(Newser)
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When Dara-Lynn Weiss wrote in Vogue about her yearlong struggle to help her clinically obese 7-year-old daughter lose 16 pounds, she probably wasn't expecting quite the level of backlash that has ensued. Yahoo has highlights from Weiss's article, including her admission that she herself has struggled with eating and body image issues her entire life. Among the tactics Weiss used with daughter Bea: depriving her of dinner because she ate 800 calories at school during "French Heritage Day," refusing to allow her to participate in "Pizza Fridays" because she once added a corn salad on the side, and angrily dumping out her Starbucks hot chocolate when the barista couldn't tell her exactly how many calories it contained. Yahoo rounds up some reactions:
- Katie Baker pulls no punches on Jezebel, writing that Weiss "has to go down in history as the one of the most fucked up, selfish women to ever grace the magazine's pages." Yes, Weiss found herself in a complicated and difficult situation, but "the obvious fact that Weiss was projecting her hatred of her own body onto her child throughout her yearlong diet" is "truly disgusting."
- On Fashionista.com, Dhani Mau notes an incident in which Weiss steps between her daughter and a salad nicoise, physically preventing her from eating it. "This may have not been the best way to set up the article if she wanted the reader to believe her to be a sane, reasonable person," Mau writes. "Weiss comes across as obsessive and the fact that she made such an issue of her daughter’s weight, both in public and in Vogue—seems wrong."
- "Rather than identifying the cause of the overeating … Weiss chose to project her own self-loathing onto her daughter," writes an anonymous blogger and mom in New York. "I'm pretty sure Weiss just handed her daughter the road map to all her future eating disorders."
