I'd done so much work on my body image to this point, and it was something I was mostly able to keep in the background. My knee-jerk reaction was to feel ashamed and embarrassed. I figured I'd embarrassed her by dancing in public - a rite of passage as a mom. I did a little shimmy and was met with a horrified expression on my kid's face. One day, while out grocery shopping with my 6-year-old, a great song played in the store. I'm raising them to understand that bodies come in all shapes and sizes and that their weight and appearance have nothing to do with their worth. I never wanted my daughters to feel about their own bodies the way I did about mine or to be focused on trying to change their bodies to fit a cultural standard. Thinness was a prize and I was determined to win. For months at a time, I'd subsist on a highly restrictive, low-calorie diet and work out twice daily. While working at "People" magazine in my 20s, I continued to be critical of my body. As a result, I was hell-bent on staying thin. As a competitive equestrian in those days, being fat was pretty much a cardinal sin. Being a teenager in the 1990s - an era when diet culture thrived and body-shaming was the norm in pop culture - didn't do my body image any favors. I had never really given it a lot of thought before this comment, but it marked a shift and started me down a road of body struggles that would continue for decades. Regardless of my size, this was the first time I can recall anyone talking about my body. She poked at my body, giggled, and declared, "Fat thighs." I was actually a thin little kid who just happened to be bigger than her. My friend looked down at her legs and then looked at mine. My friend and I sat on the community-pool deck, dangling our feet into the water and counting down the minutes until the adult swim ended so we could resume our underwater handstand contests. In the summer of 1987, I was 7 years old. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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