm sorry to hear you say that absolutely letter change letter where something she feels comfortable in but i go back to that things like well what are you feeling uncomfortable about can i help you with that you know getting but i wouldn't you know like i love you no matter what you look like and i want you to feel comfortable so like what's going on that you don't feel comfortable and that michael you might not feel to have that conversation the moment she says it because like if she's getting dressed you're probably going somewhere right but you can come back to that like i heard you say that