San Diego, California (CNN) — Welcome to 2010. What is your New Year’s resolution? Are you planning on investing more money into the annual $40 billion dieting industry? If so, please think again.
As we start our workweek, many of us are looking in the mirror and saying “Yuck. I feel fat, uncomfortable and need to go on a diet.”
Dieting and the language of “fat” have become so normal that we don’t think twice before we say, “I have to go on a diet, I have gained so much weight.”
If we are parents of teenagers, we may as well be saying to them, “Change yourself, fix your body. You’re not perfect and never will be.” Is this how we want to empower our youth?
You spend countless hours raising your child with the values of honesty, integrity and the importance of the work ethic. But if you are dieting and complaining about how fat you are, you could be putting your teenager at risk for an eating disorder. As a psychologist who has been treating eating disorders since 1985, I worry that there could be a connection between dieting parents and teenagers who develop anorexia or bulimia.
