In a 2013 clip from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the Dutch-American former model Yolanda Hadid can be heard talking on the phone to her daughter the model Gigi Hadid.
“How are you?” asks Yolanda.
“I’m feeling really weak,” says an 18-year-old Gigi, who was on a juice cleanse at the time. “I had, like, half an almond.”
To this, Yolanda advises: “Have a couple of almonds and chew them really well.”
And in another clip, from 2012:
“I’m so excited for the food,” says Gigi.
“That’s good. You can have one night of being bad, right?” says Yolanda.
“Yeah. I was actually really good this week,” says Gigi.
“Yeah, and then you gotta get back on your diet, though,” says Yolanda.
Never mind that this footage was filmed on Bravo for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of Real Housewives aficionados—these are a mother’s real interactions with her daughter.
A more subtle yet equally jarring Hadid parenting clip comes a few years later, in the form of an “Everything I Eat in a Day” YouTube video for Harper’s Bazaar, in which Yolanda says that “you are what you eat” as an array of healthy snacks—including almonds—in different glass jars pans across the screen. The kicker: “I … think that, as a mom, we lead by example.”
In Yolanda Hadid’s case, it turned out to be a demonstrably bad example—though all three of her kids did go on to become successful models—and viral social-media fodder. Yet despite becoming the poster child for what is now taking the form of a full-fledged “almond mom” trend, Yolanda Hadid in no way sustained it—average mothers did.
“Have a couple of almonds and chew them really well.”
Everyone remembers the mom at the birthday party who ignored the pizza and placed a measly portion of salad leaves onto her own plate. Who on a road trip vetoed the Taco Bell in favor of a Ziploc of baby carrots, and when she sensed her kid needed a bit of extra energy, handed them a couple of nuts. (Usually, the kid was a daughter.) And the mothers who, when their daughters were older, encouraged everything from fad diets to old wives’ tales in order to fit into prom dresses and debutante gowns.
These are the almond moms.
To be sure, forgoing a meal for a handful of almonds is not an exclusively motherly practice. Even Obama, Michelle once joked, enjoys “seven almonds as a snack in the evening.” And, while slimming down for his lead role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy went so far as to eat only an almond a day, according to his co-star Emily Blunt.
But it’s arguably at its most destructive where moms and daughters are concerned. And while the Hadid case is the extreme, for most almond moms, it’s more subtle—which may explain why it’s taken several decades for this to become a trend that social media is obsessed with.
“I … think that, as a mom, we lead by example.”
Many millennial women grew up with moms who were not physically controlling of what their children ate, but whose attitudes toward their own diets could be easily overheard. There’s a whole litany of words and phrases that indirectly impart unhealthy habits, from “cheat meals” to “naughty foods.”
Marina, 31, tells me she can’t remember a time when her mother wasn’t watching what she ate. “For my whole life, my mom was on some kind of diet … at the dinner table there would be one meal for my dad and us [children] and a different, low-calorie meal for my mom. I thought that was how adult women all ate.” Others remember their mothers on specific diets. “I knew the word ‘Atkins’ before I could do all my times tables,” says Naiome, 35.
Sabina, 32, says that her mom would tell her off for not stopping her from eating: “I always remember my mom telling me not to let her have a bite of my pudding and then feeling so guilty later when she asked me for one.”
It’s no surprise that this sort of upbringing has had an impact on girls who are now young women—many of whom have inherited their mothers’ thinly veiled disordered eating.
“I knew the word ‘Atkins’ before I could do all my times tables.”
Much of the behavior exhibited by these moms would be seen as worrying if viewed in a teenager, but it is somehow excused or ignored in middle-aged women. Even the term “almond mom” sanitizes the behavior and means that, now, when teenagers create parody videos on TikTok acting out the habits of an almond mom—such as blotting grease off pizza or scooping excess oil off the top of soup—we laugh instead of getting pissed off. After all, these attitudes toward food aren’t maliciously passed down but are the result of a toxic diet culture that was force-fed to women at the time.
The way the media discussed women’s bodies back in the noughties seems as strange and unbelievable now as women painting their faces with lead or wearing breath-constricting corsets. When you think that our mothers were taught that you shouldn’t be able to “pinch an inch,” that eating two bowls of Special K in the place of two meals was perfectly healthy, that a size 8 was overweight, that Britney Spears was “disgusting” because she had the tiniest bit of a stomach showing, it’s no wonder almond moms exist.
When you think that our mothers were taught that you shouldn’t be able to “pinch an inch,” that eating two bowls of Special K in the place of two meals was perfectly healthy, that a size 8 was overweight, it’s no wonder almond moms exist.
Body-positivity influencer Alex Light thinks that new moms have learned from the problems of the past. “We’re not the first generation to be subject to these comments from our ‘almond moms,’ but we’re the first to be collectively, actively rebelling against them and recognizing the damage these behaviors have caused,” she says. “We’re so much more aware of our words and our actions, both towards other people’s bodies and eating habits and also our own. I am confident that we are fully capable of breaking the cycle.”
There’s certainly a need for change. According to the Archives of Disease in Childhood medical journal, the proportion of children trying to lose weight increased from 21 percent in 1997 to nearly 27 percent in 2016, while childhood obesity has increased at a much slower rate. Today, one in seven “slim” children are now dieting.
And while many new moms are determined to break the cycle, as Light puts it, according to Expert Market Research the global weight-loss market size was valued at more than $190 billion in 2023 and is expected to only grow (thanks in large part to Ozempic) to more than $280 billion by 2028.
So while this generation of moms may be determined to put down the almonds, it could prove harder than expected. As hard, perhaps, as it would be for Yolanda Hadid to suggest Gigi have a burger.
Flora Gill is a London-based writer