Why Do We All Seem to Have a Tendency to Comfort Eat?
If you have children, you will know that when they are small they tend to go through a fussy eating phase. Normally they grow out of it but parents have many different ways of reacting to a stubborn child. We do our best as a parent but unfortunately, being a parent can sometimes seem like walking a tightrope with a minefield on each side. Sometimes in the long term, the strategy we choose produces an outcome we could not have anticipated and you may discover you have been training your children to comfort eat. Generally, the strategies detailed below only become a problem if used consistently throughout childhood.
Training Your Children to Comfort Eat Starts Early
Babies are not the best communicators. When a baby cries, there are not many things that it might need. Unfortunately, for some babies the first option when it cries is for their mother to feed them. It may be that the baby is hungry but if they are not, this is the first point where you may be training your children to comfort eat!
When a child starts to talk, the conditioning becomes more sophisticated. How often have you heard or said the following?
Clean Your Plate – There Are Children Starving in Africa
A more contemporary version to this is “You cannot get down from the table until you have finished you dinner” (finished, of course, implying eaten it all). This statement is training your children to comfort eat because it is telling the child that there is some merit in eating all of the food put in front of them – even if they have to make themselves ill in order to do so. This is training the child to disregard their natural weight control mechanism and eat so long as there is food in front of them. As an adult it becomes difficult to leave food because to do so would be “bad” or “naughty".
If You Do Not Eat Your Dinner, You Will Not Get Any Pudding
This is training a child to regard sweet things as superior to savoury. The dessert becomes the reward for eating the main course. It trains the child to eat dessert even if they are filled up by the main course.
Be A Good Boy/Girl and Eat Your Dinner
This teaches the lesson that if you eat (even if you do not want to eat), you are good. As an adult, this child will eat when they are down or feeling dejected because they have been conditioned to feel good or rewarded when they eat.
If You Are Good, I Will Buy You Some Sweets Later On
This conditions a child to believe that sweets are a reward. If as an adult they feel in need of a lift, they can give themselves a feeling of reward by eating sweets!
There is not a manual on being a parent and we do the best we can. Unfortunately, we all make mistakes. Even if you have said these things to your children, it does not mean that the overall message from their childhood will be as described above but a child’s conditioning does have a major effect on whether they develop a weight problem. Hopefully, you have not been inadvertently training your children to comfort eat but if you have a weight problem it may help you to understand how that may have started. When eating habits like comfort eating are deeply ingrained trying to get thin just by calorie counting can be an uphill struggle.
Address Unhelpful Patterns of Thinking with Hypnotherapy
If you want to control your weight by correcting unhelpful attitudes to food hypnotherapy can be extremely effective.
Book an appointment with Stephen Rigby today on 01483 566115 or you can book online. Appointments can be made in Guildford and Woking, Surrey. Free introductory sessions are available in Guildford.