A lot of the beliefs and bad habits we’ve built up around food stem from our childhood. Well-meaning parents who were busy and doing the best they could, but who often instilled unhealthy patterns and habits we hold to this day.
Patterns and habits we likely don’t even notice we hold.
So what are some of these?
- Eat your food or you can’t leave the table
In my opinion, the most damaging one of all is being told to clear everything on our plates. If your childhood was anything like mine you weren’t allowed to leave the table until you’d finished your beans or brussels sprouts or whatever your personal food challenge was. Or how about, ‘no dessert until you’ve finished your fish fingers’. Ugh. And now you have a love-hate relationship with fish fingers.
And worse, it’s become a habit and you clear your plate at every meal without even thinking about it. And not noticing if you’re actually full before you get to the end of the meal and are eating everything on your plate just because it’s now a habit.
Telling your child to eat everything, even if they’re not hungry, teaches them to ignore their own hunger mechanism. And once you start ignoring it, it becomes harder and harder to hear. And now as adults, we eat because it’s a mealtime and ‘time’ to eat, not because we’re hungry. And we finish what’s on our plate because it would be ‘wrong’ not to do so.
- Using food as comfort
We give food constantly to our children if they hurt themselves, or are unhappy. Here, this will cheer you up. This then leads to a lifelong connection in their minds between eating food and feeling better.
- Using food as a reward
We also reward our children with food. Perhaps after a ballgame, or for doing well in their exams. With a trip to the ice-cream parlour, of the family favourite restaurant as a reward.
As a child, do you remember having to go for a jab or some vaccine? And then being given a lolly or sweet? Even now as an adult we’re offered a lollipop or sweet after having our flu jab.
- Social occasions
All extended family get-togethers or having friends around always involved food. And drink. So now we think we can’t have a good time, or social get together without food and drink.
Growing up, I have clear memories of visiting a distant Uncle occasionally on the weekend with my parents. And to shut us up and keep us quiet while the adults talked, he’d always bring out the most delicious selection of choccies on the table and I’d gorge myself.
Visits to my Aunt and Uncle always involved food. And pudding. And whatever special dessert my Aunt cooked up for me, knowing how much I loved her baking. And wanting to show her love for her niece and nephew.
- Festivities
Ah festivities.
We associate Easter with chocolate easter eggs, sweets and cake for our birthday, advent calendars leading up to Christmas. Eating turkey or ham, stuffing, potatoes and gravy, Christmas pudding. The entire works at Christmas dinner. Pumpkin pies at Thanksgiving. Trick or Treat at Halloween.
I remember each time we drove down to the seaside during school holiday (an 8-hour trip made 3-4 times a year) we’d stock the car up with colouring books and games, but also sweets, chocolates, crisps and colas.
Christmas stockings stuffed with sweets and choccies, with the occasional non-food treat.
Visits to the Rand Easter Show, my memory is always the candy floss I got there. And the toffee apple. I can’t remember a thing about the rest of the entire day spent there, just how delicious the food was and how I’d always go home feeling a little sick.
- We decide what they should eat
We also tell our children what to eat. We dish it up and make them eat it. And we decide what we think they should have, rather than letting them decide for themselves. And then we have a battle each day to get them to eat it. Imagine if they were given what they want instead of what we think they should have. The battles would disappear.
- Behave at the table
My mealtimes were always accompanied by ‘don’t put your elbows on the table’. ‘don’t play with your food’. Children love to play, why take the fun out of family time? Time you could be spending playing and having fun with your children. So what if they play with their food. Or for that matter, have their elbows on the table.
- Don’t talk with your mouth full
The other thing I can still hear my mother saying, ‘stop talking with your mouth full, it’s rude’. But mom...
Kids want to talk and feel part of the group and conversation. They are then torn between eating and talking,
- Eating because it’s mealtime
Very often we force our children to eat just because it’s mealtime. Dinner at our house was 6pm. Daddy got home from work, mom had cooked, and that is when we sat down to eat. Regardless of whether or not we were hungry. That reinforces the eat because it’s time to eat instead of eating when you are hungry.
I went to boarding school for my years 13-18. And again, mealtimes were at set times and we had a matron who’d walk around the dining room making sure we’d eaten every single thing on our plates. Even when they served us liver and onions. Ugh.
- Unconscious habits and beliefs
All the habits and beliefs you hold around food, most of these unconscious, would have been formed during your childhood. And now they are a part of who you are. What you eat. When you eat.
And even why you eat.
You Can Change This!
But you can change this. The first thing you need to do is start recognising these habits, noticing the beliefs. And realising you can change them. They are not set in stone.
You can easily instil new better serving habits and beliefs around foods. Ones that will serve you better and empower you to take control back around food.
In order to break the connection, you need to recognise the connection
Perhaps every time you hear an ice cream van you want ice cream, but it’s really the happy memories and emotions it elicits from your childhood you are after.
Keep a food journal. You’ll soon notice patterns. You might notice that it’s every day at 3:15 pm you get the munchies. Have something healthy at hand so you don’t hit the vending machine. And think back to your childhood, is that when you got home from school and grabbed something out the fridge to tide you over to dinner.
Practice not eating absolutely everything on your plate. Sure it might be hard at first, and you’ll probably feel guilty. But your body and waistline will thank you for it.
And make a commitment to yourself that from now on, you will eat only when you are hungry, not because it’s time to eat. And you will stop when you’ve had enough, even if you still have food left on your plate.
