I pretty much don’t trust a single word that comes out of my mouth when it comes to food. I’ve never had an eating disorder, but unhealthy attitudes towards food? That, I’ve experienced, because hey, I grew up female in this culture, so I readily think of foods as good and bad, sin and reward. I have been undoing the cultural indoctrination over the last 15 years and I feel healthier and happier for it but I still have to stop and think about what I say about food in front of my child, particularly as I will probably be the only person around her to counteract the rubbish she is going to hear about food. This post I found at Hoyden About Town by Lauredhel was a wonderful discussion on that, and a good reminder, I was slipping on some things.
I try to describe food options in terms of freshness and colour and origin and diversity and nutrients, not in terms of good and bad, allowed and forbidden, sinful and virtuous.
While we’re talking early eating habits, there’s also this from Lauredhel. (OK, that’s a bit of a stretch for relating these two posts, but it’s all I’ve got). Breasts really are fascinating – see why do breasts shrink after breastfeeding.
Did you know that the storage capacity of any individual breast may be between 80 and 600 ml, but that storage capacity has no effect on the ability of a mother to feed a baby? As soon as the breast empties, the polypeptide dubbed “Feedback Inhibitor of Lactation” (FIL) levels drop, and the breast ramps up its production speed dramatically. Cue-fed babies will adjust their feeding frequency according to their mothers’ breasts’ storage capacity. In addition, the emptier the breast, the higher the fat content of the milk.
In practise I just find that being positive about food leaves me with no answer to the question “why can’t I have 3 hot dogs for lunch?”. So I stumble around with comments about sometimes food, and things that have nothing in them that helps your body and other clumsy things.
And in the end I have achieved exactly what my parents achieved without any thought for nutrition – they like a huge variety of food, get a good nutritional base, but eat too much rubbish. I say this having just eaten an ice cream that the eldest walked down to the shop with his father to buy… 🙂 Jeez, I’m just such a good mother…
Ah, I get around that gotcha by talking about balancing a meal or a day’s or week’s food, mostly in terms of nutrients (hard to imagine) and food colours (easy to see). In this way you’re talking about getting all the nutrients and freshness that you help you feel good, not talking about avoiding the sinful “bad food”. So a hot dog has fat and protein, but not vitamins and fibre. Thus, voila, have some salad or some fruit!
And if someone really does want three hot dogs for lunch? Sure. Just balance at snacktime and dinnertime. It’s all flexible.
Yeah, I do try that, but the problem I have is that he wants to keep eating long after the balanced diet has been achieved… 2-3 courses of breakfast, normal lunch and two full dinners if I’d let him. If his dinner was balanced, surely his brother’s uneaten one is even better? How do you handle just too much food, as opposed to too much of this food?
(Sorry for hijacking your comments blue milk!)
My kid chucked a tanty yesterday because he wanted cake for breakfast. We told him he can’t have it because we’re not French. This came after a week of tanties every night when he wanted Weetbix for dinner. He’s too young for explanations of ‘sometimes foods’ so we just hide stuff and show him empty containers and tell him “all gone”.
Tonight of course it’s Logies night so we’re having frozen chips, fish fingers, frozen pastizzi thingies, and cheap plonk.
Oh yeah, Logies tonight. I forgot, my sister is at the Logies tonight for the first time. Yay her!
We try to counteract the good food/bad food messages as best we can. We do talk about sometimes foods and once-a-day foods and we talk about balance as well. We don’t use sweets as a reward, but we do see them as a treat.
I don’t know what you do about the just-too-much food, since my daughter is actually the only one in the house who will stop eating when she’s full. If she asks for more food, we give it to her (although we do say “you can have more protein or more carrots if you’re still hungry”, knowing if she’s really hungry she will eat another piece of chicken and if she was just trolling for more bread she won’t).
Ariane, I have a very sweet tooth, which my father’s family encouraged when I was a child by consistently feeding me chocolates and sweet biscuits.
They DID manage to break me of the “eating too much” habit at age eight, although it’s not a method I would recommend; the rule was I could eat as much of my Easter/whatever sweets, so long as I also ate all my lunch, dinner and breakfast. That was the year I received somewhere around 20 kilos of chocolate for Easter.
It disappeared in two days, and I felt mildly nauseous from sugar poisoning for a week.
Ariane I’m inclined to go with Aphie, is some kind of self-regulatory approach to your child’s appetite not possible? Wouldn’t he learn from the discomfort of over-eating if he was free to indulge his whim for hotdogs after healthy meals? A kind of consequence based approach. I haven’t got an older child so I don’t know what lies ahead, but a self-regulated appetite is what we’re doing with our 3 year old.