It all started with a clip from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with Yolanda Hadid on the phone with her daughter, supermodel Gigi Hadid. Gigi complains of being weak because she only ate half an almond.
Yolanda replies to her daughter by saying, “Have a couple of almonds and chew them really well.”
The clip by itself could be passed off as a joke, but if you watch this compilation of Yolanda’s constant micromanaging of Gigi’s eating on the show, you’ll see this is not just a one-off joke and Yolanda’s food policing feels like a form of emotional abuse that could have long-lasting damage.
Gigi Hadid has never mentioned having an eating disorder, but Gigi’s sister Bella has been open about her own struggles and had such a poor body image that she got a nose job when she was only 14! She now regrets that decision. Had she grown up in a more body-positive household, she wouldn’t have felt the need to go under the knife at 14.
TikTok Users Relate to Toxic Diet Culture
The Real Housewife clip recently went viral on TikTok because, unfortunately, many people relate to Gigi and were raised by an “almond mom” who restricted their eating, promoted unhealthy dieting, was always obsessed with their own weight and their child’s weight. Moms who love to ask, “Are you really hungry, or are you just bored?”
The #almondmom hashtag currently has over 256 million views on TikTok with hundreds of thousands of users sharing their almond mom stories by impersonating their diet-obsessed mothers in their videos.
In a TikTok by @betches, an almond mom shows how she celebrates Christmas. Instead of candy canes, she offers her kid peppermint tea.
In another part of the video, she says, “Look! Mommy has the same diet as the reindeer!” and chomps down on a stick of celery.
Most of those almond mom videos are kind of funny, but the actual message behind the trend is really dark and shows just how toxic diet culture is. It promotes disordered eating and poor body image. It’s better to focus on being healthy rather than being a certain weight.
In response to the Almond Mom meme, Yolanda Hadid decided to poke fun at it in a TikTok of her own. The short video shows Yolanda going about her day while eating a giant bowl of almonds with silly music playing over it. It’s titled” #worstmomever.” Do you think she’s just being funny or making light of a very serious problem in our culture? Let us know in the comments below!
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