Just to be annoying and science-y for a minute, the study that article talks about is in fish, not in kids, so I'd hesitate to extrapolate those findings to humans. Bingeing and fasting may be a stressor for some species, but it is also perfectly normal for some types of animals, like snakes and mammals that hibernate. Obviously, people don't actually hibernate, but I also don't think you can draw conclusions about human eating patterns and lifespan from this study.

My mother has been on a diet at least my entire 35 years of life. Her eating habits, and how much she's gained or lost, has always been, and still is, one of our main topics of conversation.

When I was little, she fed me a lot of what she ate, which I mainly remember as being Weight Watchers sanctioned tuna salad and Tab cola. When I was 9 and started to put on a little body fat as I headed into puberty, at my dad's urging she gave me Dexatrim and put me on my first official diet. That's about the time I started thinking of myself as fat (looking at pictures of me back then, though, I was a pretty normal-sized kid). When I was 14, also at my dad's urging, she took me to a weight-loss doctor that she herself attended, who put me on about a dozen different pills to help me lose weight. So naturally, by the time I reached adulthood I was genuinely obese and had a ton of food and body-image issues. To this day, she blames my weight gain on getting my tonsils out when I was five. Yeah, I don't know either.

Now I just try to be healthy and take decent care of myself, and I fluctuate around the line between "normal" and "overweight" on the BMI index, but in any case I think I look fine, and it always flummoxes my mom when I gently tell her I can't be arsed about the details of her new miracle diet.

I love my mom, but, yeah. She crazy.

I love my mom dearly!

She struggled with her weight since I can remember, but she never ever forbade any foods or used them as a reward; I ate whatever I wanted whenever I wanted (and since she had veggies, fruit, cake, candy, and any kind of food you can think of, to me, food is JUST FOOD). There was no calorie talk, nobody at home ever called anyone else fat, and there were no bad or good foods. I put on around 40 pounds when I moved from my home country to Pittsburgh, and that is the only time in my life that I have dieted. It made it worse. Not only was I heavier that my comfortable level, but I also felt guilty and developed a pretty messed up relationship with food. No more! I work out when I can, take care of myself and enjoy food (BTW I just had some left-over Pioneer Woman mac & cheese and IT ROCKS!) but I don't diet anymore. Currently I am in the lower end of overweight and I feel great.

Yep, my mother was definitely my first weight loss influence. She still tells me I should lose weight now which really pisses me off and I tell her so. She's overweight and has done Weight Watchers, Slimming World etc in the past and offered to pay for me to go but i'm not convinced since she's just put the weight back on after stopping going. I hope to instill a positive body image in any children I have, there is enough shit out there without parents knocking their children's confidence.

First diet:

This year after gaining 15-20 pounds after entering grad school, not being a competitive fencer, and moving from Manhattan (walking non-stop) into suburbia (driving EVERYWHERE). I hate the suburbs. And I can't afford a new wardrobe. Solution: Lose the blasted weight. :)

Also experimented for about 5 minutes in high school with eating less. Failed miserably, thanks to lots of common sense, an insane schedule academically, musically, artistically, and physically. I found that eating less was simply not an option. Everything else in my life suffered, so roughly 44 minutes after lunch (during which I didn't eat), I scarfed down my sandwich, 2 fruits, and 2 cookies, and wrote off anorexia as the realm of lunatics and sadists.

Mom dieting:

On and off. My grandma too. At the ripe young age of 79 my g-ma asked me what kind of weight-training routine she should try. She's a badass. :)

Both of them mainly did the Ultra Slim Fast thing. But when I was a kid any "diet" that let you have a chocolate milkshake for breakfast did not fall under deprivation. I was so jealous! It made my cereal look sad. My mom went on Atkins when I was in college, but a combination of me bitching at her that eating fat all the time wasn't healthy and her own common sense moved her to a more plant-based diet that's maintaining a healthy weight.

Also, my dad is a superb cook (and so is my mom), but he used the kitchen as a canvas. That was where his art happened. He has high cholesterol, blood pressure, and triglycerides even tho he's a bean pole. We ate insanely healthy nonprocessed food from all over the globe although I wasn't conscious of it at the time. It was just food. I read The Omnivore's Dilemma (which is a superb, superb book - everyone who loves food and eating should read it!) and it made me appreciate it all the more.

Now, I'm gradually losing weight by eating healthier (closer to how I grew up, and OH MAN am I grateful for my mom and dad single-handedly making a finely chopped Israeli-style salad with a squeeze of lemon a comfort food for me), fencing more, and hitting the gym to cross-train so I beat more people at practice. It's not the losing weight so much as getting stronger that I'm focusing on. It makes it a lot easier. Instead of "What has less calories?" it's more "What has the most protein, vitamins, minerals, and fiber and no crap in it?" And I weigh myself every week or two. Doing it every day is too much.

Also, finding this blog was cool. It's really nice to read about other people doing the same thing (trying to be healthier inside and out), and it's pleasant break from writing my statement for candidacy. ;)

Maybe I'm in the minority , but my mom wouldn't LET me got on a diet. Granted, I would eat how she ate, and she's been on a diet on and off since I was four, but her diets never consisted of celery only. There was just never junk food in the house - the only snacks I was allowed to have were pretzels, fruit, or crunched up ice with OJ (weird, but it was my fave as a kid). In the summer I got popsicles. She carefully monitored what came in the house so she just didn't "get" why I would even think of dieting - we already ate healthy, and I was an active kid. So she never let me diet, even though I brought it up around the time I was eleven. her thing was "we live healthy already - dieting for you would be unhealthy". She was very sane about it. I wish she would be this sane about her own body.

I can't say I recall my mom ever dieting, though boy howdy did she ever put ME on a diet. My weight became a way for her to do battle with my dad, who always let me (and my siblings) eat whatever we wanted. If I came home from a visit to dad's weighing more than I did when I left, the shit hit the fan! I was doing WW in middle school and trying to purge in high school. Purging never worked for me, so I'd starve myself and exercise madly instead. To this day I still feel emotionally like ass when I gain weight, and hells yes I blame her for it.

To my credit, I'm trying to leave it all behind, though.

My mom has never been on a diet in her life. She's underweight so all I heard growing up was how lucky i was to be an average weight and healthy. We always had fruit and veggies in the house, but we had brownies and cookies too. She's the one who taught me that being healthy and eating a balanced diet is more important than being stick thin. I didn't ever diet until my senior year in high school. now I don't diet, but I do try to eat healthy and get all my dairy and fruits and veggies in.

All sorts of memories are flooding through my mind right now. I hate to think that my family screwed me over when it comes to body issues, but I don't think I grew up in the most healthy or accepting environment.

My mom was very thin until she started having children; in fact, I think she was mocked throughout her childhood for being skinny. She was anemic, fainted a lot, that whole thing. She inherited my grandmother's pear-shaped physique but remained on the slim side even after having 2 children. I think she has always hated being pear-shaped. She skipped meals often when I was a kid.

As for me, I don't remember exactly when my first diet started, but I remember being on one by the time I was 9 and doing those boring Jane Fonda workouts with my mom in the evenings. My weight was constantly discussed among aunts, uncles, grandparents, godparents, pretty much everyone -- "she seems like she will be tall and grow out of it," etc. Weet, we should compare notes. :)

My mom wasn't an open dieter as much as she was openly unhappy with her body and health, and I remember wanting to lose weight from as early as 9 years old, too.
However, it wasn't so much HER influence as it was the influence of pictures, tv, movies and friends that made me want to lose weight so early. I remember realizing that my stomache was NOT flat and cut like hot chicks on tv, so I started doing crunches like crazy, only to have my mom tell me after weeks and weeks that doing crunches wasn't going to fix the problem - I need to lose body fat to have abs like that. I took that the WRONG way. I wasn't fat, and if I could have just left it at that I wouldn't have issues now. I was just 9(!!) years old. I remember after that having a brief stint of only eating 1/2 a sandwich a day, or a can of tuna. But then it quickly went the other direction, and now I have built in desires to eat for no reason at all, except for emotional reasons.
I think that food issues are VERY complex, and it really comes down to the person. Now I'm not as sensitive as I was when i was 9, and I wouldn't be phased as much.

Like Jean's mom, above, mine's been on a diet for at least my entire 38-year life, and weight comes into the conversation at some point every single time I see her. Usually, *her* weight is the subject, now that she seems to have noticed a direct relationship between her talking about my weight and my telling her to fuck off, and the script is always the same: she really shouldn't be eating this, because she's gotten *so* fat, blah, blah, blah . . . My mother is flabby, sure, but she's also 71; it's allowed. And when she does succeed in getting her weight below where it is now (usually through really stupid, dangerous means), she (a) looks emaciated, and (b) still thinks she's fat. I've tried telling her that if she did a little resistance training she'd both lose weight and feel better overall, but she claims she can't. Whatever. Basically, she's eaten whatever she wants for as long as I've known her, she's always felt guilty for it, and she's always been thinner than she thinks she is. Fun!

Not surprisingly, my mother's misperception of her own body also extends to mine. Whenever she buys me clothes, she gets them two or three sizes too big, and usually in tentlike shapes. She clearly thinks of me as obese, when in fact I'm an overweight but decidedly hourglassy 14/16 (at 5'7"). She can't help commenting on my size every time she sees me, but she's been trying to be nicer about it, which for her means saying, "You look like you've lost weight!" To which my standard reply is--since I invariably haven't--"No, I've just never been as fat as you think I am." She still doesn't get that this is not a welcome topic of conversation, regardless of what size I am.

I was a skinny kid, because I was an extremely picky eater, so it wasn't until I hit puberty that I started becoming what I was told was chubby--in retrospect, I was totally normal. From that point on, though, Mom encouraged me to join her in whatever nutty diet she was doing. So although it's hard to pinpoint my *first* diet, it was probably when I was about ten.

Fortunately, having seen my mother being ridiculous about her weight for so long, I've rarely tried to go on a diet since leaving home at 17. I try to eat more *healthily* from time to time, recognizing that three desserts and no vegetables does not a balanced diet make, but when I've actually tried to lose weight, it's always been exercise-driven. I call it the All Things Being Equal Diet, whereby I endeavor to eat pretty much the same as always but move around more.

My reasoning is that I spend 80 percent of my waking time sitting on my ass at a computer, moving nothing but my hands, and I pretty much eat whatever I want (see above under "three desserts a day"). So the fact that I--and this goes for my brother, too, who's more pear-shaped but just as sedentary, and who also eats restaurant food for more than half of his meals--have not become obese in spite of this shows that I have brilliant genes. Therefore, all I should have to do to lose weight is add regular exercise and subtract maybe one dessert per day. And basically, this works, except that I really hate exercise, and I really like dessert.

Since I try not to demonize specific foods, but rather to mind my portions and increase variety from time to time, I don't feel like I've ever really been on a diet as an adult. My weight's not where I'd like it to be (holy moly--I went bra shopping yesterday? which *totally* sucked), but I know that it's not there because I just don't care about it as much as I care about other things. If my size starts being really important to me at some point, exercise will move up the priority list, and cake will necessarily move down.

So, to get back to the original topic, I was certainly *aware* of diets when I was a kid, and they influenced my eating because they influenced my mom's cooking, but I never *wanted* to be on them, and I think my exposure to chronic, unneccesary dieting at an early age led to my having a realistic and basically healthy relationship with food.

My mother never really dieted, but she was really into telling ME when I was overweight. In fact, to this day I dread visiting her because I know her first thoughts/comments will be about my weight. I am HAPPY the way I am. Sure, I'd love to be thinner, look better in that pair of jeans, but I'm not really worried about it. Isn't that what mothers should be concerned with...happiness of their child?

I was a tall kid. Bigger than most girls...but not fat. Just bigger. I was 5 feet tall by the time I was 10. And I used to believe I was overweight. I look back at my 13-year-old self and realize I was just fine. In fact, better than fine. I looked 17 when I was 13! I never went through a leggy, coltish phase. I was always well-proportioned.

But body image is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you are fat, you sort of grow into what you see yourself as. In college I was horridly depressed when I gained FIVE pounds. And I still was a size 10! Makes me mad now that my mother started me on this negative vision of myself. To be worried about my size.

I am determined NOT to do that to my daughter.