116: Emotional Eating Habits Start in Childhood (how to avoid that with your kids!)

Raise a thumb if you’ve caught yourself stress eating in the past year…

How about rewarding yourself for getting through the day with a little something to indulge in (sugary treats or alcohol)?

And have you seen anyone in your household engage in emotional eating?

Eating because you’re sad, stressed, anxious, worried, overwhelmed, etc?

We know it’s harder to break a bad habit than to build a good one in the first place, so how can we set our kids up to be protected from emotional eating habits?

We’ll talk about 3 simple strategies today:

1. How to find the right words to talk about emotional eating at a kid’s level
2. Why we need to care for big emotions with love and connection, not food
3. The importance of avoiding food as rewards

And finally, we’ll chat about helping our kids be resilient to the “diet culture” out there which does not have their best interests at heart…

Can’t see the video? Learn how to avoid emotional eating here on YouTube!

No time to watch the whole video? Here are the notes!

Emotional Eating

• 0:05: When I stress eat, I tend to go for the chocolate, ice cream, and other foods that are not great for me. Today we’re talking about emotional eating and how to help your kids avoid emotional eating patterns.

Where do Emotional Eating Habits Come From?

• 1:06: I’m sure you all know from experience that it’s easier to form a new habit than break an old habit. Let’s set our kids up for success so they don’t have to break unhealthy emotional eating patterns as adults. 

Breaking a habit is so hard, and the longer you’ve had a habit, the more difficult it is to break it. Many of our food habits start in childhood. -Katie Kimball

• 1:58: I personally developed a sweet after a meal habit in childhood. After finishing a meal, it doesn’t feel complete without a little piece of dark chocolate or something sweet. Let me tell you, it’s a hard habit to break!

• 2:59: Some people sometimes do the opposite of stress eating and they are unable to eat when under high stress and don’t get enough food or proper nutrition. That’s dangerous in a different way. 
• 3:19: Today on the Healthy Parenting Connector we’re going to talk about 3 ways to avoid emotional eating habits developing in your kids. 

3 Ways to Avoid Emotional Eating Habits

• 4:00: First let’s talk about some language regarding eating. Even with very little kids we can talk about different kinds of hunger. Are they bored hungry or sad hungry or is their tummy actually hungry? We don’t want to feed a bored hungry even with healthy food.

We only want to feed a hungry tummy. We don’t want to feed the bored or sad hungry. -Katie Kimball 

• 5:36: We want to treat big emotions with something other than food. We don’t want our kids to link food with strong emotions or distract them with food when they need to be supported working through those emotions. Here’s the interview I mentioned with Dr. Dina Rose.

• 7:15: I give some examples of helping kids through big emotions without resorting to food.
• 8:19: This includes big positive emotions as well! If every time something happens to celebrate we pull out food, our kids will link foods (usually sweets!) with celebrating and accomplishment. We don’t want to think “fun things=fun foods.”

• 9:17: We want to avoid using food as rewards. How many times have you been at church or a doctor’s office and you hear a parent say “If you’re good we’ll get donuts.” or a teacher has a reward basket with candy for good grades or behavior. Here’s more on why rewards are a bad idea with one of my favorite parenting experts.

• 10:52: COVID has been a big interruption in many people’s habits. I’ve seen it going either positive or negative. For many people, it’s been a good interruption by reducing over-scheduling and breaking bad habits.

Insulating Against Diet Culture

• 12:06: When we talk about emotional eating, especially moms of teens and tween girls, we worry about diet culture and body image. Let’s talk a bit about how we combat that. My strategy is to eat dinner together as a family as often as possible. This has been shown to help teens eat more healthily and have a better body image. Benefits start with just 2 family dinners a week! 

• 13:43: Watching our own language around diets and body image is vitally important. Many people in the natural health sphere are trying different diets for health reasons other than weight loss. You can use the word protocol instead of diet, explain to your kids that you’re doing it to heal your gut, feel better or eliminate allergens, and separate it from diet culture. 

Be sure to separate elimination diets from diet culture. -Katie Kimball

• 15:33: We can do this! Parenting is hard, but these 3 strategies will help you set your kids up for success at avoiding emotional eating patterns. Watch my talk on the power of teaching kids to cook to hear more statistics about connecting with your kids through food in positive ways.

Resources we Mention For Avoiding Emotional Eating

• Healthy eating habits with Dr. Dina Rose
• Helping your kids avoid disordered eating habits
• How you feed your kids is more important than what they eat
• Vital strategies to raise successful kids
• Avoiding sugar with kids
• How rewards set kids up for failure with Amy McCready
• If you haven’t seen my canceled TEDx yet, “The Power of Teaching Kids to Cook,” that’s right here