Blog # 9

How was the issue of food and weight discussed in your home? Was it ever a control issue or a point of conflict for you? How much influence do you believe your family has on the way you feel about food and your body today?

My family never had any kind of big issues related to food or weight. I still remember my mother feeding us different types of meals on a regular basis which was an example of a perfect diet. My mother is a health and environment teacher in a local school and my father is a district education officer who monitors hundreds of schools within a district. Being a health teacher my mother definitely knew all about a healthy and balanced diet. Inside a house, I used to eat whatever my mother used to cook and those diets were fresh and healthy. However, my parents were not satisfied with my body image. I was a typical skinny high school guy. My friends often called me a “stick” as I was the tallest and skinny guy among the all classmates. This skinny body image sometimes had a negative impact on me. I often had a discussion with my mother about this matter and I used to ask her, “why I couldn’t gain some weight and be a muscular guy?” This was definitely a negative influence of media and society’s so called “glamorous body image”. However, I never thought I had any kind of eating disorders or unhealthy diet. My parents believed that obesity brings a lot of health problems and it’s better to be a skinny guy, yet a healthy person rather than being a fat person. My family always focused on a healthy diet lifestyle rather than delicious food eating lifestyle which is often a big problem among all Nepalese people who often eat spicy, hot and oily foods. My parents never had any kind of restrictions over the foods that me and my sister ate. However, my parents considered binge eating and skipping meals as an unhealthy eating habit. Those family beliefs and teachings still influence my eating habits. My mother still calls me sometimes just to check what kind of foods I am eating. She often gets afraid of all those junk foods that we eat here in the United States and tells me to cook my own meal at home. So, somehow I believe that we are all influenced by those eating habits that we practiced in our childhood and some habits imposed by our parents during our early childhood.