Maybe We Need More Almond Moms
With half of our country being obese, snacking on almonds maybe isn’t a dangerous threat to the psyche
The great condemnation of the “Almond Mom” is yet another online trend which points to Mom and Dad as the main culprits for a myriad of psychiatric problems. “Almond Moms” are health-crazed parents described as “fatphobic” people who use their body weight and image as a yardstick to judge their own, and their kids’, self-worth. Their behavior, according to some, is largely disordered and emanating from a hatred and loathing of their own bodies, which ends up being projected onto their family. As modern day would have it, this of course is used to describe any parent who wishes to clean up their family’s lifestyle and lead a generally healthy life.
With this said… what if the almond mom trend is actually something our country desperately needs? After all, nearly half of our country is obese, and half of our country’s kids have some form of a chronic condition. For the almond moms touting two children, it’s likely that at least one of your kids will suffer from a chronic syndrome, with the most common being obesity, diabetes, or a mental health condition. The rise in children receiving diagnoses like they’re Tootsie Rolls may leave you skeptical regarding our country’s continued initiatives geared toward childhood “health”. How are all of those health and exercise initiatives going? Remember when Michelle Obama did push-ups on Ellen and filled vending machines with apple slices instead of Nutty Bars? Ah, those were the days! Especially considering a child’s “truth” is now regarded as sacrosanct, and if they want to eat chocolate for every meal of every day, that’s their authentic little diabetic self, advocating for their own needs! Is this empowering? That is, for half of today’s children to be riddled with symptoms of eczema, autism, ADHD, asthma, and/or a mental health condition?
Now, before the authors and advocates of staunch mommy blogs come after me for my “harmful” perception of kids’ development, I must say: there is such thing as an excessive focus on aesthetics and health. My own anorexia quickly developed into orthorexia for many, many years before I found a means of freeing myself from the grips of compulsive counting and obsessing. Orthorexia, for those unfamiliar, is a less-severe and life-threatening mutation of anorexia in which an individual becomes preoccupied with “health food” only. This can look like refusal to eat anything that isn’t “low-fat” or “low-carb”, a highly restrictive allegiance to a specific dieting trend, or cutting out entire food groups if they do not meet the criteria for “health”. Depending on who you ask, it could also look like individuals strictly adhering to a Paleo or Whole-30 diet.
What I can say with certainty, though, is my anorexia-turned-orthorexia had absolutely nothing to do with media messaging, skinny supermodels, or being taught how to cook a healthy meal. Anorexia’s cure also wasn’t through “body positivity” and believing there is no such thing as bad food, though. Because eating disorders have next to nothing to do with food and everything to do with a person managing a compulsive behavior problem and having a very low tolerance for difficulty. A child who is told Oreos have more sugar than strawberries, or that ice cream is an unhealthy breakfast, is highly unlikely to develop a psychiatric eating disorder. These are basic, logical facts that I believe we owe to our children--- no matter how much they may not like to hear it. Do you handle it well when you go to the doctor and see that you’ve gained weight? When you’re wrestling with your jeans in order to fit into them, do you reframe the situation with “body neutrality”? Or do you cuss yourself out in the mirror while swearing off those frickin’ Thin Mints you keep buying despite having no willpower against? This isn’t a problem so much as it’s a rational response to aspects of ourselves that we’ve neglected. While I’m not making the argument that we continuously shame ourselves our obsess over our weight, there isn’t an inherent problem in weighing ourselves, measuring our food periodically, and nutritionally tightening our belts. These aren’t problems. They’re only problems to a society that prioritizes victimhood, shitty lifestyle, and an external locus of control as “brave”.
When we launch into almond moms being children’s most threatening problem, we sorely miss the plot. Almond moms are causing eating disorders! Moms who hate their bodies will teach their daughters to hate their bodies! Call me harsh and perhaps even gauche, but I don’t see eating disorders as being a major problem in our country. Frankly, it’s the opposite: the greatest risk facing our kids appears to be that of obsessive laziness, comfort, and ease in the people who are raising them and educating them.
“Diet culture” is not new, much like a mild fixation with appearance is unsurprising. Have you seen mothers on Instagram? The ones who claim to love their body, and they love their body by posting themselves in provocative positions in what appear to be wrestling singlets online for hundreds upon millions of people to gawk at? By all means, if this is your version of contentment with motherhood, I am not the person to tell you otherwise. But something tells me there’s an underlying insecurity present that forces a woman to believe she’s only as worthy as her online audience ranks her. With this in mind, and this may sound counterintuitive, it’s unlikely that exposure to social media, or even exposure to a “health-nut” of apparent, is the reason for development of a psychiatric condition. Yes, social media has been nothing short of tragic for the psyche of today’s kids and many of their parents. But it likely wasn’t what caused their most pressing issues. The unnatural and addicting, intermittent reinforcement we receive online is likely what exacerbated existing symptoms to the degree that they’re now more noticeable.
I’m certain we’ve all had a classmate in elementary school who was the loser that came to school with celery sticks and home-grown pepper slices as snacks. There wasn’t even such thing, at the time (at least to mine and my family’s understanding), as “organic almond butter”. The almond butter moms and their progeny were perhaps so sparse and detached from my social circle that us normal kids, who sucked down Kool-Aid Jammers and Pixie Stix, were unaffected by their food rules.
And perhaps herein lies my point: we were unaffected because our attention wasn’t stolen. We were unaffected by the apparent “peanut allergy epidemic” because nobody we knew even sneezed in the presence of a peanut. The adults in the room throughout my childhood were intelligent enough to refrain from the moral panic that is so common in today’s parents and today’s educators: you’re not going to die if your table partner eats fake peanut butter, so calm down and do your math homework. The dangers of the almond mom seem to fall under similar pseudo-problems as the mother who still spanks her unruly son or the father who believes that there is such thing as first place, and only those who win will receive a trophy and a high-five. The primary reason for my belief in the almond-mom-threat being overblown is my own experience as an anorexia patient, and my degrees in clinical psychology/behavior analysis that shape my understanding of psychiatric conditions.
Firstly, eating disorders, specifically anorexia, typically do not develop from seeing someone thin or being told that we’re fat. Never in my life have I been told I need to lose weight, go on a diet, or “watch what I eat”. Insecurity, body image issues, and disordered eating habits may result from more frequent exposure to Victoria’s Secret catalogues, specifically if the young woman is entering her teenage years. But we must remember that teenage girls are emotional terrorists by design. The healthiest of teen girls with no history of mental health issues quickly becomes a raging c-word the moment she turns 13, and is unrelenting in this psychological warpath until she smartens up toward the conclusion of her high school years. Our feminine rage can also manifest differently. In high school, most of us began experimenting with drugs and alcohol around our sophomore year, when we got our driver’s licenses and were free to act foolishly wherever and whenever we wanted. My parents were known for making us come home earlier than most all of our friends, much to our dismay. I can guarantee you, though, that my parents’ disciplinary style did not contribute to mine and my brother’s mental problems. Much like basic food rules likely will not contribute to the development of a food complex.
Our problems both were compulsive and addictive in nature. Mine was anorexia, my brother’s heroin (and basically any substance he could get his hands on). I will die before I blame any of this on my parents, as they were authoritative, powerful, supportive, and unbelievably loving. My childhood did not lead to the development of panic disorder and anorexia, much like it didn’t lead to Conner’s hunger for intoxication. Part of me has wondered for many years if we merely inherited some “addiction” gene, as my mother is highly compulsive and my father is overall panicky. But nobody in my blood line on either side has ever struggled with addiction or an eating disorder. How much of our behavior was learned versus genetically endowed, then? And would it ultimately matter? We are responsible for addressing our own behavior. Unfortunate circumstances may not be our fault, but they’re certainly our responsibility.
Many people believe their mothers are the reasons they need to see a therapist. It’s an ongoing joke in therapeutic circles, one I’ve considered for many years. This may partially be true, but it’s more likely that we’ve just failed to address our problems as things we have control over versus cruel afflictions we’re forced to carry for our lives. Does the world have an obsession with thinness and dieting? Honestly, I don’t think so. I just think the human body generally wants to be healthy and is inclined to keep itself alive and thriving at all costs. Staying alive as an obese person with shitty lifestyle habits will put far more stress on the body’s systems than a person who is of healthy weight with a responsible lifestyle. Objectively, it shouldn’t be controversial or harmful to inform your child that they cannot have something with a lot of sugar in it. No, Timmy, you’ve eaten 2 adult-sized Crumbl cookies already. You cannot have another one. This will not give Timmy a food complex or an eating disorder. It may make him cranky and trigger a mild tantrum, but do not mistake dramatic, emotional responding for a psychiatric diagnosis.
If we hadn’t instructed parents to pretend bad foods didn’t exist or that sugar isn’t horrible for humans and animals in high quantities, we may have children who do not suffer from such growing, chronic problems. These are problems unprecedented even one to two decades ago: 1 in 36 children has autism, with over a third of those being in the moderate-to-severe, nonverbal category. Six million children are diagnosed with ADHD as well as anxiety, with nearly 20% of teenagers having contemplated suicide in 2018-2019 alone. All of which again begs the question: Is it the almond moms or idiotic mental health movements we’ve decided are compassionate and caring? How are all those social-emotional learning programs going for our children and young adults riddled with supposed anxiety, depression, PTSD, and ADHD?
The problem is not an absence of compassion, but an over-abundance of it. We’ve invested so heavily into the emotional aspect of things completely detached from our own lives that we generate as many reasons as possible to not behave like adults. We’re “compassionate” to the degree that we accept and even encourage completely inappropriate behavior, as we believe pretending “there are no bad foods!” is less of a risk to our children than stuffing them with ultra-processed junk because we’re too burnt out or too marginalized or too anxious to cook. Our compassion is not truly compassionate if it’s in place only to quell our own personal problems. Your kids didn’t do anything to you--- so stop bending reality and calling it trauma-informed teaching or gentle parenting. No, sweetheart, you cannot have M&M’s for breakfast. And no, you already ate a bag of chips, so you can’t have another one. You’re probably not anxious, Maya, you just drank 50 grams of sugar and now you’re sitting on your ass on the couch. Have you tried going for a run?
The problem is not the almond mom and her vicious rigidity, but a too-loose approach to parenting that looks more like begging and pleading to be liked. Do your children really need to presented with a choice of 7 different vegetables at different stages of ripeness, or do they need to be told to eat their brussels sprouts, goddamnit, or they’ll be breakfast in the morning? The almond mom can teeter on the edge of neuroticism and inarguably create “complexes” in their children, depending on the language she uses to describe herself and her relationship with meals. But, all in all, she’s more likely to just be a pain in the ass. And I hear a healthy diet is great for hemorrhoids.
Being overweight or obese is a serious problem. Yes, a problem. Not “little hiccups in your health journey” or “resulting from being a victim of weight stigma”. This cannot be overstated: being overweight wrecks absolute havoc on your health. It destroys the body’s functioning in similar ways an overindulgent parents obliterates a child’s sense of self-efficacy. Someone needs to be the adult in the room, and I hope to God it is the literal adult who decides to do it.