Team Discussion of the Month: The Impact of Diet Culture on Families: A Look at Almond Moms
Content warning: This blog post discusses dieting, disordered eating, body image, and weight.
Ah, diet culture: that insidious, pervasive system of cultural myths that, in one way or another, tells us our health, character, and worth depend upon the fact of whether or not we are thin. Diet culture’s pervasiveness (and centuries-long history, which is rooted in white supremacy, healthism, and patriarchy) makes it so its pro-thin, anti-fat messages are difficult if not impossible to escape. It’s in the air we breathe.
While diet culture often wraps up its idolization of thinness in the language of health, wellness, common sense, and even self-love, it is concerned, first and foremost, with being thin.
In diet culture, thinness is the ultimate virtue to which to aspire—and because of diet culture’s profound influence, many of us make it ours, too. We buy into diet culture’s promises of acceptance, love, happiness, and meaning via the attainment of a thinner body, a different body than the one we have now. In diet culture, restricting our eating, whether based on food type or amount (or both), is upheld as a clearcut route to thinness—and, therefore, to wholeness.
While diet culture is frequently discussed in the context of the media or, at the very least, from a broader social lens, it can also play a damaging role in families, often acting as a linchpin in the family culture itself. This is made evident by the existence of “almond moms.”
Parents, like anyone else, are not immune to the impacts of diet culture.
If you’re plugged into pop culture or social media, you might have come across the term almond mom sometime during the last couple of years. It’s a nickname given to parents who, due to their own restrictive eating and investment in diet culture, push their children, particularly their daughters, to restrict their food as well. This is typically done in the name of health and self-control.
Almond mom families function like diet culture at large but on a more intimate, one-to-one level.
In these families, restrictive eating is normalized and glorified, while intuitive eating—which rejects dieting, focusing instead on eating according to one’s hunger cues and body’s cravings—is looked on with fear. Foods are typically split into distinct categories of “good” and “bad”—just as they are in the larger diet culture. Meanwhile, thinness is upheld as a prime source of aesthetic and moral value, even if this is not explicitly named.
Someone who grows up with an almond mom is conditioned from a young age to have a distrustful, control-driven relationship with food and their body and to tie their self-worth to their size. Quite understandably, this can be the ideal breeding ground for the development of an eating disorder. Likewise, almond moms’ fixation on thinness can be triggering for their loved ones who are already recovering from disordered eating, making it more challenging for them to tune into their inner well of Self wisdom.
If you are an almond mom or grew up with one, you can be the one to break the cycle.
In Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, legacy burdens are beliefs and feelings that create suffering and are passed down intergenerationally through the ancestral line. Almond moms’ preoccupation with body size and eating habits—theirs, their kids, and in the general sense—is usually not ill-intentioned. Instead, it is often reflective of the legacy burdens they’re holding—something they picked up from their own parents (who picked it up from theirs, etc.).
Of course, none of this takes away from the damage almond moms can cause their children, particularly as it relates to their children’s relationships with their bodies and food. If you grew up with an almond mom or identify as one yourself, it’s absolutely okay to acknowledge the harmful impacts it had and perhaps continues to have on you today. In fact, to heal our legacy burdens, we must turn toward them—and do so with patience and compassion.
If you hold a legacy burden involving your body and/or food, you can start by simply getting curious about it without any shame or judgment attached.
Perhaps you recognize a parent or caregiver of yours in the almond mom description. Or maybe you see (a part of) yourself in it. Either way, IFS helps us connect to the Self so we can hold compassionate space for the parts of us that took on diet cultural burdens and work to keep us safe through conformity.
In IFS therapy, we learn to befriend, not shun or shame, protective parts such as these. We learn to compassionately witness our vulnerable younger parts impacted by cultural and legacy burdens that veil our perceptions, ultimately helping release them. By doing this, we create space to listen to our wise, intuitive, and loving Self about what our bodies need and begin to choose, from a Self-led place, how we want to nourish and care for ourselves.
Begin Eating Disorder and Body Image Therapy in California
Kindful Body can help you positively transform the way you think and feel about your body and food. At Kindful Body, we utilize the most cutting-edge, evidence-based approaches, including Internal Family Systems (IFS), EMDR, and Somatic-based modalities. You can begin therapy with us by following these steps:
Schedule a free 15-minute consultation with our client care coordinator.
Connect with a caring, experienced eating disorder therapist.
Start improving the relationship between you and your body!
Other services offered by Kindful Body
Our team is happy to offer a variety of services in support of your mental health. This is why our team is happy to offer counseling services focused on with low self-esteem issues, trauma and PTSD, emotional eating recovery, nutrition counseling, binge eating disorder, and body image. You can start receiving support from Sacramento, San Jose, Oakland/Berkeley, Walnut Creek, San Mateo, Orange County, or anywhere in California. Learn more about us by checking out our blog and FAQs page.
References
[Person gazing up at sky photograph]. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/trauma-recovery
[Person looking down at salad photograph]. Bel Viso Spa. https://belvisomedspas.com/just-say-no-to-fad-diets-how-to-eat-right