Tag Archive for: intuitive eating family support

Food Shaming and How to Break Out of the Cycle

Sad woman eating donutAre you suffering from food shame? Have you recently encountered someone telling you not to eat something because it is fattening? Do you get looks from people if you eat a cookie? Or maybe you are the one engaging in these behaviors and judging others based on what they eat. The concept of classifying food as “good” or “bad” and then judging others based on where your perception fits is called food shaming.  This can negatively impact your health.

 

Does this scenario sound familiar to you? You are in the company of a particular family member who once again makes a comment or gives you a look when you reach for a food that they consider “off limits”.  You become extremely frustrated to be on the receiving end of this judgment. As a result, not only do you end up depriving yourself of the food you really want, but you also find yourself experiencing an emotion such as anger. You become angry with this person for making a comment and because then you end up not eating that food to avoid the judgment.

 

It becomes a vicious cycle in which you may also find yourself engaging in this behavior, such as when you are at the grocery store and see another shopper with a cart full of unhealthy, fat and sugar laden food. You automatically make the assumption that they must be in poor health.

 

How did this happen? How has this become a socially acceptable norm?

 

It boils down to influences and messages that you receive throughout life. These messages come early in life from parents and build throughout your years from the media, friends and even healthcare professionals.

 

What you may not realize is how detrimental this is to your health and mental well-being. These kinds of beliefs and thought processes go against your natural feeding instincts. You are born with natural hunger and satiety cues. Allowing food shaming to influence you effectively violates these inborn cues. Instead of indulging in a craving when you are actually hungry for it, you are doing yourself a great disservice and instead create feelings of deprivation and anger. Feelings of deprivation and anger can then backfire and cause an overeating episode in an effort to satisfy the deprivation and quell the anger. Overeating episodes such as this often happen when you are not actually hungry. This then results in feeling bloated and lethargic as well as powerless over how much you just consumed. So the anger and deprivation finally result in powerlessness and low self-efficacy from the loss of control.

 

How can you best defend yourself from food shaming? You need to embrace intuitive eating to tune into your physiological cues to eating, avoid emotional eating, develop a healthy relationship or make peace with food, and respect your body. Intuitive eating brings you back to your roots and re-engages you with your innate drive to eat.

 

Now it’s your turn to take action: What will you do this week to combat food shaming?

 

 

Intuitive Eating: Make it a Family Affair

Family meals 2Many of the eating behaviors that you are trying to change have likely been behaviors and habits you learned while growing up through your childhood. Statements such as “you can’t leave the table until you clean your plate” or “clean your room and we will go for ice cream” puts food in the category of either punishment or reward.  It is so important to think about how these statements mold your children’s thoughts and beliefs about food.

It’s very important to me, as a mom of 4 children and 1 grandchild, to help my family respect their individual food preferences and inner signals of hunger and satiety. They need not eat what they don’t like, nor should they eat when they are not hungry or continue eating when they reach satiety. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I don’t ask them to be open minded and taste a food that they “think” they won’t like, or that they didn’t like years ago. Tastes change, especially in growing children.

Let me share a story with you. Last week we were eating a family dinner. My youngest daughter (11 years old) stopped eating and put her fork down. There was a little food left on her plate (I think it was potatoes) and my husband asked her why she didn’t finish.  She said that she’s no longer hungry and that she had enough. She looked at me when she said it, as if to say “mom, aren’t you proud?!” Yes, indeed, I was beaming. I quickly said that I will put away what she left over and she can eat it tomorrow. This was important as my husband doesn’t like to waste food and as long as he realizes I wasn’t going to throw her food in the garbage, he didn’t say a word other than, “oh, okay”.

Practicing intuitive eating should be a family affair. In this way, your kids will grow up with a healthy attitude towards food, their mind and their body.

Your turn to take action: Please share in the comments below one of your dinner table stories depicting intuitive eating.