Leave Childhood Eating In Your Childhood
Many of my clients report that they begin each day determined to do well on a new eating plan.
They stay on target until late afternoon, and then at around 4 o’clock they lose their resolve and begin to crave cakes, biscuits or sweets.
In therapy they very often recall coming home from school to a snack of something sweet or stodgy.
Many adults have programmed themselves to recreate this scenario by eating the same foods at the same time of day. We have taste receptors in the mouth that link certain tastes to certain sensations.
That is why we always crave foods like toast, ice cream, biscuits, cakes, chocolate, desserts, cereal with milk, etc.
Few people crave comfort food in the form of salads, vegetables, sushi or steamed fish. We have no memories of these foods being given to us as a treat or comfort so we can’t re-enact anything by eating them.
Food is linked to memories, both good and bad, that’s why many adults hate semolina, tapioca or Brussels sprouts because of the memories of being made to eat them at school.
These Memories Are Still Having An Effect Years Later
Overeating is a search for security: a need to recreate the secure feeling we got as children when we held and fed.
By eating foods that are similar in sweetness and texture to the foods we ate as babies, we are trying to reactivate the memory of feeling secure and loved: we are looking to find the feeling in food but it’s a search that does not work.
Emotional Eaters Often Want To Eat Food Linked To Nice Memories To Recreate The Memory Along With The Sensation
Emotions are very linked to food and many people who eat sugary fatty foods are searching for the emotional memory the food had for them.
Smell is by far the strongest of our five senses and is absolutely linked to memory, followed by taste, hence the smell of freshly baked bread or cake or chocolate will bring back memories, as will the taste of these foods.
Equally the smell of boiled cabbage can remind us of being back in the school dining room and the taste of something we were forced to eat like cod liver oil can bring up horrible memories.
When We Continuously Reward Children With Food We Set Up A Pattern In The Brain That Wires It To Believe Food Makes Everything Better And Is A Cure All
We reward children with sweets, snacks and desserts then they learn to associate these foods with feeling better.
Food can distract an unhappy child and instantly make things better because children’s lives are so simple therefore and ice cream creates instant gratification.
Lucy falls over, you buy her an ice cream, she is distracted and happy again.
As an adult Lucy falls out with her boyfriend she buys a big tub of ice cream believing it will still have the same effect, but it can’t.
As adults our lives are not simple and we cannot find instant gratification in food.
It can’t make anything better.
If you lost your job and your partner and you were describing you feelings of devastation to a friend who replied, ‘Here’s a chocolate bar, that will make you better’, you would find this insensitive and ridiculous.
A chocolate bar is not a cure all to an adult.
Adults don’t need instant gratification, we need the long-term gratification of liking our bodies and being healthy.
As an adult you cannot find comfort, distraction, friendship or love in food.
If you could, believe me, you would have done so by now.
When children go on long trips it is so easy to distract them with food and it its hard not to do this on a long train, car or plane journey.
So many habitual eaters cannot do a long trip without stocking up with sweets and snacks just like when they were children.
You can break all of these patterns.
Reward yourself with magazine and an hour to yourself to read it.
Buy healthy fruit to snack on.
For many people Christmas and Easter mean lots of chocolate while summer means ice cream because we have programmed ourselves to link a particular food to a particular event.
Human behaviour is not random, it is heavily patterned.
We set up patterns in our brain, but it is your brain and you can change any pattern.
By doing the exercises in this book you can break these patterns forever.
If you sabotage your diet at teatime or get those early evening cravings for stodgy, fatty or sugary foods the way to stop them and to stop looking for comfort in food is to say to yourself out loud several times:
- I am not a child. I refuse to eat like one.
- I don’t need that. I don’t eat that. I don’t do that.
- I don't need nursery food.
- Cake cannot make me feel better.
- Food cannot solve any problems.
- I have a healthy adult relationship with food now and always.
- Every time you do this you are moving away from a negative learned response and rewiring your brain for success, so do it frequently and enthusiastically.
If You Want To Have A Slender Adult Body You Need To Eat Like A Healthy Adult
If you were travelling in first or business class you would enjoy all the luxury grown-up food served in first class.
You would not ask the stewardess to go into economy and get you the children’s chips, beans and chicken nuggets, because you would feel silly.
Imagine being at a glamorous event with two buffet tables, one for the adults laden with lobster, seafood, chicken, Parma ham, exotic salads, fresh mango, papaya and berries.
The other is laid out for the children with chips and ketchup, sticky doughnuts with vivid pink icing melting in the heat, bowls of crisps and sweets in psychedelic colours and those bright blue and pink crushed ice drinks.
Which would you choose?
Imagine how odd it would be to eat all the children’s food with all the children while the other adults looked on baffled by your behaviour and choices.
When my daughter was very small and had birthday parties the other children’s parents always came along to supervise their toddlers.
I would provide grown-up food and wine for the adults and smiley face biscuits, crisps, sweets egg mayonnaise sandwiches and sausages on sticks for the children.
Every now and again an adult would hover over the children’s table and eat all their sweets as quickly as possible looking horribly uncomfortable.
I have done this myself, before I sorted out my eating habits, and I always hated the feeling afterwards.