Okay, I'm going to be doing a little bitching today. Just thought I'd warn you!
I hate (yes I am saying Hate) people that feel no remorse over foisting body and food issues onto children. Why can't they just shut up and try to do something helpful instead of just being hurtful.
I'm talking about the multitude of people out there who have no qualms about making a child feel bad about their physical appearance.
When I hear of parents that tell children that they are fat I just want to hold up a mirror, showing them their own reflection and point out all the flaws that they must obviously not being seeing.
I've actually heard parents commenting on their child's appearance in front of their child's friends. And these are not nice comments either, not that telling your kid they are fat is nice, but it's a hell of a lot better then telling your 9 year old son that he has 'man boobs' that's for sure.
I had parents that believed that if you humiliated your child enough, both privately and publicly then your child would feel so ashamed of their physical appearance that they would then do something about it.
Yup, worked really well for my parents. That's why I now weigh 206lbs and my baby brother has struggled with weight issues for his entire life.
When I was in highschool I weighed 125lbs, and because my parents kept telling me I was fat I stopped eating. At first it was only breakfast and lunch and then I'd have a small dinner. But I eventually stopped eating pretty much everything. I would go days with only eating some fries or drinking tea and pretty much nothing else.
So the day that I got knocked down in the hallway and proceeded to blackout, I was walking into walls and stumbling all over the place, that day was a wake up call for me. The teachers thought I was on drugs. My parents thought it was because I was knocked down, and part of me believes that as well. But another little part of me thinks what if that was because I hadn't eaten anything but an order of fries, a bag of chips and a can of coke all week?
Needless to say I started eating again. Oh man, did I start to eat. Everytime my Dad said to me "The best excercise is pushing yourself away from the table!" I would stuff a few more handfuls of potato chips into my mouth, or another donut or whatever was at hand.
When my Mom said to me "Pull your shirts down over your bum, your bum is too large to show off." I would eat a carton of ice cream.
Everytime I sat down and pigged out I would hear my parents words ringing in my ears.
I believed what they told me. I met my Hubby when I was 16 years old. I weighed around 120lbs. So he couldn't understand why I was always on a diet, he couldn't understand why I was always obsessed with working out. He kept trying to tell me that I was beautiful, he kept trying to fill my head with words of praise, but his words weren't loud enough to drown out the critisisms of my parents. What teenage girl listens to the praise instead of the critical? They obsess, focus on nothing else but their percieved flaws, the acne on their faces, the bloating around their bellies, is their make up covering up those red blotchy marks? So someone saying you are so cute would be drowned out by "Fatty, fatty, fat, fat!" Which is what my ultra skinny younger brother would chant at Baby Bro and myself.
My Baby Bro didn't have it much better either, actually he probably had it worse. Because he was not an athletic boy, not at all. And since my Dad only seemed to relate to his kids on a sports level that meant that Baby Bro had nothing. He tried, he would go and run around the track for a few hours everyday, he purchased a weight set for his room, which he would use for a few more hours everyday. And still he would hear how chunky he was and how he just needed to stop stuffing his face all the time.
My parents didn't believe in positive criticism, it was always a tear down from them.
I'm not sure about how bad it got for Baby Bro becaues I left him. When I turned 18 I embarked on a series of adventurous disasters at leaving home. I slept in friends houses, I moved out completely a few times, and then when I was 23 I got pregnant, moved out for the final time and got married. Baby Bro was around 14 then.
And we all know that once we have a baby our universe centers around them and their well being, so I didn't really see anything going on with Baby Bro. I did give him a place to go if he needed it, and he did come over a lot at first. But then he couldn't take the 'baby happiness' of my place and began to hide at a friends house. He wasn't around much anymore, he pulled a disappearing act much like I had at his age.
Both of my brothers friends never even knew that they had an older sister, and my parents were very permissive so our home was a hang out for both my brothers sets of friends.
I do know that to this day my brother still has issues with his weight.
I still have issues with my weight. I look in the mirror and I hear my parents voices still carrying on about how fat I am, and how I look so disgusting.
The only difference now, is that I tell them to shut up and I don't turn to the fridge to drown out their criticism with a carton of triple chocolate fudge ice cream smothered in whip cream.
Not Anymore!
10:13 a.m. - March 01, 2006
Recent entries:
March Break Almost Done - March 16, 2006
Annoying and Irritating - March 15, 2006
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DNA Personality Test - March 10, 2006
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