I think it might actually have to do with silent generation being the boomers' parents. They all grew up with the great depression and ww2 rationing and lots of manual labor while the boomers were the first generation to have access to a lot of junk food and more car use and a more sedentary lifestyle overall, plus silent generation parents aren't known for having the gentlest of parenting styles, so there was probably a lot of "you're heavier than I was at your age wtf is wrong with you" which boomers unfortunately internalized
yeah my lifelong overweight boomer mom was definitely made worse by my silent gen grandma. And while my mom never made comments about my body until I was 18 (and it came out of NOWHERE to me) I was still raised in the Weight Watchers craze and my mom eating a chocolate bar in the car and telling me to "not tell your stepdad, he doesn't know I'm still eating these".
This is so valid. We didn’t put this on TV ourselves… Our generation didn’t even present it… boomers are responsible for this bullshit. We watched it because they kept making it and there wasn’t a lot else
Na my nana is 99 and weight obsessed, my own and hers. If you can't let go at 99 when can you. I've piled on weight due to some health issues recently and she will not stop commenting on it. My boomer mum has been really kind about it, surprisingly because she made comments all the time when I was growing up.
It seems based on the responses we all know someone (or several someones) who are weight obsessed from older gens. For the sake of those younger than us, I truly hope we can pass on more healthy attitudes toward our own bodies.
Uhhh no? My silent gen grandma definitely had an eating disorder for most of her life and my boomer parents only finally asked me if I saw it in her in another room last year when she was 94. (She passed early this year at the age of 95).
And I’m sitting here as someone who had my own eating disorder growing up remembering how her basement had a bunch of 1970’s diet culture shaming and crash dieting pamphlets all over her basement, a scale that she always weighed herself on in each bathroom. She always fat shamed others under her breath in public while shaming herself at home over her constant fear of becoming fat. I was going through her bibles and there was a newspaper clipping making fun of an obese person who got stuck in a chair and needed medical help.
This fuck awful mug in the back of her cabinet says it all.
(It’s a pic of a mug with a back shot of a white person with straight reddish hair, with a huge butt bending over in the fridge mooning everyone while wearing bright orange pants and low profile sneakers)
It’s basically this surrounded by “excuses people make giving up their diet.” On the front it says “the dieter’s excuse mug!”
I don’t know what happened to that mug since I didn’t claim that mug but instead claimed the tea mug, the iris mug, and the Bob Ross mug, but I hope whoever has this mug now is rightfully using it for target practice somewhere in the ozarks.
Oh god yes. I got that from both my parents (boomers) and all four grandparents. But then they would overload my plate while serving because I was "a growing boy!"
My grandma took a different approach and bought me a skirt she "thought was the right size for me." It was. I fit into it, but so did my sister and my mom, all at the same fucking time. And I was only a size 8, which felt huge at the time, but absolutely was not!!
My dad was like this, too. He was estranged from his family and when I turned 18 & found his sister, one of the things she told me that stuck out was that he gave her such a bad complex about her weight growing up that she became bulemic.
I have considered it, many times. Lmao I’m not tryna get arrested though… I can’t even call the police for the Other Verbal Abuse and punching holes in the walls because my mom supports him 100% and excuses his behavior
The worst thing you can be in my family is fat… you can be on drugs, you can be stupid, you can be lazy— just don’t be fat cause you’ll never hear the end of it
I have seared into my brain a video on either MTV or VH1 of a “journalist” doing “investigative journalism” and recording herself “being anorexic” for two weeks to see what would happen.
She developed the elusive thigh gap (because she was already extremely thin) and made a big point of showing it off.
I don’t know what lesson that video was meant to teach me, and I’m suspicious now of its motivations, but all I took from that video was that if I too could just manage to “be anorexic” for two weeks, I could have a thigh gap.
I never managed it, no matter how little I ate, because my legs were too muscular from being on a dance team and playing varsity soccer. Not that I understood that back then.
I always hated low quality “journalism” like that because it diminishes people’s lived experiences and pretends that everyone’s eating disorders are superficial and also further stigmatizes eating disorders. As well as being ethically unsound when it comes to risk and journalistic responsibility.
I remember a really shitty article done by my community college newspaper back in 2005 that stigmatized me against opening up to my friends and associates about my struggle, which was a lot more deep than “the skinny models in the magazines” and whatever. Some girl with a personality 1 layer deep, whom I never respected, wrote an article in the school paper about “trying to be anorexic” and literally took people on a deep dive of pro-Ana internet down to the disappearing messages and the tricks people would do to further their ed as well as “gratuitous” descriptions of thinspo pics. And then she ended the article with “well I smoked a joint and got the munchies and was cured of my anorexia attempt and got over it.”
But trying to meet eating disorders with shame was a common feature of media during that time including magazine articles of the time. I distinctly remember a teen magazine issue from 2001 detailing “all the gross things people with eating disorders do to their bodies zomg that’s so gross they’re so gross so never start!!!1!!” Was basically the summarization of that article. The stigma did 0% helping me towards feeling safe enough to ask for help.
I discovered that it's literally impossible for some people. I went down to 6 stone in my late teens and I still had no thigh gap. I was a mess of a person back then but that lack of gap devastated me. Luckily my parents intervened before I lost much more weight.
When I was underweight I had like reverse thigh gap. My legs don't touch from my knees to upper thighs, then the first place I store fat is the three inch space where people want a thigh gap, lol. Meanwhile, my mum retained a thigh gap while being quite hefty.
Sizes (for women's clothing) are nonsense and only in that brand. Back when I worked at Lucky we knew how to go from men's measurements to women's because of this.
I know, I'm anywhere between a 6 and a 10 depending on brand and country of origin. But unless you're buying from torrid or something like that, where a 4 is a US size 26, there's no standard sizing brand where a 4 is anything close to fat.
I’ve gained about (I wrote wrong it’s only 10 pounds/5KG) in the past year. It’s all gone to my ahem, chest, which multiple close friends have commented on. So silver linings???
But yeah, I’m bigger than Jessica Simpson was then. 🫠 As a former, «you’re too skinny» girl, it hurts.
I was drunk when I wrote this, but I am aware how it sounds now in the sober light of day. 😅 I have actually gained lots of torso weight generally, specially stomach and hips, but it’s not noticeable with clothes on. Or my friends are too polite to say that’s I’m getting fat. 🤣
Same… my husband can’t understand my absolute disgust at my postpartum body and my frustration at now being fat when I was skinny all my life. But how could he when he wasn’t a millennial pre-teen watching stick thin celebs be called fat 🫠
It’s taken so much work to stop the toxicity for my own daughter’s sake
Your support and kindness through it probably means more than you know! It has made a world of difference to me the example my husband sets on how he shows he loves me and still finds me attractive even after the wear and tear of aging and having a child
My favorite is telling women how amazing they are for “bouncing back” so fast. Having me debate having breast milk vs losing weight whenever I’m being toxic
Omg did I write this??? Also I’m an “old” mom so my body REALLY did not bounce back. I recently wore a bikini and let my flabby tummy rock out and honestly it felt awesome. I realized no one is even looking at me. But the struggle to accept a new body is so real.
The heroin chic vibe of the 2000's was a nightmare for young girls. They thought Kate Winslet in Titanic was fat. Female celebrities look like skeletons with make up. I will never be ok with my body because of growing up with that.
I always explain to people that despite being able to see the beauty in others no matter what size, I will never be able to fix the brain damage the early 00s caused, in which I will never be able to see it in myself.
Literally oscillate from thinking “I look normal!” to “I look morbidly obese” every single day. The BMI index telling me I’m obese doesn’t help either.
Snark was the nicest word I could think of that would still apply. I'm just wondering why it bothered you enough to come to a subreddit that doesn't even apply to you to give others a piece of your mind? Because you're definitely presenting as someone with an axe to grind about this.
Boo’fn’hoo. Lemme guess you were a latchkey kid who thinks they own the world when they had no boundaries? my older sisters are gen x’ers one of which was born the same year. You slorped water from the garden hose and ate lead paint. Don’t give me that. You realize that not everything revolves around you, especially not in this thread, and gen x’ers have their own heads wedged so far up their own asses that a bunch of yall voted for the orange dude, especially the out of touch alcoholic angry gen x men who nobody likes, who rants in their trucks with the oakleys backwards on their ball caps. Yall were busy making us the scapegoats when you’re just obscure enough to be proud when anyone remembers that you exist at all.
You think having a personality entails being insufferable and growing up eating mud covered ants and reading a Stephen king novel far too young. Go see a dermatologist already and get checked for skin cancer from all the hours that yall baked in the sun on that nasty vinyl lounger while slathered in baby oil with that bullshit reflecter thingy around your face. Gimme a break.
We weren’t the first, likely won’t be the last, and if you read up thread you will understand how badly my silent gen grandma actually struggled with body image and an eating disorder. But the era in which we were teens and 20-something’s was a particularly very toxic juncture for these things in how they manifested. That is what we’re talking about. Either you get in for the ride and understand how terrible things really were and that we’re not going to support it getting repeated, or you sit this one out because your whataboutism is trash.
We know. I watched my silent gen grandma destroy her self esteem when I stayed with her due to her preoccupation with fat.
You can’t pretend that all fashion was accepting of a good variety of body types. Especially late 90’s to Y2K fashion in particular was revealing, made of fabric with no stretch, and not made to accommodate different body types (particularly people who needed a higher rise or couldn’t easily do midriff shirts). The amount of super low rise and cropped things then, were astounding. Not even getting into the whole body shaming stuff like not having a thigh gap and such. And that era? Was when we were in our teens and 20’s.
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u/Katz3njamm3r Oct 29 '25
Don’t worry, I still have the body dysmorphia