When you notice your daughter gaining weight and beginning to eat out of control, in order to help her effectively without makiing her feel unloved or unwanted because she’s heavier, you have to first deal with your own weight issues before you can help her to make peace with food and friends with her body. Here are my tips to help you to help your child end emotional eating.
http://thejuicywoman.blogs.com/my_weblog/2010/11/how-to-support-your-daughter-to-make-peace-with-food-and-friends-with-her-body.html
Are you a mom struggling with body insecurities and worried about your weight? Is your worst fear that your daughter will follow your body hating footsteps? She will, if you don’t change.
Here’s an article that I re-printed sharing a Q&A session with Dee, a mom, and coaching client of mine who was terrified that her food and body obsession would be passed down to her daughter.
Q: Andrea, I’m a mother of a 9 year old daughter. I want to stop dieting, but I’m torn because I also want to lose weight. I’m hoping to find some peace between the two. I’m getting kind of concerned that all the dieting that I’ve been doing for most of my daughter’s life is not very good for her. How can I help her to change the negative feelings that she’s developed about food and her body?
A: I understand your desire to want to lose weight, but it’s important to know that habits that have been practiced over a long period, won’t disappear overnight. Losing weight without dieting is a process. You can’t expect the same results that you may have gotten on your best diet. Changing your behavior and attitude toward food will take some time.
Here are my secrets that worked for me to help my daughter to end her emotional eating:
Listen to your heart: Filter everything through your emotions and use them to guide you to know what to do. As for me, I felt very strongly that although my pediatrician had my daughter’s interests at heart, she was unaware of the big picture. I knew that I needed to deal with my emotional eating in order to help my daughter to deal with hers.
Demonstrate your trust – Speaking as a mother who also realized that my disordered relationship with food was also costing my daughter her self esteem, I realized the importance of going against tradition and putting the power of control back in her hands. Despite her doctor’s admonitions to put her on a diet, I chose the opposite. What she needed was to know that she could trust herself around the foods that at that time she felt compelled to eat.
Ban the Scales – Put away your scales and measuring tape and every other gauge you would use to measure yours and her progress. I know from personal experience that scales and measuring can create enormous amounts of undue stress for any kid and eventually that will only lead them to want to eat.
When I was a child my father and step mother used to weigh me every week and measure me every month to determine how well I was following my diet. It was frightening knowing that I had no sense of control and whatever the scale or measuring tape showed, it would affect my relationship with two of the people I loved most. If they were disappointed, I felt as though I let them down. And for me, feeling their disapproval was usually the fastest track to a binge. At the time I didn’t understand that they only wanted to help. But their scale pushing ways only felt invasive and upsetting.
As an adult, I ended up using the scale on myself in the same abusive way. From my years of dieting, it was the only thing I knew that I could rely on to tell me if I was on the right track or headed off the rails.
But because I was so obsessive and had no sense of balance or boundaries, the scale became more like a horoscope, letting me know if I had the right to be happy or not. Sadly I wasted years putting myself and my kids through unnecessary agony because I didn’t understand the connection.
During the years that I was still weight obsessed, my son, Paul hit puberty. He faced the same situation as me with weight gain. Without giving it a second thought, I handled it in the same manner as my dad and Rosie, with fear and intimidation.
To this day, it has caused a rift in our relationship, making it difficult for us to be closer. He also struggles with emotional eating, but refuses to ask me for help. Sadly I realize that I made my mistakes with him and corrected them when my daughter faced her own challenges with weight. If I had it to again, I would never criticize or deprive my son of foods he loved. I would teach him how to feel safe around food and to put the emphasis on coping with his stress, not focusing on what he was eating. Now I know that it was my issues with weight and food obsession that contributed to my son’s struggles with his weight.
Be honest about your own struggles – My recommendation is to take your daughter aside and confide in her. Be willing to allow yourself to be vulnerable and tell her that you realize that your struggles with food have led her to question her own relationship with food and her body, fearing that she can’t trust herself to stop eating.
Initiate an Open Door Policy with Food – No more dieting or deprivation. Stock the house with foods that everyone enjoys. I realize this seems horribly frightening to you to give your child carte blanche to eat what she wants, but you’ll see that after a period of time, she won’t desire to eat those old forbidden foods anymore.
Eat When Hungry – Suggest to her to have a goal in mind at the start of each day to only eat when she’s hungry and to refuse food every other time. She can eat anything she wants to at any time as long as she’s hungry. She’ll start to notice that she’s getting very picky about what she wants to eat. On the days when she eats more than she intended to, remind her that we all fall in pursuit of learning how to walk and to be gentle with herself as she learns this new process of eating like a naturally slim person.
Have More Heart to Hearts – Realize that your daughter needs your love and guidance. If she has begun to demonstrate habits connected with emotional eating, recognize that she needs to have her emotions validated. Spend time and listen to her and connect with her. Find out what’s going on in her life that pushes her to want to eat when she’s not hungry. Create a safe, loving, non judgmental space for her to share her thoughts with you.
Let Her Test Her Own Limits – At first when I encouraged my daughter, Cara to stop dieting and eat what she wanted and listen to her body, I think she probably tested us both by eating chocolate and other sweet treats often throughout the day. It seemed that there were a good couple of weeks when she would tell me that she would ‘crave’ chocolate cake for breakfast or Reese’s peanut butter cups for dinner, all the while watching my face like a hawk looking for a reaction response.
My thought is that this was her way of saying, “Are you sure you really trust me to make my own decisions about what I can eat? Then when I caught onto what she was doing, I stopped making faces, judging her and trying to control her decisions. I knew that I had to back off and deal with my own judgments about what she ‘should’ be eating. From that point, when I made those changes, I noticed that the quality of her choices completely changed their character, moving toward a varied combination of foods that only included moderate amounts of chocolate. Today she has very little interest for any sweets.
Know That You Are Her Role Model – I can tell you that you are your daughter’s best role model. As you begin learning new techniques and strategies for thinking about eating, food, and your body, by watching and observing you, your daughter is going to pick up all these new discriminations vicariously. Children are just like little sponges soaking up the most subtle information about our thoughts and values without our ever having to utter a single word.
Be the Change You Wish to See – Instead of you saying, “Okay, this is what you need to do, where you might encounter some mad amounts of resistance such as, “Mom, please you’re not going to tell me this.”
As she starts to see you act in a different way, becoming more at ease with and accepting of your own body, relaxing more around food, being less judgmental of your slip ups, feeling safer around the foods you used to consider temptation, she’s going to want to get in on the goods. Feeling good is our body’s natural state.
As your daughter begins noticing that you’re feeling better about yourself and being more compassionate toward your own body, she’s going to be encouraged to re-evaluate her own thoughts and feelings surrounding food and her body.
By showing her that you can feel good about your imperfect self, you give her permission to love herself despite her flaws. And who doesn’t want that?
weight gain, self confidence, Weight Watchers, fat kids,
The Juicy Woman, Andrea Amador, Lovin’ the Skin You’re In,