I was 9 when I started my first diet. I was tall for my age, and as an early developer, I felt fat and ugly. My mum was a member of a local slimming club, so I pored over her trusty photocopy listing the calorie count of most popular foods and devised my own 1000 calories a day, far too little for a girl on the verge of puberty.
It has taken me three decades to repair the damage done to my body confidence and my disordered relationship with eating. For this reason, I have been determined to break the cycle of toxic diet culture with my own daughter. Many parents of tweens expect that their daughters will likely hit a confidence blip once they hit their teen years. They may even be readying themselves for that ‘challenging time’—but many girls start to lose their self-confidence much earlier than 13 years old, and as parents, our action is required several years before then.
