7 strategies to raise body-confident kids in an era of slimmed-down celebs
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Here's what parents can actually do to raise body-confident kids in the GLP-1 era, from experts who work with eating disorders every day.
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I’ve struggled with body image for as long as I can remember. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, when women survived on grapefruit, SlimFast and diet pills. I never taped “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” to the refrigerator, but only because it already kept a permanent room in my head.
It was an era when “heroin chic” was the ideal body, and Nicole Richie got told, to her face, that she looked “thicker,” with the helpful note that it might cost her roles. Jessica Simpson, Hilary Duff, Kate Winslet, and Renee Zellweger, all of them healthy and average-sized, got raked over the coals for being fat. Victoria Beckham and the Olsen twins, meanwhile, were famous less for what they made than for how little space they took up.
Then I had a daughter, and the stakes rearranged themselves. Those sideways messages are the ones I actually worry about handing down.
That’s especially true now, when girls can open Instagram and see celebrity bodies contracting in real time . The advent of GLP-1s have helped a lot of people manage legitimate health conditions, but it’s an open secret that Hollywood starlets are using them to become as slim, or slimmer, than the supermodels of my youth. The conversations about celebrities like Ariana Grande pick up more or less where the 90s left off. Eating disorders are on the rise, and experts say this particular moment risks pushing those numbers higher.
None of us can mute the culture. We can decide what happens at our own kitchen tables. So I asked three people who do this work every day for the specific, repeatable habits that help raise kids who feel at home in their bodies. Sarah Callazzo is the founder of the eating disorder helpline Love, A Stranger, and is in recovery herself. Golee Abrishami, PhD, is VP of Clinical Care at Octave Therapy. Sally Fleck, PhD, is clinical director at the Eating Recovery Center in Plano, Texas. Here’s what they told me.
1. Start with your own body story
Before you fix a single word you say to your kid, listen to the ones you say about yourself. “Kids notice the comments we think are harmless,” Callazzo says. “‘I look terrible in this,’ ‘I need to lose weight,’ ‘I shouldn’t eat that,’ criticizing ourselves in photos. If they see themselves in you, they may start to wonder what those comments mean about them, too.”
The good news for those of us hauling around a couple decades of baggage is that the bar isn’t perfection. “You do not have to be fully healed to parent differently,” Fleck says. “You can interrupt old patterns out loud.” She suggests saying it plainly, something like, “I grew up hearing a lot of unhelpful messages about bodies, and I’m trying to speak differently now.”
Callazzo calls this letting your kid see you’re human. You can have a hard day, apologize for a comment, and ask your child what they need from you in the moment. Kids don’t need us to model perfection. They need to watch us navigate the imperfect part with some grace.
2. Go for body respect over body love
The standard body-positivity script asks kids to love their bodies, which is a lovely idea and a tall order for anyone, let alone a 10-year-old whose body is changing by the month. Fleck reframes the goal. “Not every child is going to love their body every day,” she says. “A more realistic goal is body respect. My body deserves care even when I feel uncomfortable in it.”
In practice, that means moving the compliments off of appearance. Callazzo’s swaps are easy to start this week. Try “you look so happy” in place of “you look so skinny.” Praise your kid’s kindness, humor, creativity, or strength. Give them language for boundaries too, like “we don’t need to comment on someone else’s body” and “you never have to explain what you’re eating or why.” The work is teaching them that their body doesn’t have to look any particular way to deserve care and a full life.
3. Make food neutral
Every expert I spoke with circled back to the way we talk about food. Abrishami puts it plainly: “There is no ‘bad’ food or ‘junk’ food. Broccoli and cookies are both just food.” She points to the loaded phrases most of us don’t clock as they leave our mouths, like “I need to be good today,” “I can’t have that,” or “I’m going to earn this later.” Kids absorb that scoring system even when the words aren’t aimed at them.
This is the challenge for many of us who grew up surrounded by diet culture, because “I was so bad this weekend” is basically the mother tongue. Instead of “I was so bad,” Callazzo suggests, “I really enjoyed that meal.” Retire the arrangement where dessert is the prize for finishing the vegetables. Fleck says we should drop the moral vocabulary entirely, including words like good and bad and clean and cheat, and instead point to everything food actually is: nourishment, culture, pleasure, comfort, celebration, and connection.
The catch is that this only works if the whole house speaks the same language. “It’s difficult to tell a child that all foods can have a place while they hear the adults around them skipping meals, apologizing for dessert, or talking about ‘working off’ dinner,” Callazzo says. To reframe food for your kid, you have to reframe it for yourself.
4. Rethink what exercise is for
Here is where I get to give myself credit. I teach Xformer Pilates, and I never tie a single rep to earning dessert or getting bikini-ready. I teach movement as a way to get strong enough to be inconvenient to mess with. (Ok, also health, longevity, and overall happiness, but I digress.)
That framing turns out to have clinical backing. Fleck counts compulsive exercise and working out to “make up for” eating among the red flags she watches for, and Abrishami flags the “I’ll earn this later” logic as one of the loaded scripts kids inherit. For families with a kid in sports or dance, Fleck draws an especially useful line. Separate performance from body size wherever you can. “Strong, fueled, rested, and emotionally steady are much better indicators of health than smaller or more controlled.” Movement is supposed to add something to a kid’s life. When it starts working like subtraction, it’s worth a closer look.
5. Protect the family meal
Family dinners often get talked up as protective, and the experts back that up, though not for the reason you’d guess. Proximity isn’t the active ingredient. “What actually makes mealtimes so beneficial is that they are predictable, low-pressure opportunities for connection,” Abrishami says. Kids learn that food shows up on a reliable rhythm, without a fight.
What quietly wrecks that is turning the table into a performance review. Comments about portions, praise for eating “well,” pressure to clean the plate, all of it tells a kid that someone is watching and grading. “When kids feel like they’re being evaluated, they start looking for signals from other people to help them decide how to eat and how to look,” Abrishami says. Her single best tip is simple and straightforward: Talk about anything at the table other than food and bodies. Ask about their day, a friend, something they’re fired up about. Connection is the protective factor. Everything else just supports it.
6. Build a filter instead of a ban
You cannot bubble-wrap a child against every “what I eat in a day” video and celebrity before-and-after. Both Callazzo and Fleck make the case for teaching kids to interrogate the feed rather than pretending you can delete it. When something questionable scrolls by, Callazzo suggests skipping the lecture and asking instead. “How did that make you feel?” “Do you think we’re getting the whole story?” “Would you want a friend comparing themselves to this?” You’re handing them a filter they can use when you’re not in the room.
Teach them to identify the machinery of monetized diet culture instead of swallowing the message, Fleck says. And both experts give kids explicit permission to protect their peace, which is a practice kids and adults alike can benefit from. Unfollow the account. Skip the video. Leave the conversation. We teach kids to be careful about who they let into their lives. Their feeds deserve the same bouncer.
7. Look for signs of disordered eating
Reinforcing body positivity at home is the daily work. Knowing when something has tipped into a problem is the other half of the job. Keep an eye out for rigidity, Fleck says. A healthy habit has some give. A disordered pattern comes with rules a kid feels they cannot break. The red flags parents tend to miss are the ones the culture applauds: sudden “discipline,” the cutting out of whole food groups, a new fixation on ingredients. “The question I want parents to ask is not just, is this habit healthy,” she says. “It’s ‘What happens if my child cannot do it today?’ If the answer is panic, guilt, secrecy, or distress, that is important clinical information.”
Watch for meals getting skipped, foods that were fine last year suddenly off the table, distress when plans change around food, secretive or hidden eating, exercising while sick or hurt, and pulling away from anything social that involves a meal. If the behavior is persistent, escalating, secretive, or bleeding into school, friendships, sleep, or mood, loop in a pediatrician or an eating-disorder-informed clinician. A handful of signs warrant urgent medical attention, among them fainting, chest pain, purging, or rapid weight loss. You do not have to diagnose anything first. As Fleck puts it, the threshold can simply be: this feels bigger than what we can hold at home.
Callazzo wants parents to start the conversation the way they’d approach puberty, before there’s a crisis. “The goal isn’t to have one perfect conversation,” she says. “The goal is to open a door they know they can walk back through.” Her own helpline fields calls from parents, not just kids, which is worth remembering the first time you notice something and feel your stomach drop.
If there’s one thing to get from all this, it comes from Callazzo, and it’s the permission slip I wish someone had handed my mother. “This is your first time going through life, too.” You will say the wrong thing. You’ll grumble aloud when your go-to jeans are suddenly tighter. The repair, the out-loud correction, the willingness to go find help: This is the part your kid actually learns from.
My daughter is going to grow up in a world that profits from her feeling too big. The least I can do is make sure that the loudest voice she hears about her body, for as long as I’ve got the mic, is one that never once mentions its size.
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