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Motivational Tips to Get in Shape
How To Get Your Kids Addicted To Food
While your goal may not be to make your kids fat, unhappy or addicted to food that does not mean you are not going to end up doing it. One of the biggest ways we do this in today’s society is through conditioning very young children with food. The main reason we do it is like many of societies’ habits, we were taught this way by our parents.
The typical youngster has a healthy view of food. They use it as a pleasurable activity amongst many others. Eating that ice cream may be fun but then so is chasing a football which ranks up there with pulling the dog’s ears. When food is used amongst many other activities to provide pleasure it will not produce too much of a negative effect on the body assuming you know what to eat to optimise your body (which may differ from typical ‘healthy eating’).
Foods cause a problem for children when they are given to them as a reward, to keep them quiet or to provide excitement in their life. This can create a behaviour cycle where they demand more and more food often with horrendous consequences for their body if combined with bad foods and too much of them!
Where foods become a problem for adults and children is in how we form an anchor to one or more certain foods. An anchor is a stimulus that provokes an emotion, e.g. your favourite song reminds you of the past and makes you feel good. Food acts the same way and many to most people’s food anchors stem from when they were a child. Using this knowledge with children the goal is then to create anchors to foods that help the body while avoiding too strong an anchor to negative foods.
Start by not using food as a reward, silencing tool or an idea to excite the kids. Another way to avoid anchor forming is to rotate any bad foods you give them, for example do not always use one particular brand because it reinforces that anchor to the particular food.
You should also try to anchor ‘good’ foods into the child’s psyche. Do this by giving them these foods when they feel happy already and by subtly pointing out how good foods are producing other good things in their life. It is also important to not feed children when they are not hungry. Many parents are obsessed by a fear their kids will starve to death if they are not eating every 10 minutes. This only results in overweight kids.
This whole process is made easier if you can start seeing how the foods your children eat relate to how they feel afterwards. When you get it right you will control hunger and craving, when wrong, the opposite occurs.
The biggest objection I hear about this is always from the parents, because they feel it is depriving their children some happiness if they hold back certain foods (because the parents think the food makes them happy).
Argue all you like, but food addictions are learnt by the child not born with them. As parents you are the biggest educators and if you think a short term pleasure is worth a long term addiction then that is your choice.
Mind body change exercise
- Take a look at your favourite foods and ask yourself what do they remind you of? Can you think of any other things you could do that also remind you of a similar period? E.g. playing certain music, board games, photos, talking to people etc.
- If you are a parent spend some time thinking about how you are currently conditioning your children to be addicted to food. You may have to jump over your own beliefs here.
- Take some time to find ways to replace using food and instead think up some non-food or drink related behaviours/rewards.
Ben Wilson
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