My sons preschool is running a curriculum at the moment called ‘Healthy Food – Healthy Bodies’. I think this is a great idea, they are encouraging the children to try different Fruit and Vegetables, take part in a different sport, running wheels day’s where they take part in races etc. Fantastic I think its such a great way to teach the children the importance of Health and Wellness. I picked my son up the other day and he wanted me to read him one of the books that the preschool have out about the human body. I got very excited about this! I’m a personal trainer, one of my favourite subjects is Human Biology! So we start reading about how food is digested…. Then to my horror in the book it talks about the importance of eating well to….’make your body look good’!
Why on earth would the author of this book want to encourage a child to think about how their body looks! Surely the writer should be educating the children on how food is fuel, that the body is an engine, that certain foods will make them feel good and make them strong, and that certain foods will make them feel bad and so those foods are treat foods only! A discussion about the way a childs body looks shouldn’t ever occur.
Not only could it potentially focus on the child on things they previously wouldn’t have noticed, who is to say that ‘thin’ is healthy? Who’s to say someone who is considered overweight isn’t healthy? Surely encouraging exercise or making healthy food choices should be for their overall health and wellness?
By even suggesting that a child should want to make their body look a certain way can ultimately lead to that child seeing only flaws in their bodies, and really this is what starts the dieting patterns, I spent years in my 20’s and early 30’s trying to get a certain weight, when I got there was I happy? Absolutely not, because my body still didn’t look like I envisaged it should…. Yes that’s right, I didn’t look like the vision of perfect which was at that time to me a model in a magazine! Because that’s what we were lead to believe was the vision of perfect! Hell we can now see these days that even those models don’t look like the pictures in the magazines thanks to the power of photoshop! You know why because I hadn’t taken into account my body shape… I was barely 50kgs ( I knew this because I weighed myself morning and night) and I still had a tummy? How could it not be flat? The models in the magazines I was reading had flat tums, something that was flat… my bum was never going to change because no matter what I did I was never going to change my body shape. Therefore, we should never discuss with a child the way their body looks, everyone has a different body shape, and no matter what you try to do to your body you are never going to change that shape.
Ultimately our discussion with our children needs to be about being fit and healthy! Lets stop the diet cycle, and encourage our children to love their bodies, to view it as a machine to assist them to achieve their goals, and to view food as a way to nourish their bodies to Health and Wellness!