(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Fat-positivity activist and author Virginia Sole-Smith recently published a book advocating for fat acceptance among young children, encouraging parents to embrace their obese children’s unhealthy eating habits.
Sole-Smith did an interview with The Cut to promote her upcoming book, What If You Weren’t Scared of Your Kid Being Fat?
According to the Daily Wire, the author complained that eating healthy and taking care of your body is a “white ideal.”
“The thin ideal is definitely a white ideal. When we trace the history of modern diet culture, we really trace it back in the United States to the end of slavery,” Sole-Smith said.
She argued that the purported “fear” of fat people is simply an alleged attempt by white people to remain in power.
“Obviously, white supremacy is trying to maintain the power structure. So celebrating a thin white body as the ideal body is a way to ‘other’ and demonize black and brown bodies, bigger bodies, anyone who doesn’t fit into that norm,” she opined. “So this is really about maintaining systems of white supremacy and patriarchy.”
Sole-Smith also criticized parents who feel uncomfortable allowing their children to partake of sweets too frequently. Using the example of ice cream, she explained that parents should allow their children to do what makes them happy.
“There are seven days in a week. Your child can have ice cream seven days a week. There is no law against this,” she said. She also said that if a teenager should ask for a whole package of Oreo cookies, they should also “pour a glass of milk — so they can dunk them.”
Sole-Smith, who has two children of her own, wrote about her no-rules approach to feeding children, which therefore makes sugar less exciting to kids.
“Vegetables are the least important part of it to me,” she said. “They have their whole lives to decide if they want to eat kale.”
Sole-Smith encourages her children to “listen to [their] bod[ies]” when it comes to eating and tells them they “don’t have to earn dessert.”
The crux of her book is her attempted “debunking” of the seriousness of childhood obesity. She argued that the United States’ “fear of fatness” is worse for children than the health toll taken by being overweight.
“The real danger to a child in a larger body is how we treat them for having that body,” she wrote.
Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted that childhood obesity is a “serious problem,” and often leads to “high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, breathing problems such as asthma and sleep apnea, and joint problems.”
Recent reports from the CDC indicate that nearly 20% of children age 2 to 19 are obese.
