Author of Body-Confident and parenting coach Emma Wright at her Arrowtown home. Photo / Mayjonesphotography
Parenting coach Emma Wright tells Joanna Wane why keeping kids a healthy weight while making sure they love their bodies can be an impossible task.
How did it come to this, that it almost feels worse to “let” your kids get fat than it would be to get them hooked on crack cocaine?
This isn’t exactly how Arrowtown-based parenting coach Emma Wright puts it in her new book Body-Confident, an empathetic and research-based guide that looks at how our obsession with “healthy food” can cause more problems than it solves. But the mother of two knows exactly what I’m talking about.
A high BMI is equated with a lifetime of suffering, from the emotional abuse afflicted by our weight-obsessed world to the spectre of disastrous health consequences and early death. As the child of weight-conscious parents herself, Wright was so repulsed by her body that she spiralled into an eating disorder and later became fixated on controlling what her own children ate. Choosing to take a step back from those power struggles at mealtimes was a relief for everyone, but it did take a leap of faith.
“Parents feel like they’re being thought of as criminals if their child is bigger,” she says. “The feelings around it really do run that deep. We’re supposed to help our kids love their bodies, and we’re supposed to turn them into healthy eaters and they’re supposed to remain a healthy size. What I have come to understand is that those three things are often in huge conflict with each other.
“How do we step back for a minute and go, ‘What is our goal here?’ Is our goal to make sure the kids eat the peas on their plates tonight? Or is our goal to turn them into competent eaters? That requires a very different set of rules and a very different perspective to give them the power to tune into what their body needs.”
There’s a lot to unpack in her book, which suggests family food fights at the dinner table — “not the fun ones” — are doomed to be a losing battle. Putting tight restrictions in place may elicit short-term compliance, but research shows those children are likely to eat a less nutritious diet when they’re older. Wright also looks at the flawed measures used to define obesity and the damage caused by society’s anti-fat bias.
We already know the only winner to come out of the multibillion-dollar diet industry is … the diet industry. Studies on weight-loss methods collated over the past 100 years show the rate of sustainable “shrinkage” is less than 5 per cent, and weight cycling caused by yo-yo dieting is so strongly associated with health risks, it may be more dangerous than fatness itself.
Wright also references the work of Dr Cynthia Bulik, the founding director of the University of North Carolina’s Centre of Excellence for Eating Disorders. She’s exploring the biological origins of conditions such as anorexia and bulimia, and how an underlying genetic predisposition can be activated by an environmental trigger — such as dieting. Yes, the ironies abound.
While dysfunctional eating has traditionally been more prevalent in girls, some researchers in the field reckon it’s now close to an even gender split. Wright works with just as many parents who are concerned about their sons as those who are worried about their daughters. A Harvard University study found that while the stigma relating to skin colour and sexual orientation has reduced, prejudice against body size has significantly worsened.
“In my family, there was a real contempt for big people,” says Wright. “I was a skinny little kid and I picked up the messages very clearly that I had a desirable body. Then when I went through puberty, it was like someone put a bicycle pump in my mouth and blew me up overnight. I remember understanding that not only was my body now disgusting, but that it was my responsibility to fix it.”
One of the book’s key messages is that it’s hard for anyone to feel good about their body without challenging some of society’s deeply entrenched and harmful beliefs. When Wright’s children were young, meal times filled her with dread. Now she encourages parents to shed that binary view of what’s “good” and “bad” to eat, loosen the reins (without dropping them altogether) and think about all foods fitting into a healthy diet.
These days, she and her two teenagers have a much more relaxed and harmonious experience when they sit down at the table together. “We don’t really talk about food,” she says, “other than, ‘Do you like that?’ and ‘Would you like some more?’”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
Let’s take a look at the science.