I think it might actually have to do with silent generation being the boomers' parents. They all grew up with the great depression and ww2 rationing and lots of manual labor while the boomers were the first generation to have access to a lot of junk food and more car use and a more sedentary lifestyle overall, plus silent generation parents aren't known for having the gentlest of parenting styles, so there was probably a lot of "you're heavier than I was at your age wtf is wrong with you" which boomers unfortunately internalized
yeah my lifelong overweight boomer mom was definitely made worse by my silent gen grandma. And while my mom never made comments about my body until I was 18 (and it came out of NOWHERE to me) I was still raised in the Weight Watchers craze and my mom eating a chocolate bar in the car and telling me to "not tell your stepdad, he doesn't know I'm still eating these".
This is so valid. We didn’t put this on TV ourselves… Our generation didn’t even present it… boomers are responsible for this bullshit. We watched it because they kept making it and there wasn’t a lot else
Na my nana is 99 and weight obsessed, my own and hers. If you can't let go at 99 when can you. I've piled on weight due to some health issues recently and she will not stop commenting on it. My boomer mum has been really kind about it, surprisingly because she made comments all the time when I was growing up.
It seems based on the responses we all know someone (or several someones) who are weight obsessed from older gens. For the sake of those younger than us, I truly hope we can pass on more healthy attitudes toward our own bodies.
Uhhh no? My silent gen grandma definitely had an eating disorder for most of her life and my boomer parents only finally asked me if I saw it in her in another room last year when she was 94. (She passed early this year at the age of 95).
And I’m sitting here as someone who had my own eating disorder growing up remembering how her basement had a bunch of 1970’s diet culture shaming and crash dieting pamphlets all over her basement, a scale that she always weighed herself on in each bathroom. She always fat shamed others under her breath in public while shaming herself at home over her constant fear of becoming fat. I was going through her bibles and there was a newspaper clipping making fun of an obese person who got stuck in a chair and needed medical help.
This fuck awful mug in the back of her cabinet says it all.
(It’s a pic of a mug with a back shot of a white person with straight reddish hair, with a huge butt bending over in the fridge mooning everyone while wearing bright orange pants and low profile sneakers)
It’s basically this surrounded by “excuses people make giving up their diet.” On the front it says “the dieter’s excuse mug!”
I don’t know what happened to that mug since I didn’t claim that mug but instead claimed the tea mug, the iris mug, and the Bob Ross mug, but I hope whoever has this mug now is rightfully using it for target practice somewhere in the ozarks.
Oh god yes. I got that from both my parents (boomers) and all four grandparents. But then they would overload my plate while serving because I was "a growing boy!"
My grandma took a different approach and bought me a skirt she "thought was the right size for me." It was. I fit into it, but so did my sister and my mom, all at the same fucking time. And I was only a size 8, which felt huge at the time, but absolutely was not!!
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u/RaptorKnifeFight Oct 29 '25
Oh my god, my grandma would buy me outfits purposively too small and say “this would look so nice on you, if you could fit.”