Daughter Visiting Her ‘Almond Mom’ For The Holidays Finds A Concerning New Addition To Her Parents’ Snack Cabinet
She thought she’d finally escaped the food policing from her mom.
Fizkes / Shutterstock Many people escape the unhealthy dynamics of their family life when they decide to leave home, but what happens when they come back for the holidays?
It’s a tale as old as time — your mom’s hyper fixation on the living room furniture, your little brother’s constant nagging, your grandma’s snide comments — dealing with family can sometimes be a little too much to handle.
TikTok content creator, Flavia, posted about her experience going to her almond mom's home for the holidays. Thinking she’d escaped the food policing of her mother, she quickly realized that was far from the truth.
This daughter found a ‘Diet Piggy’ in her almond mom's snack cabinet while visiting over the holidays.
Calling out her mom’s interesting choice for kitchen decor, Flavia posted the “Diet Piggy” she found in her snack cabinet at home. The work of her so-called “Almond Mother.” It seemed like this was far from the first time she felt food-shamed in her childhood kitchen.
While the term might be relatively new, the almond mom is infamous in many families. They’re known for their fixation, and often obsession, with restrictive diets.
The original almond mom was Yolanda Hadid, mother of supermodels Bella, Gigi, and Anwar. She adopted the title after a video surfaced of her encouraging her Gigi to eat “a handful of almonds” to satisfy her hunger.
The term almond mom has recently gained popularity as a descriptor for parents who are hyper-vigilant about their restrictive diets.
Many people struggle with “food policing” thoughts. The truth is those were likely conditioned by a parent or some habits from childhood. The “food police” is the inner monologue you hear that encourages you not to eat “bad food” or restrict yourself to only a small amount of the “good foods.”
If you grew up in a household that condemned snacks or forced diets on you as a child, chances are you ended up sneaking around with foods or finding “abnormal” times to eat your necessary meals.
Feeling hungry turned into a shameful thing and your unique habits with food (once out of necessity) turned into a much larger struggle.
This narrative of “food policing” is the dark side to a seemingly lighthearted joke about almond moms, especially ones with unhealthy habits that get forced upon their children. Not only does it perpetuate an excuse for disordered eating, but it sets children up for a lifetime of food-related trauma.
Children of almond moms struggle to overcome the trauma of their parent's restrictive habits.
“Big hugs for all of us who had mothers like this and turned out okay,” one commenter honestly wrote under the video. In a sea of comments laughing about the “Diet Piggy,” many were reminded of the food resentment they carried for a lifetime after living with a similar parent.
Sadly, more often than not, the consequences of their actions are not clearly intended. In fact, many almond moms only developed their restrictive dieting, constant food policing, and compulsive attention to appearance from their own parents or childhood experiences.
“If having a product called ‘Diet Piggy’ isn’t enough to convince people that our society has a serious diet culture problem — I don’t know what will,” one viewer wrote after dueting the video.
While our culture today is more focused on inclusivity and detachment from physical appearance, it hasn’t always been this way. Many people, women specifically, have always had their appearances policed.
This cultural shift might’ve made it easier for younger generations to talk about diet, but there are plenty of people still caught in the throws of an unhealthy relationship with food and their sense of self-worth. We still have a long way to go.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a news and entertainment writer at YourTango focusing on pop culture and human interest stories.