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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 hormone-balancing obsessives who would never dream of consuming anything with “toxins” or processed artificial flavourings.
Though it might have been introduced to the world by Yolanda Hadid, the actual term “almond mom” was spearheaded by creators like Tyler Bender, a 22-year-old LA-based comedian who began posting spoof almond mom videos on her TikTok. She told Nightline in 2023, “An almond mom is a mom who is a little bit bought into diet culture. A little bit of an obsession with healthy eating, with her body image, with her daughter’s body image. Maybe a little bit of an obsession with fitness. But it tends to veer on the side of overdoing it.” At that point the term had around 300 million views on TikTok.
What’s interesting about Bender’s Nightline news report is not her views on the trend, though. It’s her mother’s. When reporters spoke to Sara Bender she was bemused and said she didn’t consider herself an almond mom at all, though she admitted that she saw some of her own behaviours reflected in her daughter’s videos. But the spoofs had led to some difficult decisions and – she claims – brought them closer, even though they might have “stung” at first. “I said that I didn’t know I hurt her,” Sara said. “That was never my intent. You want them to be healthy and happy, and you just provide the pathway that you think is the best.”
The trend has become so pervasive that dieticians have begun to block the content on their own socials. Sarah Fuller, a lead NHS child and adolescent mental health services dietician, specialising in eating disorders, is among them. While she has yet to have someone bring up the term in her therapy sessions, she often hears young people say that comments from their parents about their eating habits or weight are incredibly difficult to deal with.
But for those posting almond mom content online, what is the appeal? Is it to make themselves feel better, to complain about their parents or to find solidarity with other people who have had similar childhood experiences? Frustratingly, the answer is that this – like many other aspects of online disordered eating culture – is under-researched. “We just really don’t know [why people post these videos online]”, Fuller says. “Nobody as far as I am aware of has researched this specific, relatively recent phenomenon. However, we do know that any environment that has increased awareness of food, weight or shape concerns increase the risk of an eating disorder.”
Historically, those environmental factors have been considered to be diet based (things like having an allergy or diabetes, meaning you have to carefully monitor your food intake), or related to sports and hobbies (ballet, ice skating, modelling, things that tend to be traditionally enjoyed by young girls).
Parental comments and almond mom behaviour though, can clearly play into this, particularly when amplified by social media. Although these videos might be posted with the intention of either shitposting, joining in on a trend or seeking solidarity out of frustration with living under an almond mom’s roof, broadcasting them to an audience of millions can potentially do more harm than good. When do these videos stop being a joke and start being just another facet of pro-anorexia online content?
To answer that, you have to consider this: these are mostly daughters venting about their mothers – sometimes with their tongues firmly in cheek, but other times pointing the finger directly, saying things like, “I’m normal, no thanks to you.” On YouTube, dieticians and other self-proclaimed experts post videos to millions of followers with titles like “Six Signs Your Almond Mom Caused Your Eating Disorder.” The signs include things like “She’s always on a new diet” or “Her food is labelled.” In the rush to claim, “I relate,” nuance is lost. The fact that the mother herself may still be struggling with the same issues she’s passing by osmosis onto her daughters is sadly lost in translation.
What unites all these videos is that the gender divide is so pronounced. Equivalent dad content is thin on the ground and these fathers would probably be called Crossfit Dads instead. Their behaviour is, while no less extreme, still played for laughs (one viral video posted this week showed a man running his toddler son on a treadmill at high speed).
“Parents can’t cause someone to have an eating disorder,” warns Fuller. “These are highly complex psychiatric illnesses that have many, many contributing factors.” She acknowledges, however, that there are pre-existing gender differences in the world of eating disorders: diagnosed anorexia presents in one man to every 10 women. Whereas daughters might aim to be as thin as possible, she explains, sons more commonly want to be uber-masculine and ripped. “I would imagine gyms are full of the dads who are doing meal prep and intermittent fasting,” Fuller muses. The mothers, however, are at home. And as the return of super-thinness thanks to Ozempic tells us, they’re not going anywhere any time soon.
If we can’t get rid of them, then what do we do with almond moms? The bitter pill answer is perhaps we ought to show them some compassion, though we might not want to. The trend is arguably perpetuating the same treatment these almond moms had from their own mothers but not with deliberate malice. And the silver lining is that it’s led many younger creators, writers and even just watchers of almond mom content, to broach difficult conversations with their own mothers about the impact their unhealthy habits had on their own lives.
On parenting subreddits, mothers despair over how they handle food in their homes and whether it means they’re almond moms. Dads rarely seem to experience the burden of the same dilemma. Last year an article published in Vogue argued for some sympathy for almond moms, as the trend exploded on social media. It began by quoting the classic Philip Larkin poem: “They f*** you up, your mum and dad/ They don’t mean to but they do.”
Today, Tyler Bender says she absolutely feels sorry for almond moms, rather than adversarial towards them. “Just like me, they’re caught up in diet culture,” she tells me. “It’s important to recognise that they’re also victims of the same harmful messages we’ve all been exposed to.” And her own exposure to the trend has brought her closer to her own mother, rather than driving them further apart.
After appearing in reports like Nightline’s one, she says they managed to tackle some “challenging” topics together. “Now I call her every day,” Tyler says. “She is my rock.”
For anyone struggling with the issues raised in this article, eating disorder charity Beat’s helpline is available 365 days a year on 0808 801 0677. NCFED offers information, resources and counselling for those suffering from eating disorders, as well as their support networks. Visit eating-disorders.org.uk or call 0845 838 2040
