Let them eat cake!

Teach your kids to treat food as a fun friend – not a mortal enemy

“No,” she said, turning away from the chocolate cake being sliced up to celebrate a friend’s birthday. “I can’t eat cake. I will get too fat.” She stopped for a second, looking stricken. “I think I already am,” she said sadly.

I would probably have thought nothing of this – my friends tend to say this sort of stuff every time we eat out – except that this young lady was all of six. Yes, six years old, and already full of self-loathing for her body and weighed down with an unhealthy relationship with food. And this, despite the fact that she was not in the slightest bit chubby (let alone fat). 

All of us present turned accusingly – as you do – towards her mother, unspoken rebukes all too apparent on our faces. She turned a bright red and stammered, “I really don’t know where she gets this from. I have never told her that she is fat. Or that she can’t eat cake.”

And you know what? I believe her. Knowing her as I do, I am pretty darn sure that she could never be so insensitive as to say such things to her daughter. And yet, that is the message that her daughter has picked up from her. 

Sometimes it’s really not about what you actually tell your children. It’s about how you behave around them. It’s about non-verbal clues that they pick up from hanging around you at the dinner table. When Mummy sticks to salad and soup for dinner because she has put on weight that tells her daughter two things. One, that it is not A Good Thing to put on weight. Fat is bad. Thin is good. And two, that food is the enemy. 

You probably know girls like this as well (yes, for some reason, it is mostly girls who fall prey to body dysmorphia). Children who have internalized the message that fat is bad and that – as Kate Moss so famously said – nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. 

How could they not? We live in a world that venerates skinniness as some sort of divine attribute. The media are awash with airbrushed picture-perfect images of thin women showing off their washboard stomachs and toned behinds. Film actresses and other female celebrities are routinely slagged off when they put on a few kilos, even if it is after a baby. 

Remember the bad press Aishwarya Rai Bachchan got when she arrived in Cannes carrying a bit of post-pregnancy weight? And the praise showered on her when she did her Cannes call last year, looking like her old svelte self? That is the kind of size-ist nonsense that passes off for media commentary these days.

There really is no way to protect our children from this stuff. It is all around them all the time. But to counteract that it falls upon mothers, much more so than fathers, to send out some positive messages. Because like it or not, girls are more at risk, and it’s their mothers they look to as they try to navigate the world.

So, for all the mothers of young girls out there, who want their daughters to grow up with a positive body image rather than eating disorders, here are some do’s and don’ts. 

• Don’t fetishize food. Don’t get into fad diets in which you give up entire food groups claiming an intolerance or a food allergy. The message you pass on your child is that food is the enemy.
• Instead, teach your daughter to treat food as a fun friend. Get her to help you in the kitchen, giving her age-appropriate tasks. Teach her how to lay the table. Make the dinner table a place of family conversation, laughter and the happiness of eating together; not a minefield which may blow up in your face if you end up mixing proteins and carbohydrates (no, I don’t know what that’s all about either). 
• Serve up healthy food by all means but don’t restrict your menu to exclude all ‘treats’. That just turns them into forbidden fruit, which – as we all know – becomes all the more attractive for being verboten. It makes much better sense to serve up the odd sugary treat or French fries so that they seem like just another food choice.
• If you must obsess about your weight, don’t do it within her earshot. She doesn’t need to know that you were ten kilos lighter before you had her. And how hard it is to get your pre-baby figure back. She thinks you look perfect anyway. Don’t tell her any different.
• Don’t compliment other women by saying how much weight they have lost or how thin they look. The subliminal messaging that goes through to your daughter is that losing weight is what matters. That you can never look good unless you are thin. And that starving yourself to achieve that goal is perfectly okay.
• Don’t ever use the word ‘diet’ within her hearing, even if you append it with the politically correct ‘healthy’. If you must, use the phrase ‘healthy eating’. Or better still, ‘healthy lifestyle’ which involves eating well, and getting enough exercise.
• Do tell her how lovely she looks. But never make it contingent on how much she weighs. Beauty does not lie in a particular shape or size; as the old saying goes, it lies in the eye of the beholder.

My kind of woman

How can you tell whom you are likely to be best mates with?

There are some questions that always pop up when a group of young girls gets together. Who is your kind of man? What qualities do you look for in a guy? How would you like your future husband to be?

The answers are often as hackneyed as the questions. The words ‘tall, dark and handsome’ have been known to be uttered. As have ‘sensitive and caring’. A sense of humour is always touted as a desirable quality. And everyone wants a well-educated, even ambitious, man though only a few will admit to looking out for a rich one.

I guess all of us start out with a mental checklist against which we judge any potential mates. It is another matter that this checklist is the first thing to go out of the window when true love strikes. Then, it doesn’t matter if he stands a couple of inches shorter than you or how deep his pockets are. It doesn’t matter if his jokes are unfunny and he doesn’t have a hint of a six pack. And it certainly doesn’t matter that he doesn’t look like one of those pin-ups you idolised throughout your teenage years.

Once you’ve fallen in love, even the most unsuitable of creatures begins to look like your ideal man. And no matter what he is or how he is, he magically metamorphoses into your kind of man.

But then, that’s love for you. It has the knack of turning the world on its head. It has a way of making everything you once believed in seem futile and foolish. As the song goes: “I stand alone without belief; the only truth I know is you.”

Perhaps that is why I have never wanted to define – not even in my head – who my kind of man would be. At some subliminal level I guess I always believed that when I met him, I would know.

But women – ah, now we’re talking. I’ve always been very clear in my head about who my kind of woman is. (And just so we’re clear, by that I mean the kind of woman I could be friends with; not one whom I dream of having babies with.)

It all began – as things tend to do – in school. It didn’t take me long to realise that I wasn’t really cut out for sport and rough-housing of any kind. So hanging out with the sporty, tomboy types was out of the question. Instead, all potential friends had to pass what I called the ‘Do you read Enid Blyton?’ test and only those who had read everything from the Secret Seven to the Famous Five and the Mallory Towers series were in with a chance.

As I grew older, this test was further refined. Anyone who dissed Georgette Heyer as just another romance writer was off my radar in less time than it took to say Beau Brummel. Later still, all those who regarded Ayn Rand as the Fountainhead of all wisdom got short shrift. And more recently, Dominick Dunne has become my litmus test for People Like Us (or, more accurately, People Whom I Like).

But books are just the beginning. The tests of incipient friendship extend far beyond them. Take bread, for instance. No, I mean that. Take bread. Go on, take it. Break off a morsel, slather on some butter, or dip it in olive oil, and plop it into your mouth. Um, delicious, isn’t it?

What? You don’t eat bread? Or carbs of any kind, except on the weekend? Oh well, it was nice knowing you, but this kind of abstention spells goodbye in my book.

In fact, truth be told, food can be a landmine littered with the corpses of would-be friends. You want to share a salad? A salad? Seriously? You can’t even commit to an entire portion of lettuce leaves and rocket finished off with a touch of balsamico? Sorry, but that’s a deal-breaker for me. (Now, sharing a dessert – a nice, gooey, chocolaty concoction – that I can totally get on board with.)

Okay, you got me. I like a woman who enjoys her high-calorie treats, who doesn’t shy away from a bit of pasta or a slice of pizza. I like a woman who has an appetite and is not afraid to feed it. Though it can get a tad annoying if she stays startlingly thin at the end of all that face-stuffing.

And then, there are those women whom I know I would simply never get along with in a million years even if they shared my reading lists and my love for a perfectly crisp French fry. These are just some of the categories that come to mind:

·         The kind of women who wear high heels on long-haul flights. You see them at airports all the time, teetering on laughably high stilettos, mincing along on shoes that look more like torture instruments. These are the women who would puncture the evacuation slide if the plane ever had to make an emergency landing. You want to steer clear of them.

·         Women who are rude to waiters. Though, to be fair, this one applies to men as well.

·         Women who treat their domestic staff badly. It doesn’t matter how beautifully you behave in company if you go back and terrorise your house help. If you can’t treat the people who clean and cook for you – and look after your children for good measure – with respect (if not love) then what hope is there for the rest of us?