How Do You Diet When You Have Kids?

When I stopped breastfeeding my son at 16 months, I suddenly became very aware of just how large my body seemed to be. It was spring, almost summer, and with the thought of swimsuit season looming, I decided that it was time to prioritize getting back into shape. I started slowly, tracking my food and steps each day and cutting out the late evening postnursing snack I’d held on to even after I’d stopped breastfeeding.

As I began to lose weight, and my old clothes began to fit again, I felt happy and satisfied. As the number on the scale went down, my sense of worth as a woman went up. I wondered how much more weight I could lose.

As the summer rolled by and slowly turned to fall, I began to take my dieting more seriously. I cut out certain food groups, abandoning carbs and meat, and started logging two hours a day in the gym. By winter I had reached the weight I was in high school, well before my two babies had come along, and had purchased a whole new set of clothes to accommodate my shrinking body.

Every time I looked into the mirror, stepped onto a scale, or went down a dress size, I got a hit of satisfaction. I felt accomplished despite the fact that my whole relationship with food and exercise was becoming increasingly strained and stressful—I made separate meals for my family and myself and skipped out on bedtime kisses for an evening workout each night. My happiness was perpetually tied to whether I’d stuck to my "limit" of calories for the day.

The compliments were flooding in. Friends told me how great I looked, congratulating me on all the hard work I must be doing. Everyone noticed. Even my five-year-old son.

One morning, as I slid a fresh batch of pancakes, scrambled eggs, fruit, and bacon onto the plates of my husband and two sons, my eldest asked me, “Mommy, why don’t girls eat pancakes?” As I tried to piece together his question, I realized that I was the only girl he saw eating breakfast each day, and I was indeed guilty of skipping pancakes in favor of a small bowl of grapes. Just like everyone else, my son had noticed my dieting, but it wasn't my thinner thighs or smaller tummy that caught his attention, it was the fact that I wasn't eating full meals. “Lots of girls eat pancakes, baby,” I responded. “I just don’t like them,” I lied.

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I felt guilty, not just for lying but for eating in a way that seemed so unnatural to my five-year-old—a kid I’d always encouraged to fill his plate with delicious and nutritious foods. I felt guilty for setting up a world in which it was normal for my son to see the woman he knows best saying no to healthy, good food, in pursuit of a smaller body. A world in which he might see women's bodies as projects that needed to be constantly under construction. Later that week, he’d asked me another tough question about why ladies eat only salads for dinner. It was devastating to hear my son make such disturbing generalizations about women and even more upsetting to know that my behaviors were the cause.

“We grow up and learn to eat in a world that tells us every day that we’re doing it wrong, we’re too hungry, we crave too much, and we can’t listen to our bodies.”

Research suggests that kids as young as three years old can begin to develop a dislike of their body. Given what was happening in my own kitchen, it’s not surprising. How was my diet impacting my son’s body image?

The tricky thing is figuring out how to do better. It’s impossible to unlearn all of the harmful messages about our bodies we’ve been internalizing for decades in one exchange. It’s impossible to fall in love with your body just the way it is over the course of one meal.

Sometimes it even feels impossible to learn to practice what we preach to our kids. Danielle,* a mom in Tennessee, says that her six-year-old son has noticed that she constantly measures food to make sure that each serving size fits in with her diet plan. After he has asked her about it repeatedly, she still measures her food, though she no longer does it in front of her kids. Mary F., a “lifelong dieter,” in North Carolina, also feels challenged by the idea of dieting while parenting. “Since I’ve had kids, I’ve struggled to diet more because I’ve gotten heavier. But having a five-year-old daughter has made me think about how I talk about dieting,” she says. “I try to talk a lot more in terms of health and feeling good than achieving a certain number or a certain image.”

The truth is we should be taking lessons from our kids when it comes to the way we treat our bodies—not the other way around. “We are all born knowing how to eat,” says Virginia Sole-Smith, author of The Eating Instinct, cohost of the Comfort Food podcast, and an expert on kids and body image. “Every baby knows when she is hungry, when she is full, and—perhaps most crucially—that food provides comfort. But we grow up and learn to eat in a world that tells us every day that we're doing it wrong, we're too hungry, we crave too much, and we can't listen to our bodies.”

Research on intuitive eating supports the idea that listening to our body's hunger and fullness cues, is the best way to develop a healthy relationship with our food long-term—and model one for our kids. “Suppressing our appetites only fuels a dangerous restrictive mind-set that ultimately backfires,” says Sole-Smith.

Fed up with my plate full of sad-looking lettuce, I committed to being a better example for my son by being better to myself.

I began my new way of eating simply by following the rules that I made for my own children when it comes to food: I want them to eat a wide variety of foods that taste good and fuel their body. I encourage my kids to eat until they are full and to ask for seconds if they’re still hungry. I don’t usually let them eat a lot of processed food, but nothing is a “never” food, so I readopted that rule for myself and welcomed all food groups back into the fold.

Since my son started to notice my unhealthy dieting and I made a commitment to be better to my body, I’ve gained back some of the weight that I lost. I don’t fit into that new wardrobe I bought myself when I was at my thinnest anymore, and I don’t get a lot of comments about how good I look. But that’s okay. I know I’m setting a good example for my children about what it means to be a happy, healthy woman—and enjoying pancakes with my family again.

*Name has been changed.

Julia Pelly is a writer in North Carolina covering parenting. You can find more of her work at juliapelly.com.

Originally Appeared on Glamour