This story is part of Very, Very Unmerry, Yahoo’s look at the meltdowns, mayhem and misfires that haunt the most festive time of the year. Do you have your own holiday disaster story? Drop us a comment below or fill out this Google form, and we may feature your submission in a future story.

A week before Thanksgiving, Jessica S. was already mentally preparing herself for dinner table conversation. She wasn’t worried about all the usual minefields — politics, religion, money — but something more constant: her mother’s relentless stream of commentary about what she and everyone else was eating.

“There's gonna be that moment where she's gonna be like, ‘Oh, I shouldn't have any more. I'm stuffed to the gills. My pants are gonna explode. I shouldn't have another piece, but all right, maybe just a little. I'm so bad,’” Jessica tells Yahoo. “That always happens at every big meal, and I don't want it to be a thing.”

Now in her late 30s, with a family and a home of her own, Jessica still feels the stress and pressure of the messages her mom ingrained in her as a child about diet and exercise. Jessica’s mom has all the hallmarks, in other words, of an “almond mom.”

“My mom probably doesn't even know what the term 'almond mom' means, but she is 100% an almond mom,” says Jessica. “Growing up, it was definitely impressed upon me that women were supposed to be thin, and eating too much is bad.”

The term emerged a few years ago as a way to describe a mother who passes on rigid expectations about eating habits, weight and body image onto her children, especially daughters. The phrase originated from a 2013 clip from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, in which Yolanda Hadid advises her daughter Gigi to eat a few almonds and “chew them really well” when the model complains about feeling weak from hunger. The moment resurfaced on TikTok around 2022, and suddenly, there was a shorthand to describe the way so many women felt growing up in homes where every bite of food, every snack was surveilled.

Creators made viral videos capturing the various sayings familiar to those who grew up in diet-obsessed households, directives like, “You’re not hungry, you’re just bored,” or more subtle, underhanded remarks such as, “I can’t believe you’re eating that. I’m still full from breakfast!” To some, the meme-ification of it all might make it seem like a silly joke. To those who felt the sting of recognition, like Jessica, it helped them identify the moments that shaped both their mother-daughter relationships and their lifelong patterns with food.

Jessica has worked hard to unlearn the lessons her almond mom tried to drill into her but going home for the holidays still feels fraught. It’s an experience that millions of millennial and Gen Z women will grapple with as they return home for food-centric celebrations. It’s an especially touchy subject given the re-emergence of an ultra-thin body ideal and the prevalence of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. A November YouGov/Yahoo News poll found that 22% of respondents (and 28% of women) say they are feeling anxiety around diet and exercise around the holidays.

That unease is hardly surprising, says Johanna Kandel, founder and CEO of the Alliance for Eating Disorders. “America's favorite pastime is diet talk,” she tells Yahoo. “The first thing that people do when you come together socially is comment on appearance.”

Many women are bracing themselves for exactly that. Some have a playbook for navigating those moments; some are planning to grin and bear it. Others still are determined to not let history repeat itself.

A childhood shrouded by diet culture

Jessica doesn’t remember a time in her childhood when diet wasn’t a topic of conversation in her household. “I remember from a very young age, my mom would be sharing a SlimFast with me and telling me to have that for breakfast, sending me with almonds to school,” she said. “Every few months, there was a different diet in the house.”

When Jessica was 14, her mom went on the weight loss drug Phentermine — and urged her to do the same. As the teenaged Jessica was already going through a hard time, she agreed. It wasn’t until a few years later, when Jessica left for college, that she realized how much those experiences had damaged her. “My parents weren’t there, so I was getting to make my own food choices without anybody breathing down my neck,” says Jessica about her first time being away from home. In the midst of that, she regained the 50 pounds she had lost by taking Phentermine.

“When I came home, there were a lot of really painful comments from my family,” she recalls. The most hurtful came from her grandfather, which gave her an inkling of where her mother’s own food beliefs had come from. “He was like, ’You're a bright girl. We talked about the freshman 15. You had all these skills, you've seen how your mom eats. So what happened?’”

The comment felt like a slap in the face, says Jessica. “After that, I did start feeling a little more self-conscious, thinking about how I’m gonna look at holiday time and if people are going to ask me questions.”

This year, there’s the added complexity of living in a world where 1 in 8 adults are on GLP-1 drugs. “It would be weird for our Thanksgiving dinner to be the only one that doesn't mention like, ‘Hey, did you see Uncle John lost 100 pounds? I bet he's on Ozempic,’” Jessica says. “It's just the talk of the town.”

Kandel says that everybody brings their own baggage to the holiday table — one family member might be on a weight loss drug; another might be recovering from an eating disorder. It’s important to extend some compassion to everyone, even almond moms, even if they are acting as messengers of diet culture.

“Often they're not meaning to create harmful messaging around bodies or food. It's the world and the culture that they grew up in, it's the messages that they're getting, it’s the algorithm that's pushing a certain type of narrative,” she says. “A majority of people start this journey because they want to eat better, they want to feel better. ... It quickly morphs into being such a focus that your life is now [consumed by] what you're eating, how you're eating, where this food is coming from, if you're eating enough, if you're eating too much. You start being really overcome with these food rules.”

Jessica’s mother doesn’t comment directly on her body anymore — Jessica has put up a firm boundary around that kind of talk. “In the midst of a huge fight, I was like, ‘I want you to never talk about my weight ever again,’” she says. “I must have just somehow that time really gotten through. So now, to a fault, she won't say anything. I think she really doesn't want to get in trouble.”

But Jessica still senses her mother’s judgement. Now, she’s also contending with an entirely new set of diet beliefs — her mother-in-law is also an almond mom. While her mom is more subtle, often narrating her own food choices, her husband’s mom is more explicit.

“She'll be staring at what everybody else is eating and asking, ‘Why didn't you eat more of that? Did you not like it? Are you on a diet?’ She just has no filter,” says Jessica. “I just want to relax and enjoy it and eat what I want to eat and compliment people's cooking. But as soon as she makes that the focus, I feel like people are watching what's on my plate.”

A moment of fleeting food freedom

Ava B. had both an almond mom and dad growing up who shaped her relationship with food.

Though her parents are divorced and live in separate homes, the comments about food, dieting and working out are constant in both households. Her mom is routinely satiated by half a grapefruit for breakfast, bits of avocado or unsalted tortilla chips as snacks and a plate of broccoli for dinner. Her dad often only has grilled chicken in the fridge.

“If we're eating something and I go back to get seconds of it, my mom still says, ‘Oh, really? I'm full. I had half an avocado. How are you still hungry?’” says Ava, now 31. Her situation is made more difficult by the fact that she’s temporarily moved back in with her mother. “I try not to eat at home because I don't want to hear any comments,” she says.

For Ava and her two sisters, the holidays with her big Italian-American extended family — “the seven fishes and all,” Ava says — were a weird aberration from the usual diet talk, but one that also messes with her head. Ava remembers being shocked by the way that her aunts, uncles and cousins all acted around those holiday feasts, with no shame attached to it. “It’s weird to get a glimpse of how other people in my family eat,” she says. “I just thought it was normal for your parents to be so focused on food all the time.”

Despite that sounding joyous, it’s also been a source of unease. “They would try to play it off like we were normal. Like, ‘What do you mean you can't have more than one? Sure, go ahead,’” Ava recalls. “We could kind of eat how we should have been eating all the time. …It’s such a weird flip.”

Ava feels that these moments of food freedom are fleeting — after the holidays are over, she’ll get an onslaught of questions about when she’s going to get back into the gym. “Between Thanksgiving and New Year's feels very stressful in that sense, with the food stuff and trying to keep up this image,” Ava says. “Then after the New Year, it’s almost like, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll fix it.’ I'll lie and say, ‘Oh, I signed up for the gym,’ even though I didn't. That's just what they want to hear.”

Cultural differences come into play

While Jessica and Ava have tried to fight back against their families’ expectations, Hannah C. feels differently. When it comes to her almond mom, Hannah, who is Korean-American, chalks up some of the behavior to cultural differences.

“Diet culture is very big among Southern Orange County housewives. I also think that it's a big thing when it comes to Asian culture,” Hannah, 26, tells Yahoo. “It's very common for people to be blunt.”

Going into the holidays, Hannah knows to expect certain observations about her appearance or how much food is on her plate. “My grandma, who barely speaks any English, asked my cousin if she was pregnant,” Hannah recalls. (Her cousin was not pregnant.) “It’s just one of those things where they’re not used to catering to everyone’s feelings.”

Esther Tambe, a weight-inclusive dietitian, says that it’s important to acknowledge that not every family is equipped to have a nuanced conversation about how their comments are hurtful. “Boundaries look different in every culture,” she tells Yahoo. “In some families, saying ‘Please don’t comment on my eating’ would be considered talking back or disrespectful. Even ignoring a comment can be disrespectful.”

If people are nervous about such talk, Tambe urges them to think about what will work for their specific situations. “You have to figure out what’s safe and realistic,” she says. “Maybe eating at a different time, bringing a support person or choosing not to attend certain gatherings.”

Knowing where the family's behavior is coming from, Hannah is less inclined to try to fix the behavior. “I wouldn't say there's any sort of shame in indulging in the sweets and all the holiday goodness. But I'll hear it when I come home, like, ‘Oh, you're eating again,’” she says. “I know it's coming from a place of caring about you, and they're worried about your health and they associate weight gain and over-consumption to be a bad thing. It's just part of their older generation, their older culture.”

“Everyone at the end of the day is full and happy and well fed,” says Hannah of her usual Christmas celebrations. “We'll deal with the comments and the conversation the next day.”

Breaking the cycle

Although the mental gymnastics around body and food conversations has become the norm for Jessica, she and her husband are set on giving their son a different kind of childhood. “I don't want my child to grow up with these damaging beliefs about food,” she says. Having him subject to the comments from both of his grandmothers makes that difficult. Jessica has taken steps to change that when it comes to her own mother at least.

“We've had to have some difficult conversations with her about how we talk about food in front of my son,” says Jessica. “We'll be sitting at a meal and I'll say, ‘There's no such thing as good and bad foods, mom.’ ... I don't want to derail a nice meal by needing to explain that to her.”

At her mother-in-law’s table, what Jessica allows her son to eat is up for as much scrutiny as what’s on her own plate. “Really? You're gonna give him a third serving of that?” is something she’s become accustomed to hearing.

When Thanksgiving did finally roll around, Jessica’s mom couldn’t help but to fall into old habits too. “We did have some awkwardness around how many scoops of ice cream our son was allowed to have with his apple pie. [My husband and I] let him have a second scoop when he asked, which got some raised eyebrows from my mom and a comment about how ‘he's gonna be up all night with all that sugar!’” says Jessica.

She ended up denying her son’s third scoop for the sake of sparing him a tummy ache. “It's so hard to walk the middle line and teach about healthy choices in a way that is not body-shaming and also doesn't turn food into some exciting special treat or thing he's ‘not supposed’ to have,” she says. “I need to break the cycle and be there for my kid.”

Who's really conjuring all that holiday magic? Hint: It's not Santa.

No dining table, no gravy, no clue. How the first Thanksgiving I ever hosted turned into a spectacular fiasco.