There’s been much buzz recently over an article in the April issue of Vogue, in which writer Dara-Lynn Weiss chronicles her yearlong mission to put her overweight seven-year-old daughter Bea on a diet. At four feet four inches tall and 93 pounds, Bea was in the ninety-ninth percentile for weight and, technically, “obese.”

To her credit, Weiss acknowledges her own problems with food and body image. “Whether I weighed in at 105 pounds or 145 pounds hardly mattered—I hated how my body looked and devoted an inordinate amount of time to trying to change it.” By her own account, even though she’s currently at a healthy weight, she still seesaws between bingeing on “decadent pursuits” (cheeseburgers, cupcakes, and cookies) and purging—if not through vomiting or laxative abuse (although she admits to having used those methods, too), then by going on juice cleanses or rigidly adhering to a restrictive food plan for a week or two.

Clearly, then, Weiss is no role model for either healthy eating or body acceptance. “Who was I to teach a little girl how to maintain a healthy weight and body image?” she says, in her only display of self-awareness in the entire article.

Who, indeed?

Over the course of the weight loss project she undertakes on behalf of Bea, Weiss earns herself a lifetime membership in the Tiger Mother club. (Ironically, she criticizes the “Tiger Moms who press their kids into private-school test prep at age four, or force them to devote countless hours to piano or dance or sports [yet] find it unthinkable that anyone would coax a child to lose weight.”)

She polices the little girl’s food choices. She berates a Starbuck’s barrista for not knowing the exact calorie count in a kid’s hot chocolate. She withholds dessert, extra portions, and dinner (when she felt her daughter had consumed too many calories at a school French heritage celebration). She alienates friends and family, including her husband, who “soon tired of the food restrictions and the glacial rate of weight loss and stopped actively participating.”

The “Red Light, Green Light, Eat Right” program the family followed, created by Joanna Dolgoff, MD, seems, at least on the surface, to promote sensible eating habits without being overly restrictive. For example, on her website, Dr. Dolgoff distinguishes between “healthy” and “junky” green light (low calorie) choices. But Weiss manages to put her own personalized, eating-disordered spin on the doctor’s recommendations, filling Bea up with diet soda and fat-free, processed snack foods while limiting fruits (which can be eaten freely) because she found Bea’s consumption of them “excessive.”

By demonizing entire categories of foods, making others available solely on the basis of their negligible calorie counts, and subverting Bea’s hunger with low-cal cookie facsimiles devoid of nutritional value, Weiss might as well be giving her daughter a tutorial on how to develop an eating disorder. And instead of seeing Bea’s weight as a behavioral issue involving modifiable eating and exercise habits, she prefers to medicalize it, liking the word “obese” because it “carries a scary, diagnostic tone.” Some sports are added, and Bea even enjoys them, but physical activity doesn’t become a family endeavor because Weiss herself hasn’t been to a gym in over a decade.

By her eighth birthday, Bea had grown two inches, lost sixteen pounds, and acquired, as a reward for her weight loss, a feather hair extension and wardrobe of designer dresses. Weiss hastens to add, “Incredibly, she has not yet exhibited symptoms of intense psychological damage.”

Talk to me in ten years.

When Weiss presses her daughter to take pride in her new appearance, telling her how different she is from “that fat girl [who] is a thing of the past,” Bea responds with a depth of insight that far surpasses her mother’s. “That’s still me,” she replies. “I’m not a different person just because I lost sixteen pounds. Just because it’s in the past doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

In the way of many controversial media figures these days, Weiss has gotten herself a book contract. I wonder what she’ll write. . . A parenting book? A diet book? Or a sociopolitical treatise on the childhood obesity epidemic in early 21st century America?  I can hardly wait to find out.