Stop telling daughters about your diets and carbs, mothers warned

MIDDLE-CLASS mothers must stop talking about topics such as “clean eating” and cutting down on carbohydrates in front of their teenage daughters, a teacher at a leading girls’ school has warned.

Fionnuala Kennedy, the deputy head of the £18,000-a-year independent Wimbledon High School in south-west London, told parents that they must act as “role models” for their daughters who are likely to follow their lead.

“It’s difficult to advocate a rounded, healthy diet for your teen if you’ve cut out carbs and dairy yourself, or fre- quently refer to your desire to lose weight,” she told parents.

Ms Kennedy said she wrote to parents after watching Netflix drama To The Bone, which has been criticised for “glamorising anorexia”.

She said she was shocked by the “irresponsible” film, which she feared girls would watch and discuss with each other during the summer holidays.

“It is not just teenagers who feel under pressure, it is ingrained in all of us culturally,” she told The Daily Telegraph.

“It is very trendy – all the clean eating – those sorts of things. Our obsession to eat kale, not potatoes. But as a teenage girl your body needs carb and fat.”

Ms Kennedy said that the trend for “clean eating” is particularly popular among affluent women, since embracing that kind of lifestyle “comes with a certain price tag”.

She said that parents much watch which adjectives they use, and compliment their daughters by telling them, for example, that they look “strong” rather than “slim”.

Clean eating, the belief that there are health benefits from eating whole foods in their most natural state, has a number of celebrity backers, including Gwyneth Paltrow, the actress, whose website Goop promotes the practice.

Ms Kennedy advised parents to familiarise themselves with the films and television shows that their daughters were watching, and then try to talk about them with “as little prejudice as possible”.

She said: “It may be painful, but shutting our eyes to the painful things they are encountering is simply to ignore a problem waiting to happen.”

“We must engage and keep on talking. For surely the most powerful thing any of us can teach our young people is that real power lies always, always, in our voices, and not in our bodies.”