If you ask a woman when she first became aware of the concept of a diet, there is a strong chance that she'll probably say that it was as a child, and that it was because her mum was on one.
Whether your she went to an aerobics class at your local church hall, counted her Weight Watchers points per Ryvita, or lived off two bowls of Special K a day in the run up to your summer holiday, the chances are that at some point in your childhood you noticed your mum trying to lose weight.
None of this was designed to make you feel bad, or to pass on a message that the body was a battle ground. Our mums were battling against the exact same image obsessed system that we are.
But even though they weren't trying to inspire us to enter into a lifelong battle with our weight, studies have shown that watching your major female role model dieting does just that.
Which is why I was so agonisingly disappointed to see Khloe Kardashian sharing an Instagram with an attempt at being funny.
The thing is, when you're the face of a TV show called 'revenge body' where people lose weight and get a make-over in order to get 'revenge', and you promote detox teas which help you lose weight via a laxative affect, you're already on a little bit of a back foot when it comes to growing up filled with body positivity.
Heap on top of that the fact that these kids have been in the public eye literally since conception, and that there are thousands of hideous messages about her looks already doing the rounds online (admittedly, that's not on KK) and you've got a recipe for disaster.
If you were raising a daughter in the public eye, having yourself been taunted and bullied for being 'fat' (not that Khloe was ever really plus size, or that the bullying would have been justified if she had been) would you not take every single possible step to try and raise her without a perception of calories as an enemy?
Food should not be a battle ground, and calories should not be considered scary or bad. They're just units of energy. The idea that they 'don't count' on holiday suggests that they are to be avoided at home. We need calories, otherwise we would die. They are literally essential.
Whenever a Kardashian does something problematic, the voices in response fall into three camps. Those who will defend their every action and think that everyone else is 'overreacting', those who hate the Kardashians and everything they stand for and therefore want to lambast them, and a final group who like them but are exasperated by their choices.
I fall into the latter camp. I respect the Kardashian hustle. I admire their attitude to business and their closeness as a family. But it is not healthy to project your own feelings about calories onto your children, especially when you've (allegedly) had a lot of surgery and devoted hours and hours of your life to sculpting an almost achievable body.
Khloe Kardashian isn't a bad mum because she's allowing her daughter to see calories as the enemy. She's doing what so many of our mums did when we were kids - allowing her own relationship with foodto spill over into her daughter's life. It's incredibly hard to avoid.
For a lot of us, being able to enjoy food as an enjoyable fuel without any kind of emotional baggage is unimaginable.
But, if we can be the generation who do not talk to our daughters about food as an enemy, or let them overhear us celebrating weight loss more enthusiastically than anything else, then we might just raise the next generation to have a genuinely healthy attitude towards food.