Dove Campaign for Beauty

I stumbled upon the Dove campaign for real beauty yesterday. I thought the videos Evolution and the others involving younger girls were very powerful. I got chills watching! We so owe it to our girls to tell them how beautiful they are. If all we talk about is how fat our thighs are and how this is a bad food or if you eat chocolate you'll get fat, what message are we giving our kids. At a minimum we make them feel guilty for wanting something sweet, or salty. There should be no guilt in wanting something sweet-ever try formula or breast milk? It's sweet and it is our very first taste. We are born, we cry, we get something sweet. If we continue to be dictators of our child's diet and enforce food rules, we are only increasing a risk for our kids developing an eating disorder- yup, boys are starting to obsess about their weight too! Babies have the ability to listen to their hunger and satiety cues- ever try to force more milk into an infant when they were no longer hungry? It doesn't go very well! As children grow, they can and do continue to honor their hunger. If they sometimes make a poor choice, well, that is all in the learning curve. It is better for them to learn to listen to their intuition now. If they learn to ignore their intuition by well meaning parents, it can and often does lead to trouble later in life.

Just in case you were wondering, that's what I do for my clients. I help them to get back to eating intuitively, we have to cut through the layers of parents, society, spouses, etc. It's not easy, but once they work through it they feel tremendous RELIEF! Ahhhh!