What is an Almond Mom? Yolanda Hadid's TikTok Sparks Diet Culture Convo

If you grew up hearing that "a moment on the lips is forever on the hips," you might have had an almond mom.

The term has coursed through social media in recent weeks, as a younger generation fills TikTok with stories about how their parents restricted their eating and projected disordered eating habits.

Why "almond mom"? The label became popular after videos resurfaced of Yolanda Hadid, mother of supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid and a former model herself, being the ultimate almond mom on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. In one clip, Gigi told her mother that she was "feeling really weak" after only eating "half an almond."

Yolanda replied, "Have a couple of almonds and chew them really well."

After viewers accused the matriarch of pushing disordered eating habits on her children, Yolanda appeared to mock the critics with a TikTok video of herself eating almonds in a variety of locales.

But the video wasn't amusing to Dr. Karla Lester, a pediatrician and life coach based in Lincoln, Nebraska.

"It makes me cringe," Lester told Newsweek. "The worst thing is that her platform perpetuates that being an almond mom, being restrictive, being in your kids' lane, reaches a success. You look at Gigi Hadid—you think, this girl's gorgeous, she has it all."

Despite those appearances, the platform of an almond mom is based on fictitious beliefs, said Lester. She argued that Yolanda was projecting her own eating disorder onto Gigi, subsuming the child into her illness.

"What diet culture teaches us is that people say they're pursuing health or wellness, but actually, they're pursuing thin privilege," the pediatrician said. "It's all based on fatphobia and internalized bias."

Young women have flooded TikTok with videos about their own almond moms.

In a clip with 2.8 million views, two daughters made fun of their moms by chanting their "toxic mantras."

"Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels," went one chant. "A moment on the lips, forever on the hips. You're not hungry, you're just bored."

In the next clip, one of the moms defended her beliefs.

She said, "Get your mind focused on, 'I wanna eat—wait a minute, that won't be as good as what I'll feel like if I'm skinny.' How motivating is that?"

In another TikTok video, Tyler Bender mimicked her mother's expressions inside a Hershey's store.

Holding up half a chocolate bar, she said, "Does anybody want the rest of this? I'm done."

"What are the macros on this? I can't imagine," she commented, examining a large Hershey's kiss chocolate.

After sniffing a Reese's-scented candle, she announced, "I'm full."

Dr. Lester said she heard many of these phrases repeated in her meetings with moms and teens before ever spotting the TikTok trend.

She urged parents to steer away from a "controlling" mindset toward their children's weight.

"You don't control or cause your kid's weight and you don't want to fixate on that. You don't want to have scarcity beliefs and fear that your kid is not gonna be successful, that they're not gonna have a wonderful life because of their weight," said Lester.

The children of almond moms should strive to create physical, emotional or verbal boundaries with their parents, she added.

"I don't want the kids to start internalizing all these messages. Recognize that's happening, that's just my mom stuck in her drama, stuck in her diet talk," said the doctor.