An article by a woman who is "fighting" her 7-year-old daughter's "childhood obesity" at home—published in the April issue of Vogue—is causing a big backlash online among readers critical of the magazine and its author. 
 
 Dara-Lynn Weiss, the author, wrote about her response to a pediatrician who suggested that her daughter, Bea, should be put on a diet because—at 4 feet 4 inches and 93 pounds—she was clinically obese and could be at risk for high blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes. 
 
 It wasn't the diagnosis that readers railed against, but Weiss' management of Bea's subsequent yearlong diet. 
 
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 "Sometimes Bea's after-school snack was a slice of pizza or a gyro from the snack vendor," Weiss wrote. "Other days I forced her to choose a low fat vegetable soup or a single hard-boiled egg. Occasionally I'd give in to her pleas for a square of coffee cake, mainly because I wanted to eat half of it. When she was given access to cupcakes at a party, I alternated between saying, 'Let's not eat that, it's not good for you'; 'Okay, fine, go ahead, but just one'; and 'Bea, you have to stop eating crap like that, you're getting too heavy,' depending on my mood. Then I'd secretly eat two when she wasn't looking." 
 
 Weiss continued: 
 
 I once reproachfully deprived Bea of her dinner after learning that her observation of French Heritage Day at school involved nearly 800 calories of Brie, filet mignon, baguette, and chocolate. I stopped letting her enjoy Pizza Fridays when she admitted to adding a corn salad as a side dish one week. I dressed down a Starbucks barista when he professed ignorance of the nutrition content of the kids' hot chocolate whose calories are listed as "120-210" on the menu board: Well, which is it? When he couldn't provide an answer, I dramatically grabbed the drink out of my daughter's hands, poured it into the garbage, and stormed out. 
 
 After Bea lost 16 pounds—meeting her mom's weight-loss goal for her before a Vogue photoshoot—Weiss wrote about her daughter's reaction: 
 
 "That's still me," she says of her former self. "I'm not a different person just because I lost 16 pounds." I protest that indeed she is different. At this moment, that fat girl is a thing of the past. A tear rolls down her beautiful cheek, past the glued-in feather. "Just because it's in the past," she says, "doesn't mean it didn't happen." 
 
 "I have not ingested any food, looked at a restaurant menu, or been sick to the point of vomiting without silently launching a complicated mental algorithm about how it will affect my weight," Weiss admitted. "Who was I to teach a little girl how to maintain a healthy weight and body image?" 
 
 "The socialites who write personal essays for Vogue aren't known for their kindness and humility," Katie Baker wrote on Jezebel.com. But Weiss "has to go down in history as the one of the most f---ed up, selfish women to ever grace the magazine's pages." 
 
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 Weiss "comes across as obsessive and the fact that she made such an issue of her daughter's weight, both in public and in Vogue—seems wrong," Dhani Mau wrote on Fashionista.com. 
 
 An anonymous blogger for New York magazine added: "I'm pretty sure Weiss just handed her daughter the road map to all her future eating disorders." 
 
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 • Erin Burnett 'annoyed' she was used in RNC's 'War on Women' ad ||||| Vogue published kind of a tricky article in their April issue about a woman putting her seven-year-old daughter on a diet. The larger issue of child obesity is, as Weiss makes sure to point out, a real one, and Weiss' daughter was clinically obese and needed to lose weight for health reasons. The article's author, Dara-Lyn Weiss is faced with the complicated task of helping her daughter lose weight without giving her long-term body image issues. Any article on the subject--especially one written in Vogue by a socialite-y upper-class Manhattanite--is going to raise some eyebrows. This one in particular has inspired serious outrage. 
 
 For example, Jezebel calls it "the worst Vogue article ever" and Weiss "one of the most fucked up, selfish women to ever grace the magazine's pages." Indeed, some of the things Weiss did to keep her kid from breaking her diet are a little nuts. For example, the article began with the following interaction: 
 
 I stepped between my daughter and a bowl of salad nicoise my friend was handing her, raising my palm like a traffic cop. "Thanks," I said, "but she already ate dinner." "But she said she's still hungry," my friend replied, bewildered. I forced a smile. "Yeah, but it's got a lot of dressing on it and we're trying--" "Just olive oil!" my friend interrupted. "It's superhealthy!" My smile faded and my voice grew tense. "I know. She can't." My friend's eyes moved to my daughter, whose gaze held the dish in the crosshairs: a Frisbee-size bowl bursting with oil, tuna, eggs, potatoes, olives. 
 
 This may have not been the best way to set up the article if she wanted the reader to believe her to be a sane, reasonable person. Some other not-so-sane things she admitted to doing: 
 
 • Angrily throwing an untouched kid's sized hot chocolate in the trash and stormed out of a Starbucks because a barista didn't know exactly how many calories were in it. • Not letting Bea partake in "Pizza Fridays" at school • Making Bea go without dinner because she ate "nearly 800 calories of brie, filet mignon, baguette and chocolate" at school for French Heritage Day (I wish I went to that school) 
 
 Also a red flag: Weiss admits to having had issues with food her whole life, including obsessive dieting, fasting, using laxatives, etc. The thing is, she fully acknowledges that, stating, "Who was I to teach a little girl how to maintain a healthy weight and body image?" 
 
 Overall, Weiss comes across as obsessive and the fact that she made such an issue of her daughter's weight, both in public and in Vogue--seems wrong. Jezebel contacted Dr. Dolgoff, the founder of "Red Light, Green Light, Eat Right," the which is what Bea's diet was based on, who said she "wasn't thrilled" with the way Weiss interpreted her book. "The parents aren't supposed to react in public," she said. "They're supposed to be on their child's team. Another parent in [Weiss'] situation may have seen that, while weight loss was progressing, there were some emotional issues. But she chose to continue dieting in her own way. I believe that if she had continued coming, the end result would have been more than just weight loss: she'd have weight loss and a happy child." 
 
 To me, it's a tricky situation that's hard to criticize if you haven't been in it yourself. Most moms aren't perfect and don't a lot of them end up screwing their kids up one way or another? 
 
 What do you think? Was it irresponsible of Vogue to publish that article? ||||| weighty issues A Mom’s Reaction to Vogue’s Story About a ‘Fat’ 7-Year-Old Girl 
 
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 I've never known Vogue's annual "Shape" issue to have a firm grasp on reality, but this month's article by Dara-Lynn Weiss on her struggle to cure her "obese" 7-year-old daughter, Bea, reached new levels of pathos. The heartbreaking chronicle of little Bea, subjected to public humiliation and the Red Light, Green Light, Eat Right diet (sort of a "kid-oriented" version of Weight Watchers), begins thus: As Bea grew I was relieved to cross several items off my mental checklist of possible issues she might develop. She was not colicky. She was not autistic. She was not dyslexic. No, it was far, far worse than any of those things: She was fat. And Weiss admits that she felt particularly ill-equipped to confront the problem because of her own struggle to control her weight over the years, which included subjecting herself to Weight Watchers, Atkins, juice fasts, laxatives, and even deadly appetite suppressants. So for several years, Weiss ignored her child's overeating, anxiously hoping it would just go away, even after Bea's 6-year-old check-up when the pediatrician suggested they address Bea's weight. But then it got serious. 
 
 One day Bea came home from school in tears, confessing that a boy at school had called her fat. The incident crushed me, but it was a wake-up call. Being overweight is not a private struggle. Everyone can see it. 
 
 A boy called her fat. Well, that certainly can't happen in a home ruled by the sort of social striving found in the pages of Vogue! We all know that the reasons we eat or deprive ourselves of food don't always coincide with appetite. But rather than identifying the cause of the overeating (maybe a mom so wrapped up in her own social standing that she was willing to put her daughter's well-being at stake?), Weiss chose to project her own self-loathing onto her daughter. 
 
 Full disclosure: I have three children, including a 7-year-old girl. I can attest to the ways in which children are a mirror for our worst fears about ourselves. I am sure I've made mistakes by voicing (however inadvertently) my own dissatisfactions with myself. And yet, I feel so fiercely protective of my children's future physical and mental well-being that I won't even use my real name for this piece. If my own daughter were to encounter a weight problem, I'd like to think I would approach it like Janell Hoffman did in her honest take "'Mom, I'm Fat:' One Mother's Inspired Response to Her 7 Year Old." If that wasn't enough, we would seek the help of professionals in a rational, loving manner. And if I were the root cause, I'd seek my own help too. Which is, of course, the opposite of Weiss's approach: 
 
 Sometimes Bea's after-school snack was a slice of pizza or a gyro from the snack vendor. Other days I forced her to choose a low fat vegetable soup or a single hard-boiled egg. Occasionally I'd give in to her pleas for a square of coffee cake, mainly because I wanted to eat half of it. When she was given access to cupcakes at a party, I alternated between saying, "Let's not eat that, it's not good for you"; "Okay, fine, go ahead, but just one"; "and "Bea, you have to stop eating crap like that, you're getting too heavy," depending on my mood. Then I'd secretly eat two when she wasn't looking. 
 
 But perhaps the most poignant part of the article comes at the end, when Bea meets her mother's deadline for Vogue's "Shape" issue and loses a total of sixteen pounds in time for them to be photographed together. For enduring her mother's obsessive narcissism, she receives many beautiful dresses and a feather hair extension as a reward. Seems like a fair trade-off for being in Vogue before second grade, right? But if Bea thought she could finally eat her coffee cake without being tormented, she'd better think again: 
 
 The struggle is obviously not over. I don't think it will ever be for either of us. Bea understands that, just as some kids have asthma, her weight is something she may always have to think about, unfair as it seems. 
 
 Unfair indeed. Weiss continues: 
 
 She will probably always want to eat more than she is supposed to. She will be tempted to make bad choices. But now she has the foundation to make these choices in an educated and conscious way. Only time will tell whether my early intervention saved her from a life of preoccupation with her weight, or drove her to it. 
 
 Um, really? I'm pretty sure Weiss just handed her daughter the road map to all her future eating disorders. But it gets even more tragic with Bea's tearful reproach: 
 
 "That's still me," she says of her former self. "I'm not a different person just because I lost sixteen pounds." I protest that indeed she is different. At this moment, that fat girl is a thing of the past. A tear rolls down her beautiful cheek, past the glued-in feather. "Just because it's in the past," she says, "doesn't mean it didn't happen."
– When Dara-Lynn Weiss wrote in Vogue about her yearlong struggle to help her clinically obese 7-year-old daughter lose 16 pounds, she probably wasn't expecting quite the level of backlash that has ensued. Yahoo has highlights from Weiss's article, including her admission that she herself has struggled with eating and body image issues her entire life. Among the tactics Weiss used with daughter Bea: depriving her of dinner because she ate 800 calories at school during "French Heritage Day," refusing to allow her to participate in "Pizza Fridays" because she once added a corn salad on the side, and angrily dumping out her Starbucks hot chocolate when the barista couldn't tell her exactly how many calories it contained. Yahoo rounds up some reactions: Katie Baker pulls no punches on Jezebel, writing that Weiss "has to go down in history as the one of the most fucked up, selfish women to ever grace the magazine's pages." Yes, Weiss found herself in a complicated and difficult situation, but "the obvious fact that Weiss was projecting her hatred of her own body onto her child throughout her yearlong diet" is "truly disgusting." On Fashionista.com, Dhani Mau notes an incident in which Weiss steps between her daughter and a salad nicoise, physically preventing her from eating it. "This may have not been the best way to set up the article if she wanted the reader to believe her to be a sane, reasonable person," Mau writes. "Weiss comes across as obsessive and the fact that she made such an issue of her daughter’s weight, both in public and in Vogue—seems wrong." "Rather than identifying the cause of the overeating … Weiss chose to project her own self-loathing onto her daughter," writes an anonymous blogger and mom in New York. "I'm pretty sure Weiss just handed her daughter the road map to all her future eating disorders."