My dd11 is stressed about being overweight

[Anonymous 1]

She's been learning about nutrition and 'obesity' in school and now she's stressed out about being too heavy. I'm happy to make some changes, but we're a fat positive household and nobody's losing weight any time soon.

Any ways to put her mind at ease? It doesn't help that most of her friends are skinny. Do I need to stop her using tik-tok since it's a bad influence?

[Anonymous 2]

LOL @ fat positive. And an 11 year old on tik tok sounds like a great idea!

[cgd5112]

I have no idea what you mean by fat positive.

Education on nutrition and weight and wellness are all good. Your dd has friends who are not overweight? Those are positive role models.

Instead of focusing on what she perceives as wrong ( being overweight) , help redirect her attention/anxiety/stress towards implementing healthy habits in nutrition and exercise/mobility. With the usual new year's resolutions, jump in with her to make changes that will set her up fir a healthier teenhood and adulthood. Tik tok may steer her to be obsessive and have negative effects on the way to lose weight and how a tween should look. So I think it's best to look at this as an opportunity to get involved with her in a mutually beneficial goal of health and wellness.
I know you said you're not looking to lose weight but even just going out fir a walk, doing a dance video game, measuring serving portions, etc can help her and it's a time to bond as she enters the teen years.

[Anonymous 3]

Fat positive? In other words your family is obese and thinks it's a good thing?

I'd explore some healthier recipes together and do something like start going on walks together focusing on health instead of body size.

[Anonymous 4]

So lame, it's entirely possible to try and try to lose weight and still be fat, so that is why it's sometimes important to accept that bodies cannot always be exactly what we want them to be, or the same as our friends, or whatever. I really hate how everyone pretends that thin is a choice that only losers don't make.

[Olioxenfree]

I would first talk to her about her motives to lose weight and go from there. What we teach our kids is that your weight has nothing to do with how good you look and it doesn’t make you a better person. All bodies are beautiful. Being overweight or underweight can harm our bodies and contribute to health and nutritional problems, so we maintain a healthy diet and exercise so that our bodies stay healthy, not so they stay skinny. That does not mean that someone is unhealthy if they have any body fat, there is a wide margin of what is healthy for our bodies before it would start causing health effects. You also can have a thin body and still suffer from poor nutrition and high cholesterol levels which will still harm our bodies.

If her body is still in a healthy range for her size and her motives are purely motivated by how she looks, I would work on self esteem building. But, if she is concerned from a health perspective and would like to lose weight to lower her risks of health problems and she is having trouble with physical activity because of her weight, I would help her look into healthy nutrition and exercise plans while continuing to motive good self esteem and would make sure she understands that she can harm her body if she tries to lose weight in an unhealthy way like depriving her body of nutrients, exercising to the point that it harms her joints, etc.

[RIZZY]

I have never heard of fat positivity but I have heard of body neutrality which I try to practice.

I have never really been able to keep my eldest daughter off of social media. If they are determined to be on social media apps, they will find a way. We had/have all of the parental controls; she just used other people's phones. But no, at 11 years old, I wouldn't ALLOW social media, either, especially tiktok.

My son started calling himself overweight around the age of 12 when he hit puberty. It was very hard to watch him struggle with that but I have found that going to the gym, working out, and eating well helps him a lot. I talk about how our bodies aren't meant to look a certain way but they are meant to be able to do certain things so we focus on what our bodies can do rather than what they look like.

Long walks and lifting weights, I think those are the key.

[Traci_Momof2]

Tell her to focus less on her size and more on healthy eating. If the food she puts in her body is healthy and not junk, and she's not overdoing it on portion sizes, and she's getting a decent amount of physical activity, then her body will work itself out to where it should be. And tell her to never compare herself to other people. Other people don't have her body, she has her body and her body is the only one she needs to be concerned with.

I too am wondering what "fat positive" means.

[EarlGrayHot]

Yeah-I have no idea what that means. Could you explain?

[Anonymous 5]

Something else to blame on schools