‘Almond moms’ are blurring lines between body image and being health-conscious

As young girls film diet-obsessed mothers and call it content, Roisin Lanigan asks if it is fertile ground for eating disorders

-  Roisin Lanigan

As with many trends, it all goes back to the Hadids. Not Bella or Gigi, but Yolanda, the original supervillain “almond mom”. Back before fashion superstardom the Hadids appeared on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, where Yolanda is filmed advising her famished daughter Gigi, then just starting out as a model, who complained of feeling weak after a “juice cleanse”. Yolanda’s motherly advice is sobering. She tells her: “Eat two almonds but chew them really well.”

Six years after it first aired, the clip resurfaced on social media, and Yolanda’s advice has become synonymous with pro-ana culture (a seemingly evergreen anorexia internet subculture where users share “thinspiration”) and the nickname perpetually dieting mothers should fear: The Almond Mom.

An almond mom, despite the name, doesn’t have to specifically recommend nuts. More broadly it refers to a mother who projects her own orthorexic eating habits onto her children (usually her daughters) under the guise of “being healthy”. Its popularity as a term on social media suggests that it’s gendered parenting behaviour that’s depressingly widespread.

Although it’s circulated for many years online – and historically, the trope of a preening, critical mother figure is nothing new – TikTok has breathed new life into the almond mom trend. Where health-conscious mothers would have once lived off Special K cereal and “low-fat” ready meals, now the new generation of almond moms raising Gen Z are hormonebalancing obsessives who would never dream of consuming anything with “toxins” or processed artificial flavourings.