During a recent episode of Teresa’s own podcast, Milania Giudice revealed that her mom’s cruel comments prompted her extreme weight loss.
That is not how Milania thought of it. In her mind, her mom had “helped” her.
Disordered eating and unhealthy eating habits are all too common in a world full of body-shaming. And it’s often a parent-led problem.
It’s so common, in fact, that Dolores Catania is speaking up to defend Teresa against “mom-shaming.” She thinks that Tre did Milania a favor.
17-year-old Milania Giudice was recently a guest on her mother’s Namaste B$tches podcast.
As we reported at the time, she shared some extremely alarming information.
“In two months, I lost 50 pounds,” Milania revealed. Most medical experts would advise against losing even half that much within that time frame.
In her own mind, Milania was not leveling any accusations. But even Teresa realized that this was too much, screaming “what?!”
“My mom would be like – she would never say anything,” Milania explained.
Recalling her mother’s critical comments, she noted: “But she would be like, ‘Oh, you’re going to have another ice cream?’”
After her rapid and drastic weight loss, Milania weighs only 110 pounds.
It sounds like she lost just shy a third of her body weight — through radical dietary changes and exercising multiple times per day.
Milania wasn’t voicing any of this as a complaint or an accusation. But countless people recoiled in horror.
There are families where deliberately abusive parents ridicule their children’s bodies, deny them food, and more. But starvation and torment is not always what body-negative parenting looks like.
It looks like little comments about what your child is eating. And it can also look like comments about your own body. Children really do pick up on their parents’ hangups.
What happens is that people’s kids internalize these body-negative attitudes. Body-shaming is a widespread rot in our culture, but when parents reinforce it at home, it can do the most damage.
To Teresa’s castmate, Dolores Catania, what Teresa did wasn’t body-shaming.
In her mind, the real problem is the people who have been mom-shaming Teresa for planting these ideas in Milania’s head.
“I do remember Milania had gone through something and she was gaining weight,” Dolores told The Us Sun.
“You know what? Sometimes as an adolescent, you get into an unhealthy lifestyle,” Dolores for some reason continued.
She suggested that “you’re eating junk with your friends all the time.”
Unfortunately, Dolores added: “I think it’s good for a mom to monitor and to be conscious of their child’s weight and to get on them about it before it gets out of hand.”
Dolores then made the claim that “Obesity is very unhealthy.”
Just for the record, there is a tremendous amount of misinformation about human body weight and “obesity.” Clearly, Dolores believes a lot of things that are not necessarily medically sound.
Also, even if “obesity” were the catch-all health debuff that Dolores clearly believes … Milania wasn’t an abnormal weight.