Almond Moms Want Their Daughters to STARVE

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]For a lot of women, the first person who made us feel insecure about our bodies is unfortunately our mothers.

[00:00:06]>> It's just junk and it puts fat on your body.

[00:00:09]>> What? Bread?

[00:00:10]>> Yep. Bread. Yep. You know what? People who want to stay thin, they don't eat bread and pasta and rice. They just don't.

[00:00:18]>> So, I'm not going to do it because I want to eat, right?

[00:00:22]>> Okay.

[00:00:24]>> So, no bread in the house forever.

[00:00:26]>> Not in my house. The avocado is good, but the meat is I'm, you know, I'm highly saturated in fat. I mean, but it smells amazing.

[00:00:36]>> Yeah, it is. It's really good. That's why I got it.

[00:00:38]>> Fat food.

[00:00:40]>> Eat it.

[00:00:42]>> Oh, I am. Don't worry. Next time I see you eat something, you're fat.

[00:00:45]>> Didn't you? I didn't say you were fat.

[00:00:47]>> Fat food.

[00:00:48]>> I did not say you were fat.

[00:00:50]>> You implied it.

[00:00:50]>> I said your food was fat. It's fat food.

[00:00:55]>> Yeah.

[00:00:57]I'm using it for my chicken. Mind your own business. Such an old-fashioned, completely old view. It's not It's not It's not bad for you.

[00:01:08]>> I want you to leave me alone.

[00:01:10]>> I don't No, I'm trying to talk to you.

[00:01:12]You need to >> leave me alone. Please.

[00:01:13]>> You need to go on a calorie control diet and have lower cholesterol.

[00:01:16]>> Okay. You're getting too fat and your cholesterol is high, obviously.

[00:01:20]>> Okay. When we see videos of moms berating their daughters about their food choices or daughters going out to eat with their almond moms and panning over to their mom's plate with like two olives and a tomato or half a cucumber slice, they are all indicative of something that feels all too familiar for so many women. A lot of women learn to hate their bodies before their preffrontal lobe was even fully developed. They learned it in the kitchen. They learned it at the dinner table, at restaurants, at Thanksgiving.

[00:01:49]Maybe it was while you were getting dressed for school. A lot of us learned it by the way that our own mothers talked about their stomachs and their thighs and their own weight. I've talked a lot for years and years on this channel about how the media perpetuates thin supremacy, the propaganda is everywhere in television and in movies, in celebrity culture, fashion, beauty advertising, the that girl aesthetic, the Pilates body, the bounceback body, the snatched body. But before a lot of us had the language for media literacy, we had mothers. Let's discuss the dangerous epidemic of almond moms and why they're just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than the media.

[00:02:46]The term almond mom, of course, comes from that infamous clip from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills when Yolanda Hadid was on the phone in the hospital with her daughter Gigi Hadid. And Gigi told her that she was feeling weak, presumably because she was not eating enough. And Yolanda told her that she needed to just chew a few almonds really well because of course she had to keep her model physique.

[00:03:06]>> Hi, Mommy. How are you? I'm okay. I just woke up. How are you? I'm feeling really weak. I have like half a couple of almonds. Chew them really well because your your stomach is >> okay. Love you.

[00:03:21]>> And now almond mom is a shorthand for moms who are obsessed with diet culture and they often encourage their daughters to eat very little to stay thin.

[00:03:29]Important to note that when Gigi was younger, she expressed to her mom that she wanted to pursue volleyball. And her mother shut her down saying that volleyball was going to make her big and bulky and masculine and that modeling was a more feminine pursuit.

[00:03:43]>> Modeling is my job. Volleyball is my sport.

[00:03:46]>> So, their bodies are big and bulky and I mean they eat like like men. I wanted her to develop as a woman. I thought that my daughter was a lesbian. Each time Gigi would express to her that she was starving, that she wanted to eat, her mom would just shame her into starving herself.

[00:04:05]>> I'm so excited for the food. Pretty much all the food that we're eating is like a heart attack in a meal. It's like But it's going to be so good.

[00:04:12]>> It's good. You're going to have one one night of being bad, right?

[00:04:14]>> Yeah. I was actually really good this week.

[00:04:16]>> Yeah. And then you got to get back on your diet, though.

[00:04:18]>> I have to have a bite for good luck, though.

[00:04:20]>> Um but not too big. No, that's too big.

[00:04:22]The half of that. Gigi's in charge of her own diet. But to be on your best weight, >> the best weight, >> you got to make the right choices. This is this is you.

[00:04:34]>> You know what, Gigi? I think that's >> too many of us know Yolanda Hadids in real life. For many daughters, the almond mom is your mom or your auntie or your grandmother. Mothers have a closeness to their daughters that the media doesn't. A TV show can make you compare yourself. A Tik Tok can certainly plant insecurities in your mind. All of these things are true. But your mother is intimately there with you for very important times in your life.

[00:05:02]Your mother is there when your body is changing. She's there when you hit puberty. She's there when your hips widen, when your thighs are starting to get bigger, when your body stops looking like a little girl and starts looking like a young woman. And if she hasn't unlearned her own body hatred, guess what's going to happen? She's going to make your body feel like it's a problem.

[00:05:22]This is why so many girls at 15, 16, 17 years old are hearing family members tell them that they're getting chubby.

[00:05:29]You need to watch what you eat. You sure you want another plate? Like, are you sure about that? In chi, which is my native language in Ghana, they say, "Hey, which means you're fat, you're getting big." But in many cases, she's literally just not 10 years old anymore. She has thighs. She has curves, especially if she's a woman of color, she has curves.

[00:05:50]She has a post-pubescent body. But because so many adults compare girls to their preubescent self, now you just developing normally, oh, that's a problem. That's a failure. And so, a 17-year-old girl is made to feel fat because she doesn't have the same body that she had at 11. And then she grows up and she becomes 25, 30, 35. And her body continues to change because that's what bodies do. They change. Living things do in fact grow. I know what a concept. Like a plant as it matures, it grows. It gets taller, it gets wider.

[00:06:23]Animals also get wider as they mature.

[00:06:27]Human beings are not supposed to stay frozen in the body that they had before puberty. But if you were told at 17 that you were already too big, what happens when you turn 27 and you have the body of a 27year-old? You panic because you're like, "Oh my god, I'm so fat."

[00:06:44]Because when you were 17, you were fat.

[00:06:45]So if you were 17 and fat, then what are you at 27? Because somewhere in the back of your mind, the ideal body was the body that you had when you were a child, before you were even fully grown. And you then spend your adult life chasing a body that was never meant to last. And unless you actively commit to unlearning it, that voice is going to keep following you around. It'll follow you in the dressing room. When you can't fit into those same jeans that you used to wear when you were 15, 16, the same size, instead of just feeling like maybe I need a bigger size, it's like nope, I'm fat. It follows you into pregnancy and after you give birth to your child.

[00:07:24]Psychotherapist Susie Orbach, author of the 1978 book Fat is a Feminist Issue, wrote in a 2018 op-ed for the Guardian, quote, "Today, pre and postpartum moms can show considerable anxiety about their body self. So much so that the rhythm of early bonding is interrupted by rules and regulations rather than the getting to know of one's own body's capacities and the wishes of the baby.

[00:07:46]For many, the parenting websites with their contradictory and commercially led advice from recommendations for tummy tucks after your C-section to making a bespoke spreadsheet to track your feeding cycle have turned postpartum into a straight jacket in which getting into pre-reg is the goal. And the anxiety the mothering person might well feel will be inadvertently transmitted to their baby who will journey through life frightened of food and confused about their body self. A further tragedy. So so much of this starts with the way that mothers talk about their own bodies. When they're constantly saying, "I need to go on a diet. I'm so bad for eating this." They're constantly refusing dessert because they don't want to put on a few extra pounds. And if they do eat, they have to work it off immediately. A daughter sees that and hears that and learns that if her body gets too big, then she too has failed.

[00:08:37]She learns that eating is supposed to be suspicious and something to be negotiated. And then there's, of course, the even more direct version of mothers who make comments about their own daughter's bodies. I remember pinching my gut and just being so distressed at [ __ ] six that I had a gut and that I was so big and that I was fat and chubby and all the things that I remember like my mom saying. The problem with growing up with sometimes a transactional mother and a Caribbean mother at that because I'm Haitian is that we become obsessed at an early age with our image. We want to be whatever right looks like in our parents' head. And that often meant skinny. It's it's this learned hatred that we have for our body when it doesn't look a specific way that drives our self-esteem down into the ground.

[00:09:25]Everything that I remember my mom saying about image has something to do with a man. It's like, hey, no man's going to go for you if you have a gut like that.

[00:09:33]No man is going to go for you if you do this, do that. Everything has been centered around men. things my mother said Saturday that gave me a lifelong struggle with body image issues and disorders. As a toddler and a young child, she would pat my tummy and squish my cheeks and say, "I don't worry, it's just your baby fat. You'll slim down soon." My brothers would make fun of my weight and I would go to her in order to I guess tattle on them. She would just disagree with them and say, "Well, are they wrong?" Anytime we were out in public and it was just her and I and she saw a woman that was over a size eight, she would say, "Please promise me you won't ever let yourself get that big."

[00:09:57]She initiated a conversation about how I was getting too big with my ballet instructor in front of me whenever I was about 12 going through puberty and I was putting on a lot of muscle mass. He would tell me to suck in my gut at least six times a day. Not exaggerating on that. Told my teachers in elementary school that I wasn't allowed to have any sort of candy. So one day whenever we were getting candy as prizes in order for getting answers correct, I got an answer right and in front of the entire class, my teacher goes, "Oh, Katie, I'm sorry. Your mother won't let me give you candy. Even have a granola bar refused to buy me bigger jeans when I needed them." So much so that she would make me wear jeans that had holes in the thighs from my thighs rubbing together. My dad called me Quanzilla. You would pinch my side boob and say, "You need a bit of that." When she would pick me up from school on the way to dropping me off today's class, she would bring me fast food. And then as I was in the midst of eating it, she would say, "You really need to fix your diet."

[00:10:37]>> This is me when I was 11 years old. My mother used to tell me that I was fat.

[00:10:42]She used to tell me that I had a fat ass. She would point out other little girls who were stick figure thin and comment about their bodies, how beautiful they were, how perfect they were. She would ask me things like, "Don't you wish you look like her? Don't you want to lose weight to look like that?" I know in African culture, in Caribbean culture, this is very much normalized for moms and aunties, the whole family to pick your body apart, to fat shame you. People will always chalk it up to culture. Don't get offended.

[00:11:15]You shouldn't be offended because that's just that's just our culture. But let me hold your hand when I tell you this.

[00:11:21]Just because something is cultural does not make it okay. It's cultural. Racism is cultural. Supremacy is cultural.

[00:11:30]Capitalism is cultural. I can go on because what really is culture, but just a way of life, a way of thinking of being that has been normalized so much so that it's now embedded into a particular group. Many violent systems do in fact become normal and a part of the culture because they're simply just embedded into our everyday life. And of course, culture can be great. It can carry music and food and really spiritual customs, resistance even. But culture can also carry colonialism. It can also carry abuse, just absolving elders of any kind of accountability because you're supposed to just respect your elders and never talk back. And that brings me to my next point about how a lot of these ideas about the ways that we view our bodies, the ways that we are indoctrinated by our mothers in the media to constantly chase thinness is in fact rooted in colonialism.

[00:12:24]Sabrina Strings writes about this in Fearing the Black Body, a book we've mentioned before on this channel, where she traces how fat phobia and race and Western beauty standards became entangled with European colonizers and the way they associated larger bodies, especially black bodies, with laziness and a lack of discipline. So around the time when these Renaissance artists were painting these full-bodied women in the beginning they were incorporating black women. They were saying oh black women they have these beautiful physiques. But by the height of the slave trade which was in the 18th century what they did was they built up the rationale to keep black and white separate. They built up race scientific theories and they said well black people don't know how to control themselves. They love food and that's why they are overly fat and we as Europeans we want to avoid that condition.

[00:13:14]>> And these ideas were used to justify slavery and a racial hierarchy. Now that history got absorbed into households and churches and family dynamics. A lot of white missionaries go into African and Caribbean countries and indoctrinate them with these kinds of beliefs. Or they come to the states and are indoctrinated with these kinds of beliefs. Or both. usually both. And that's how it gets absorbed into even black and brown culture. And of course, because this stems from whiteness, it also affects white women as well because even white women by and large do not have these bodies. It's a very specific waspy thin ideal that they are chasing after too. And that woman is supposed to be small and controlled and demure and mindful and quietly starving. The body is a status symbol. Then this becomes proof that you're the right kind of woman from the right kind of family. And this is where the narcissism of it all comes in. Some mothers are in fact more obsessed with the image of being a mother. They are more invested in the family looking good than being emotionally safe. And obviously this applies to fathers as well, but for the context of this video, we're going to stick to mothers. There are mothers that don't see their daughters as being fully human and having their own desires and having their own needs. So now if the daughter is fat or awkward or curvy or quote unquote ugly, the mother is now experiencing that as a personal embarrassment. Almond moms are seeing their daughters, often it's the daughters, as a subject or as a tool of their social performance. That's why the sons are often allowed to eat. They're allowed to stay out late and act a fool and drink and hook up and do all the things, but the daughter is made to carry the entire family's respectability on her back. These same parents, they'll sit there and wonder why their children don't want to come home for the holidays, why their children don't call them, when it's like, "When I do come over, you're fat shaming me. You're policing what I eat." And Yahoo News spoke with women who said that having almond moms made them anxious to go home for the holidays. This was of course published around Christmas time last year. An excerpt from the article reads, quote, "A week before Thanksgiving, Jessica S. was already mentally preparing herself for dinner table conversation. She wasn't worried about the usual minefields: politics, religion, money, but something more constant. Her mother's relentless stream of commentary about what she and everyone else was eating. There's going to be that moment where she's going to be like, "Oh, I shouldn't have anymore.

[00:15:51]I'm stuffed to the gills. My pants are going to explode. I shouldn't have another piece, but all right, maybe just a little. I'm so bad. That always happens at every big meal, and I don't want it to be a thing. Now, in her late 30s, with a family and home of her own, Jessica still feels the stress and pressure of the messages her mom ingrained in her as a child about diet and exercise. Jessica doesn't remember a time in her childhood where diet wasn't a topic of conversation in her household. I remember from a very young age my mom would be sharing a slim fast with me and telling me to have that for breakfast, sending me with almonds to school. She said every few months there was a different diet in the house. This feeling like every bite that you take is something that is going to be commented on. It's very real. And on TikTok you can see this playing out in real time.

[00:16:38]Young women post videos joking about their almond moms, their moms barely eating on vacation and obsessively working out.

[00:16:47]Oh, it's good without the cracker. You don't need the cracker.

[00:16:50]>> Dressing on the side.

[00:16:54]>> Why would I? I don't like sugar. Forget it. This is >> Mom, just put your put your tongue on it. Just >> yum.

[00:17:03]>> Dumb. That's the biggest pizza I ever had.

[00:17:05]>> The point of vacations is to be as debaucherous and hedonistic as humanly possible. We're supposed to get lit.

[00:17:10]We're supposed to have fun. And yet, we're working out. We're punishing ourselves for having fun. We're obsessing over what we eat. And sometimes, especially in this particular case, the mothers look visibly unwell.

[00:17:25]The temporals are wasting. And the daughters are posting these videos like, "Look at my almond mom. Isn't she so crazy? Isn't she a riot?" It's just one big joke. And they're not even self-aware enough to understand that there is a problem. And I suspect, I know it's because they're so deep in this dynamic that they don't see it as a problem. That's just mom. And that's how learned behavior works. This is how EDS get passed down. I was so tiny at your age. You know, men don't like big girls.

[00:17:56]You have such a pretty face. If only you could lose some weight. You would be so much prettier. You're at a restaurant.

[00:18:03]You're out to dinner and your mom orders a salad and you order a pasta and she's giving you the side eye. Like, that's what you're going to eat. Okay, proceed at your own risk. Don't go straight to the hips. A mother who's bonding with her daughter through dieting because she has no other way to relate to her. And yes, the media indoctrinated and brainwashed our mothers, too. Boomers and Gen X were very much drowning in the diet culture. Slim Fast and Weight Watchers, Special K, remember Special K?

[00:18:31]Lowfat everything. And the 2000s were very much a war zone for thin supremacy.

[00:18:37]Our mothers were very much shaped in the same propaganda. But that does not mean that we should excuse this behavior on account of that was the culture. Again, I feel like it's the culture has become a thought-terminating cliche of sorts that is used to completely shut down any kind of accountability because at the end of the day, you chose to have a child. Once you are a parent, it's your responsibility to self-regulate. It's your responsibility to heal, to deal with your own internalized traumas. I'm not saying that you're going to be perfect and just snap your fingers and not have any trauma or insecurities as a parent. Obviously, that's not how it works. But you also make the decision of what you internalize and what you vocalize. And your child did not ask to be the container or on the receiving end of your problems that you have not resolved within yourself with your insecurities. And that's why I believe that we have to stop romanticizing or valorizing motherhood as though mothers are infallible. Of course, motherhood is beautiful or it can be beautiful, but it can also be cruel. Yes, mothers can be narcissistic. They can be agents of patriarchy in a girl's life. If you're a mother or you want to be a mother, it's your responsibility to deprogram yourself because nobody is owed a child.

[00:19:51]A child is optional. And if you choose to have a child, you have to also choose to confront your fat phobia, your own childhood drama, your own internalized misogyny, your obsession with control. I heard this some years ago and it has always stuck with me. You have to heal before having kids so your kids don't have to heal from having you as a parent. And I'll add to it. If your parents don't heal, because to be honest, often times they don't. Often times boomers are very much set in their ways. If you have boomer parents or Gen X parents, they tend to be really stubborn. I don't know if you've heard.

[00:20:24]So, it ends up being your responsibility and it will end up being your responsibility as well to have to set boundaries. If you fat shame me, I'm out of here. If you want to fat shame me and police what I'm eating, I'm not showing up to the next family function. It might sound harsh for people who think that daughters should be treated as a doormat because they have to respect their parents at all times. But what is really harsh is when a daughter's body not being thin has now become psychological warfare. At some point, the cycle has to stop. If you are the daughter of someone who is an almond mom, there are things that you can do to set boundaries. And you also have to change your media diet.

[00:21:02]Not your diet diet, not your food diet, but your media diet. You have to read more. You know, I'm a reader. I'm always going to tell you to read. You have to stop bonding with your friends over body hatred. You have to actively shut down and refuse diet talk. You might have to also grieve the childhood version of yourself who deserved protection and didn't get it. You have to unlearn it.

[00:21:23]Going back to Gigi Hadid, her mom was pushing modeling on her before she was old enough to really know what she truly wanted. And of course, Gigi is widely successful. It really worked out for her. She's rich. But I still wonder what she maybe would have chosen if her mother wasn't putting these ideas in her head about who she should be. How many women and really people in general never actually pursued the career that they wanted because they never desentered their parents? How many of them are now in their 30s and 40s and 50s and they're living in someone else's dream? And this connects back to the way that we think about our bodies. How many of us are living in someone else's nightmare? So many women are obsessing right now.

[00:22:06]Right now, women that you know, it might be you yourself, obsessing over dieting, staying thin, and policing themselves, and they don't even really know why.

[00:22:15]They think it's their own idea, but it's really the media and their parents. Some mothers do an excellent job. They don't say these things around their child.

[00:22:22]They don't implant these ideas in their children's heads. And yet, these ideas still find them because, after all, we still live in the society that we live in. That is largely diet culture obsessed. The mothers are not always to blame. Obviously, America is the pipeline. Like, the status quo is the pipeline. You can still become a shell of yourself if you never deconstruct the ways that your family made you think, the way that they told you that you had to be. But you can decide at any point that your body and yourself, you do not exist to redeem your family's lineage or image. You don't exist to attract a husband. You will be the person that you authentically are and attract the person that is right for you. You're allowed to eat and you're allowed to age. And no, we're not going to just laugh it off like that's just mom. That's just how the almond moms are. I believe that if body hatred can be taught, it can also be unlearned. And that, my friends, that's all I've got for you today. I would love to hear though from you guys in the comments down below. What are your thoughts on almond moms? Do you have an almond mom? Maybe it's an almond auntie or almond grandmother. I would love to hear from you in the comments down below. If you like this video, then definitely give it a thumbs up. And if you want more content like this, definitely hit that subscribe button.

[00:23:35]And if you want to see what I'm up to outside of YouTube, you can follow me on my social media profiles down here. And you can also support me on my Patreon for as little as $1.50 a month or $5 a month. All of which helps to support my work. And besides all that, thank you all so so much for watching and I'll talk to you all next time.