Teenagers, Body Image and Eating Disorders

My daughter just turned 13, and, as a parent, I have to think very carefully about my kids' future. Since I have started to get more involved in sports in the last few years, I have come across so many cases of eating disorders and body image issues, especially in teenage girls. I have also come across kids who have amazing potential in sport but they absolutely despise doing any training.

In this post, I discuss my view on how to tackle long-term health and fitness issues in children in general, with teenagers, specifically, in mind.

Children, to a great extent up to the age of 11 or 12, do not usually care about their body image, and they certainly wouldn't care less about whether they're healthy or not. It is, therefore, very important to start instilling certain habits in them at an early age, knowing that these habits will probably last them a lifetime.

However much children, especially teenagers, show an indifference towards their parents' behaviours and attitudes, children usually take to heart every action the parents take. These can be as little as how they walk and talk, to more subtle aspects in life, such as attitudes towards body image.

For most parents with children who are, or about to become, teenagers, we have grown up in a rather unfortunate environment when it comes to healthy habits of eating, and we have lived, and still are living, through a period of celebrating people not for their achievements, but for more trivial things such as simply being vain, vulgar, or both, with no "real" achievements in their lives.

Nutrition science has developed quite significantly over the past few years, with a lot of the theories from the 70s until the early 2000s just considered to have been more detrimental to health than beneficial, or at the very least irrelevant. Without going into much boring details, the view now is that one needs to eat a balanced diet, which includes "all" the macronutrients, meaning eating protein, carbs and fat, but being aware of when they're eating and what they are eating depending on how much energy they need throughout the day.

A balanced diet will include some foods that we have always considered as "healthy", such as vegetables and lean meats, but it should also include carbohydrates and fats. Not all carbohydrates and fats are created equal, though, and having fruit all the time can have its negative effects as well. It may not be as straight forward to get this right initially, but we are changing mentalities that have grown up with certain misconceptions over decades, so it is normal to take some time to adapt. BUT, when it comes to our children's health, we need to adapt quickly for their own sake!

As I said in my introduction here, eating disorders and body image issues are becoming more common in teenagers than we realise. This is not limited to girls, by the way, but it is definitely more common in them than in boys. I'm not going to go on about the images of celebrities being flashed at our kids all the time, since there are already too many people talking about this, but I'm trying to offer a solution. Yet, it is important to analyse what our kids are exposed to in order to understand how to tackle it.

If we look at the celebrated people in our mainstream media, most female celebrities have a very specific image, with one aspect that always seems to be important (and mostly mentioned) and that is their weight, while male celebrities come in all shapes and sizes, with some just being emphasised as fit rather than thin, but most are not even mentioned for their body image but for certain behaviours. And there lies the first differentiator between what males and females perceive as the image to aim for, and the main reason behind the problems of body image and eating disorders in girls more than boys.

While we cannot change the whole society's attitudes overnight, we need to start doing something about it at home. As a start, we need to genuinely believe in certain things ourselves before trying to pass these beliefs to our children, the first of these beliefs is that "strong" and "fit" is beautiful and not "thin"! We need to start talking more at home about men and women with real achievements and celebrate them for their hard work without even thinking about or mentioning what they look like! A female astronaut, a male pianist, a female cyclist, a male philanthropist, etc. Then, when it comes to discussing body image, we need to look at proper athletes and see how they have reached their athletic greatness rather than looking at the body images of some rock star with drug problems and eating issues. I cannot emphasise enough how crucial this is to the long-term health of our children.

Being fit and strong comes with all kinds of healthy attitudes towards life, in general. One usually cannot be fit and strong if they are eating or drinking the wrong things or eating at the wrong times. It also means that there will be attention to recovery, which includes proper sleep. If there is a tendency towards obsessive behaviours, instead of having problems such as anorexia or bulimia, the obsessions may turn towards making sure the body is getting all the right nutrients at the right times.

Being fit and strong also means avoiding illness, which means that one needs to avoid being "underweight" as much as avoiding being overweight. So, if there is another tendency towards obsessing about weight, the obsession may turn towards body composition instead, making sure the muscle mass, fat and water numbers are in check, rather than the absolute weight.

We know that with eating disorders, people tend to not see their bodies in the actual image that people see them in, which drives really thin people to still go for extreme measure to get even thinner. And when people see them and make comments about how "good" they look, they believe that they're doing the right thing. I have also come across some athletes who went through down periods because they got comments about how "healthy" they looked, because they believed that it meant that people were telling them that they were becoming fat if they said such a thing!

As parents, we need to be extremely careful how we address our own issues as well, because they will always have an effect on our kids. If, for example, I have a weight issue, I cannot possibly keep saying that I am going on a diet! Going on a diet is a wrong idea in itself, and extremely unhealthy, not just for our own bodies, but also for the mentality and attitude we are creating in our children. A house that has different foods for different people (except for genuine medical reasons) is probably more likely to end up with issues of weight and eating problems. We need to make it a generally normal practice that everybody eats the same things, but maybe with different quantities. An adult, by default, will probably consume more than a child. Eating the same food as everyone else in the family should be the very basic starting point.

The second thing to make sure we need to take care of is not to delve into how fat or thin someone looks, and we have to absolutely refrain from commenting on our child's weight! If weight is part of a more complete analysis, it should be ok, but certainly not on its own.

The third aspect that is really sensitive is commenting on how our child's body looks. Teenagers' bodies, especially in girls, go through very fast and continuous changes all the time. We cannot possibly say to a child that they've put on weight, they look fat, or any such comments, but we need to make sure that they are just staying fit and healthy. There is fat that is going to appear on a teenagers body at some point that doesn't have to do anything with their fitness or health. It is inevitable. On the other hand, if a child start to get ill too often, then we need to start rethinking their sleeping patterns, their eating habits, how much sport or active hours per day they have, how much screen time they have, etc. and try to balance these in a more healthy fashion.

We now come to the important issue of sports and children. As part of having a long-term healthy life and healthy attitude towards life, children need to grow up with some form of sport. The biggest mistake I have come across over the years, even since I was a tiny child, has always been parents pushing their kids to become "champions"! This is the most unhealthy attitude towards sport that can be, and it will almost certainly put off your child from doing any sport as soon as they have the choice. Some children like it, but most don't!

It is only enough for us to look at sports that young athletes prosper in to see how detrimental this attitude can be towards the long-term physical and mental health of a person. Tennis is one prime example of such pressure put on children by parents. Examples of personal and social issues of young tennis players who grow up in such an environment are aplenty, as well as examples from other sports such as gymnastics and swimming.

As parents, we need to really look at sport as a long-term tool that will benefit our children to live a long and healthy life, rather than a tool for fame and fortune. The only way to make sure a child looks at sport in a healthy way is to make sure that the child has fun and doesn't see it as a chore. Of course, it is normal that children will complain from time to time about not wanting to do it, etc. but this is different from having to push them beyond their mental limits. If you see your child not enjoying the sport they're in, even after trying to stick with it for some time, just try to make them do another sport and be sure they enjoy it! If a person enjoys the activity, they are much more likely to stick to it than if they are always suffering mentally (physical suffering is usually part of sport anyway).

When the child is doing the sport that "they" are enjoying (not the one that "you" as a parent enjoys), then if they are good enough and have the base of improving, they will usually see their own potential when they win against their peers in little training competitions, and if they are keen to pursue this more, then you should encourage it, but if this competition starts to affect them mentally and they start to become less inclined to go to training or get too stressed, then you need to back off pushing them towards that irrelevant goal, since the goal always needs to be that they do sport for fun and not to become champions. Always think about how this will affect them 40 or 50 years from now, and not just 5 or 10 years from now.

Raising children is difficult, to say the least, and teenage years are a period that shape a person's mentality like no other period, since it sets the cornerstones of behaviours during adulthood, which are much more difficult to change later on. Telling a teenage child what to do never works; you just need to remind yourself how you were with your parents as a teenager. All we can do as parents is lead by example, and make sure we act as proper role models to our kids the way we want them to grow up.

Good luck to us all!