I have to keep coming back to this topic because the comments I get really tell me that some people don't get it.

They all basically boil down to 1 or 2 comments/misunderstandings-

1. It's not child abuse to make kids diet b/c I saw a parent one time give a child junk food and I thought that child was too fat. (This is almost always couched in some really class shaming language- usually involving Cheetos. Cheetos really are the food of hating on poor people.)

2. What, do you think it's ok to give a kid *insert troll amount of food here*? 

Let's clear up a few things.  (I'm not even going to engage with the classism, b/c really, people? Go do better.)

First, your cousin or that kid you saw eating candy in the DMV or whatever are not representative of all fat kids.  In fact, if you weren't a fat kid, you know absolutely nothing about what that experience is like.  And guessing about our lives based on a thing you saw once, instead of listening to people who used to be fat kids-- is shitty. 

That's not how we do things. This also falls under go do better.  

Second person, you are utterly, completely, ignorant and wrong and mistaken if you think that what I mean when I say "diet" is not letting a child eat thirty cookies at one time.

There are people who put their elementary school children on very restricted diets. There are kids who are forced to do Weight Watchers, the meal replacement shakes, the diet bars (they call them candy bars but they taste like goddamn feet). 

There are children who are being fed less than 1000 calories a day, by parents who have the money to feed them actual meals (b/c all this diet shit costs more money than food does). 

So what we have here is two groups of parents. We have the well-meaning people who are being misled by the diet industry's propaganda into doing harm to their children, physically and mentally. 

And the second group-- the abusive parents who use dieting as another way to manifest their abuse.  The craze for eliminating fat kids with these forced diets provides cover for abusers to get away with abuse and to be complimented for taking a strong stand against "obesity". 

So by insisting that forcing fat kids to diet is ok, what you are advocating for is for otherwise well-meaning people to inflict harm on children and you're providing cover for abusive parents to sadistically harm their children with no repercussions.  

If you actually wanted to know if forced dieting is child abuse, you could bother to actually listen to the people who lived through it.

Everyone talks about the problem of fat kids, but no one ever asks the people who went through it what we think.

I think that's pretty fucked up.