October 5, 2006 10:53 AM
Overweight daughters
This comment needed to be lifted to an entry so we can all get to work on this - with practical advice and prayer:
Do you have any advice for a mother of an obese child? My 13 year old daughter is 100 lbs overweight (and yes I feel like a terrible mother for allowing it to happen).Everyone in our family has weight to lose, but more importantly, we need to become healthier. However this daughter really seems to resent the changes. She becomes angry when I don't buy unhealthy food. She will sneak extra portions of food we have.
Again, we are tackling this as a family. There is absolutely no singling her out. We are all in the same battle, trying to get healthy.
Do you have any wisdom? I don't want to create an unhealthy power struggle regarding food, but I have to do something.
I'm asking because I know you won't pull any punches. I don't want the standard "just make healthy choices for your family" answer. I need to know how to address her attitude.
Thanks!!
Even after losing all this weight, it is still a mystery to me why some fatties - let's start getting healthy by refusing to tiptoe around the F word - resist change for so long.
I'll start with me. As a teen at 5'5" I weighed 130-135. My mom thought I was too fat. Looking back, I can see that she was obsessive about her own weight - and way too thin most of the time, especially considering her alcohol consumption and the lack of healthy calories.
What your mom thinks has a profound impact, no mater what kind of relationship you have. I absorbed her thinking - in my 20's got down to 115 which was downright bony for me. Put on a lot of weight with my first two pregnancies, but took off the weight right away.
When I got married in 1983 I weighed 125-130. By the time by ninth child was born, I was up to 215 - more than 10 pounds per baby. But that wasn't the real excuse, obviously - since I continued to put on weight through three adoptions.
I look back and wonder what in the world I was thinking. Yes, it was nice to know that my husband loved me unconditionally. But was it worth it to prove it by swathing myself in layers of fat - layers of fat that hid the person I really am?
Because now that I'm approaching a normal weight I so vividly feel that this is who I am and the poor overweight woman whose body I occupied was not really me at all. I spend a lot of time pondering these mysteries and asking God to give me more wisdom to share. I think the first thing God has given me is the ability to want to know and understand and share to help others. Because all around me I see people who are hiding/hidden behind layers of fat. And my heart aches for them, knowing the bondage it represents.
The problem with overweight children is so much more sensitive because fat represents more than their conscious choice, but a lot of unconscious parent/child issues. Many parents and children have issues, but most of them remain unseen by the outside world.
In an overweight daughter, the issues become visible. My own experience with this began 25 years ago (when I was thin) with a friend who had an overweight daughter.
Lisa was a very beautiful woman – tall and model-like – with a perfect home and four perfect children. Except for one: her second daughter – around 14 when I knew them – was overweight (I know the polite term is pudgy or chubby, but considering the obesity epidemic we really need to stop these “polite” terms and just be honest about the problem). Lisa and I met as single mothers and were very close, piling up our kids together in her station wagon for trips to the beach and Muir Woods.
During that time, I watched from the sidelines as Lisa battled with her daughter over food. There were combination locks on pantries and as I recall, even the refrigerator had some kind of locking system. As a family friend (and living in California, people are much more open about their lives than where I live now) I witnessed my share of sarcasm, skirmishes and shouting matches that seemed only to be making matters worse.
To an outsider looking in, it seemed a no-win situation: If Lisa continued to try to control her daughter’s eating, her daughter would sneak and lie and find food at school and friends’ houses and continue to gain weight. If Lisa gave up her efforts to control, her daughter would eat everything she wanted and get fatter.
But one thing seemed clear to me: the main issue was control, and Lisa’s daughter’s behavior fairly screamed, “You might be my mother and my boss, but in this area, you will not control me!”
I was in my early thirties then, and savvy enough about family dynamics to understand that it wasn’t just the daughter who had problems, but the mother too – and I urged Lisa to get professional help. In the midst of this I got married to Tripp and began a new life as a stay-at-home mom. Lisa and her family moved and we lost track of each other (Lisa, if you are out there reading this, please email me!).
Twenty-some years later, I’ve seen enough similar mother/daughter weight wars to confirm my thoughts that this is not a simple weight loss issue, but one where weight has become a symbol. Sometimes – and I’m not saying this is the problem in this case, but more in case it strikes a chord with anyone else out there – behind an overweight woman there is an overly-controlling mother.
This is good news, because when someone realizes that there are more healthy ways to resolve the effort of an over-controlling mother than to cripple yourself with extra pounds, she can experience the liberation of letting go of overeating as a defense mechanism.
Okay, I’m not a shrink. I’m just a woman who’s recently lost a lot of weight and – because I’m a writer – been eager to learn everything I can from my own negative experience to help other people rethink their own bad habits which keep them in bondage, preventing them from reaching the potential God intended for them.
I’m thinking out loud. And while these thoughts might not be relevant to the mom who wrote the comment above, they may be relevant to someone else on either side of the mother/daughter weight/control issue. If so, think of a rope in a tug-of-war battle. Time to let go and get involved in something more constructive.
The one point that is relevant to any parent/child weight situation is that professional help is a good idea. If you are Christians, I strongly urge that you seek help only from Christian mental health professionals – there is too much anti-Christian prejudice in the mental health community to trust anyone whose worldview may do more harm than good.
I’m also hopeful that some readers may have some other helpful ideas. I think the most important thing to remember is that sometimes answers are simple and sometimes they are complicated. But a move toward health starts with asking honest questions and being ready for honest answers. Sometimes there’s not a quick fix. And sometimes a quick fix will only make things worse in the long run.
Tripp and I have always taught our children that before a wound can begin to properly heal, you must examine it and clean it out thoroughly, even if it causes a little extra pain. Taking the analogy a little farther, when the body forms a pimple or a boil or a cancer, we can’t just ignore it, but must coax/squeeze/cut out the poison.
Our emotional and spiritual problems are like that too. As believers, our first step needs to be complete openness to what God needs to reveal to us. Then willingness to change and grow into a more honest and healthy response - no matter what that change entails.
Comments
I think it's not even always the mother. I know that my own weight problems stem from my controlling father and my overweight mother. I've been dealing with these things, too, as I try to lose weight and be a better example to my own daughter.
I really don't know what to tell this poor mother. I was an overweight teenager (although not that much overweight) and I assure you that no amount of teasing, humiliation or controlling changed my habits. I had some family members (not my parents!) who were downright mean. Maybe just encouraging her to see herself as God sees her, to do a Bible study on how God sees our bodies i.e., temples of the Holy Spirit, the image of God, etc. will help. It's so hard to be 13 as it is.
I would recommend either counseling or finding an adult woman with whom the daughter relates well and who could offer an ear to listen and understand. There's a lot a 13-year-old won't tell her mother about how she feels about herself and her world. And sometimes the pain becomes too much to deal with and it gets easier to just withdraw and stop interacting with the world around you. I know that as a teenager, having someone who would have listened to me and who would have given me Godly advice, but whom I could trust to not tell my parents what I was saying would have changed my life. I hid so much and even at 32 am still learning to be open about what's inside me.
Blessings on this mother and her family. They have a hard road ahead, but they can do it!
Posted by: Lucy | October 5, 2006 5:02 PM
This is interesting. I picked up a book at the library last week on a whim that will be really helpful for those struggling with obese daughters. It's called Dr. Susan's Girls-Only Weight Loss Guide: The Easy, Fun Way to Look and Feel Good! by Dr. Susan S. Bartell
Hope this helps! And I enjoy reading your blog BTW. Keep up the good work!
Posted by: Taffy | October 6, 2006 3:03 PM
There's another take on childhood obesity with the issue of controlling mothers who have narcissism as a personality disorder.
When I was a child, I was always around 30 or 40 lbs overweight and battled weight issues throughout the duration of the time I lived under her roof.
My mother used to use emotional blackmail to force feed and control me. She would deliberately load me up with foods that were empty calories and then criticize me for my weight problem. She would smack me around and call me useless and fat and say that when I grew up, I would grow up to be lonely and I would have to live with her forever because "no man would ever want to go out" with me because I was so ugly and fat.
She would not let me outside ever to do any activities. She would forbid me from participating in after-school sports. I really wanted to play volleyball and floor hockey. I was on the school floor hockey team for a while and I loved it and I had to lie about it to my mother to hide it from her. When she found out, she went through the roof.
My mother also forbid me from having friends. I couldn't go anywhere with any friends. I could only sit at home. She would call from work to check that I'm home and then force me to eat -- checking in the refrigerator when I got home to make sure I baked the two croissants that were in the freezer (600 calories each).
And when I was overweight, she'd punish me for being overweight with verbal and physical abuse.
I only present another scenario of another way it can go. Is my mother the only person who's like this? I'd like to know and am curious if any research has been done into this model of parental control. When I look back, I think she's a really sick person with some severe personality disorders. She used food to destroy my self esteem through the crushed self esteem, she controlled me.
Since the time I moved out about 15 years ago and put some distance between my mother and me, my weight has been restored to medically accepted parameters and all my weight issues have been corrected on their own. I just had to live the more active life that I've always wanted to live. I am motivated to eat healthier and to make better food choices these days.
Posted by: Julie | February 1, 2007 9:57 PM
