Do Your Food Choices Bring Shame Upon Your House?
One Kid's Confessional Food Recall
Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash
I recently had a conversation with an eight-year-old, who I’ll call Abigail, about what she had to eat the previous day. I didn’t ask, but someone asked her to tell me.
At first, she didn’t want to.
Most people in my circles know about my affinity for health and fitness. Still, I don’t talk about it much unless I’m specifically asked. Even then, I try to stick to the basics. I’m aware, ultimately, of how subjective all of this is. There are core tenets and principles, but it’s easy to fall into the abyss of discrete mechanisms—trying to find that one small thing that will answer and solve all the riddles that perplex us and capture all the solutions that evade us. And the subjectivity comes in when the principles either align or not with our food and activity preferences.
If you want my two cents about food, a diet, a dietary pattern, as well as anything regarding any area of health and fitness, I’ll gladly offer it, but I’ll emphasize what I know about what is directionally true of the evidence as well as offer my speculations.
I’m aware that my answers and positions have the potential to push someone in a certain direction, however miniscule.
I’m even more aware of anything I say or do around kids. I try to lead by example, and I definitely don’t want to be preachy, judgy, or proselytizing, which is not helpful.
With anyone, I try to help them focus more on what to do than what not to do. Barking marching orders doesn’t inspire positivity or compliance let alone independence or long-term adherence. It’s good way to sow the bitter seeds of resentment. It can become less about food and more about control. For kids, in particular, “… striving for nutritional autonomy, the choice of less-healthy foods is not just because of their taste, but an act of parental defiance and peer solidarity” [1].
Abigail reluctantly relented and went through her menu: a waffle, chicken fingers, and—with her hands over her eyes—a couple of slices of pizza.
To reiterate, I’ve been careful not to say anything judgmental about food around Abigail. On the contrary, as she has several food allergies, I’ve been sensitive (pun) to make sure to learn what she can eat, but it looks like she’s already picked up on my propensity for healthy foods and that she has a basic grasp of what healthy and unhealthy foods are.
By not wanting to share her meals from the previous day, Abigail was showing me that she was either embarrassed or felt some degree of shame about her food choices, which made me cringe on the inside, because, one, she’s eight, and two, she’s already assigning morality to food. If you’re eating other humans, assigning morality to food choice is probably a good first step to start making better food choices, but if you’re kid, feeling shame about what you eat is a sign of bigger problems ahead.
Irrespective of age, if you have difficulty being honest when recounting something you’ve eaten, with either the food itself or the amount, that should be a red flag.
There are many factors that influence all our food choices, including but not limited to: availability, costs, family influences, peer group and social pressures, as well as individual preferences.
When it comes to kids, girls especially are more at risk of developing disordered eating and the consequent body issues. A precursor to some of these issues can be food-shaming, which is basically when someone points out what you’re eating and makes you aware of it in some negative context.
In Abigail’s case, although she has a variety of foods available, she’s at an age where she can assert herself more and her demands are being met more consistently. When I asked why she chose those foods, she said that they taste good. I tried to gently remind her to get some color on her plate and that the colors also taste good, like strawberries and carrots.
Time and time again, whether on the socials, random articles, or in conversations, especially with young people, I often hear how “healthy food doesn’t taste as good.” First, on the surface, our palettes and tastes buds get acclimatized to whatever we eat. If you’re used to eating salty food, anything that is not salty will offer little flavor. If you don’t often eat anything with added salt—not a sprinkle from the saltshaker yourself but rather something more processed—when you do eat salt, it may seem overly salty.
Second, “doesn’t taste as good” is a translation for “doesn’t bring me joy or make me happy,” which is actually a misconception, a popular one. In one study, described in the title, “Healthy food choices are happy food choices: Evidence from a real-life sample using smartphone-based assessments” [2], participants rated foods in the moment as they ate them, logging their scores on their phones. The category of food that brought participants the most eating joy and happiness was:
DRUM ROLL…
Vegetables.
“The contention that healthy food choices such as a higher fruit and vegetable consumption is associated with greater happiness and well-being clearly contrasts with the common belief that in particular high-fat, high-sugar, or high-caloric foods taste better and make us happy while we are eating them. When it comes to eating, people usually have a spontaneous ‘unhealthy = tasty’ association and assume that chocolate is a better mood booster than an apple.”
Moreover, we’ve all had bad days that ended in comfort food, right? We do this because we think that a specific kind of food—usually something hyperpalatable, energy dense, and most likely ultra-processed—is going to make us feel better, and that may be true in the short-term. However, as these authors further note: “One of the few studies testing the effectiveness of comfort food in improving mood showed that the consumption of ‘unhealthy’ comfort food had a mood boosting effect after a negative mood induction but not to a greater extent than non-comfort or neutral food.”
We have a glorious tendency to dichotomize food as either good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, but this isn’t very accurate. Foods should be seen on a spectrum of very healthy to neutral to less or least healthy, and often, one food is only as healthy as to another food it’s being compared to.
Also, a food’s ability to contribute to or subtract from our health depends on the amount and frequency of the food eaten. A burger or half a pizza once a month is nothing to worry about. Once a week, even then, it’s questionable to have any meaningful impact on an otherwise healthy dietary pattern. A couple of times a week or every day? Okay, now we’re getting into mirky if not flat-out troubled waters.
I like to apply principles of exercise—specifically weightlifting and resistance training—to nutrition and vice versa. With any training program, you’ll have to consider the frequency, duration, and intensity of the workouts; that is, how often you do it, how long you do each session, and how intense or effort it requires. Applying these principles to any food, it’s easy to have an operational framework for healthy eating.
Frequency: You want to eat typically healthier foods more frequently and less healthy foods less frequently.
Duration: At each meal, you want to spend more time on the healthier foods and less on the less healthy ones.
Intensity (in this case, the extent of how healthy or unhealthy a food is, or intensity could be energy-density): You don’t want to go to extremes on either side here. You don’t want to force yourself to do something heavy or something that might be pleasing on the lips but not so much later. And if you go heavy—super energy dense— you shouldn’t be doing it frequently. Think of a celebratory or holiday meal, something that would make you feel a little off or even ill.
And if you happen to overindulge from time to time, that’s perfectly fine. It happens, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
I mostly have my act together now with food, but that’s a relatively recent development. On occasion, when I happen to overindulge, one, I know when to call it a day, and two, my reaction is simple: Oops! I don’t beat myself up about it; I don’t feel guilt or shame; I don’t engage in any extra compensatory behaviors (cutting calories and/or overexercising), as I used to. I just go about my business as usual with my next meal. On the contrary, sometimes I see it as a forthcoming bump in energy and know that my next workout will likely be going well. Funny enough, all of this also takes practice—deliberate practice—but I’m able to ignore these hiccups because I have a solid foundation and baseline in place.
For kids, the adults in the room control what’s available. Beyond that, we want to give them the tools to help them build their own healthy foundations and baselines, and we can accomplish that by modeling our food choices, leaning more frequently on the healthier side of the food spectrum. We want to provide them with healthy choices and let them choose what they want to eat, to exercise their independence and autonomy, but they will likely choose more unhealthy fare, and lots of it, if left to their own devices. And we need to show them that when we do deviate, the bouts are short and infrequent, and there are no value judgments or negative attitudes that are attributed or assigned to those instances. They are blips, and in the hundreds of pounds of food that we all eat every year, they are effectively insignificant.
It sounds like the pillars we establish for kids are the not too dissimilar from the ones we should make our own.
Even if your food choices, quantities, and frequencies aren’t ideal or optimum for health, they should not bring shame upon your house or your family name.
And if you find there’s room for improvement, focus on that. If kids have a working understanding of what’s healthy and unhealthy, surely, it’s not rocket science for us adults either.
