How Your Childhood Affects Eating Habits Now

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Related Episodes:

• Your Belief About Food
• Is Food a Reward?
• Boredom Eating
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Full Episode Transcript:

How Your Childhood Affects Eating Habits Now

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. I hope you had a wonderful 4th of July holiday for those of you in the US. And for those of you not in the US, maybe you have a fun holiday coming up that you get to enjoy as well.

I’m recording this before the 4th of July, but you will be listening to this after the 4th of July.

Our plans for the 4th include going down to a local high school’s track in the morning to do a track workout with a group of friends, and then heading over to our good friend Stephanie’s house for a barbecue and pool party.

She cooks the most wonderful food, so we are very excited to be able to spend time with friends and taste all the yummy foods that she will prepare. Especially since we will be very hungry from our track workout.

So in this episode, I’m going to talk a little bit about something that greatly affects your eating habits now, but is past based. If you’ve listened to several of my podcast episodes, you may have noticed that I mostly talk about current triggers for eating behaviors that have become habits. There are also things in your past, specifically in your childhood, that will affect eating habits now.

I do want you to know that even though things in the past can affect you currently, and that includes things even beyond eating habits, you can still change them. Just because something has been going on for a very long time, does not mean that it can’t be changed.

Of course, you can’t change past experiences, you can change how you’re thinking about the past. That will affect how you feel as well as what you do going forward. But that’s something that we work on in coaching one-on-one together.

I wanted to do this episode on how your childhood affects eating habits now because just having the awareness of why you may have certain eating habits now from childhood experience, just helps you to understand your current situation a little bit better. It will help you to feel like there’s nothing inherently wrong with you. You will better be able to understand why.

And understanding why is the first step to feeling better about it. It’s also the first step to being able to change your direction.

OK, so let’s jump into how your childhood affects eating habits now. I’m going to go in no particular order, but I do want to start out with the most general and sort of obvious ways that your childhood affects eating habits now.

Certainly, if you grew up eating healthier, nutrient-dense foods, like fruits, vegetables, lean protein, beans, whole grains, generally, you’ll probably find yourself continuing to do so.

This isn’t always the case. In fact, for me personally, I grew up eating fairly healthy foods, and still ended up with an emotional eating habit of eating lots of processed carbs. So of course, there are some exceptions.

And then certainly if you grew up eating less healthy foods like maybe fried foods and packaged foods, without lots of the more nutrient-dense foods like vegetables, chicken, beans, things like that, there’s also likelihood that you would continue to eat those less healthy foods into adulthood.

So even if you find that you are eating less healthy foods, because you’ve always eaten less healthy foods since childhood, that can still be changed.

And if you grew up eating pretty healthy foods like I did, and still find yourself eating unhealthy foods, there is nothing wrong with you. Life happens and things lead to eating habits that we aren’t particularly fond of or proud of. But that can also be changed.

OK, now diving into more specific reasons of how your childhood affects eating habits now. Using food as comfort is a big one. Whatever your childhood experiences were, if you felt like you needed comfort and weren’t getting it from a parent, then you may have started getting it from food. Food was meant to be pleasurable, so that back in the day, we were motivated to seek out food as human beings for survival purposes.

So even if food wasn’t scarce for you growing up, if you weren’t getting comforted in other ways, you may have found comfort in food. Or if you had an especially traumatic childhood, and had comfort from other things, food may have just been something additional that provided even more comfort for you in a time of need.

Now certainly you can’t change your past experiences, but again, you can change how you think and feel about them and your actions going forward. You can also change how you think and feel about food and eating, and therefore change your actions going forward.

This is again something that we do with one-on-one coaching. This is very personalized, so not something that I can just help you with specifically in a podcast episode, because everyone’s situations, thoughts and feelings are different.

Just know, there is help for this. And sometimes just knowing that can give you hope. And if you have hope, that means you’ll be more likely to have success.

Okay, next up is somewhat related to using food as comfort and this is having a lack of food during your childhood. So, you may have grown up poor and felt hungry most of the time.

If this was the case, then whenever you see food that you could easily access, you may have eaten as much of it as you possibly could. And this again goes back to the survival days. Your human brain was meant to do this. But this is something that could have carried over into adulthood. And that’s just because this behavior became a habit.

The other thing that can carry over into adulthood that relates to having a lack of food in your childhood, is that you would most likely finish every last little crumb on your plate. And even for those of you who may not have grown up having a lack of food, you may have been told by your parents to finish everything on your plate because there were children starving in other countries.

So, when you get into that mindset of feeling like you need to finish everything on your plate, that can carry over into adulthood. Because this is just a thought or a mindset, this can also be changed. And once this changes, you have an easier time changing your eating behavior.

Okay, so the next one I want to talk about as far as how your childhood affects eating habits now is if your parents or guardian provided food as a reward for you. So, for example, if you got a good grade on a test, you may have been rewarded with ice cream or candy.

If you did your chores for the week, you may have gotten rewarded with candy or something else food related. If you were well behaved, you may have been rewarded with food.

Your brain would start to form the connection of food as a reward. And it’s going to be very easy for our human brains to do this, because like I mentioned earlier food was meant to be pleasurable, and rewarding, because that was what was needed to motivate our ancestors to seek out food for survival.

But there is a difference between using food for survival, because of the nutrients and calories, and using food as a reward for a job well done. When your brain starts forming the connection, it becomes a habit, it becomes automatic and can then cause some negative health effects. Because I’m guessing you’re not choosing broccoli as your food reward. I wouldn’t.

And I just want to mention, of course you deserve something pleasurable for a job well done, but there are other options that can provide even more pleasure. Things that aren’t so temporary and that don’t have negative long-term effects.

You can choose smaller rewards, such as just mentally telling yourself you did an amazing job and giving yourself a compliment. You can play your favorite song really loud and sing to it or dance to it as a little celebration. You can do what one of my clients did and put a little sticker on a calendar, which was very satisfying for her to do.

You can do a little larger reward. You can put money into a jar each time you do whatever it is that you are rewarding yourself for and then at the end of the month buy yourself something, or better yet, buy yourself an experience, such as a ticket to a play or concert.

When I’m working with clients, we are all about rewards, non-food related rewards. And using these as both motivation and reward.

Next up for how your childhood affects eating habits now is that you may have gotten into the habit of eating either specific foods, eating at a specific time of day, or eating certain amounts.

So, if you remember at the very beginning I had mentioned sort of the general ways that your childhood eating habits could affect your adult eating habits, as far as if you eat healthy foods as a child you may tend to eat healthy foods now and if you eat unhealthy foods as a child then you may tend to eat unhealthy foods now.

This is a little bit more specific as far as the specific food, volume, etcetera. So, for example, if during childhood you had a deli meat sandwich every day for lunch, you may be in the habit of having a deli meat sandwich every day for lunch in adulthood.

I’m not saying that this is good nor bad, I’m just saying that a specific type of food can be carried over into adulthood, just purely based on what you’re used to as a child. It’s kind of like “well that’s what lunch is, a deli meat sandwich.”

For me, I grew up eating cereal pretty much every day for breakfast. For many years into adulthood, I continued eating cereal. And then I started eating cereal for dinner as well, until I changed my eating habits of course. I also grew up eating four cookies every night for a snack around 7 or 8 o’clock.

Now, I don’t currently eat 4 cookies every night for snack, but i do find myself wanting snack every night around 8:00 o’clock. I eat healthier snacks now, but it really is interesting because I was so used to eating a pretty substantial snack at night, it was just a thing.

Whereas my husband Paul, typically would not eat anything after dinner. He didn’t as a child and that carried into his adulthood, up until he met me.

So, besides a specific food, you can also get in the habit from childhood into adulthood of eating a specific volume for a meal. For example, if growing up your family had very large dinners and very light breakfast and lunch, you may have carried that over into adulthood. Totally fine, whatever works well for you and your family, but it’s just another example of how your childhood affects eating habits now.

Alright, so next I want to talk about a parent or guardian giving you food to keep you busy or to keep you happy as a child.

This can start really in the earliest years, as a toddler where your parent or guardian constantly gave you food to keep you busy or to try to keep you “happy.” I honestly don’t have an opinion on if this is “good” or “bad” because I’m not a parenting expert. Maybe there is research out there saying that this is not good, I have no idea.

But, as an eating habit expert, knowing what I know about the brain and the links that it forms is that if you constantly had snacks in your hand as a child, then this may spill over into adulthood. If this is the case for you, this may not necessarily be causing a problem.

If you’re someone who knows for sure that you were constantly being given food to keep you busy, and you know that you are constantly eating food as an adult to “keep busy” this may be the reason why.

Boredom eating falls into this sort of category if you will. You can have a habit of boredom eating because of this childhood circumstance, or you can have boredom eating for other reasons.

Boredom eating in general is a common one that I see as an eating habit and weight loss coach, and a common one that I help you completely overcome.

Another way your childhood affects eating habits now is observation. If you observed a parent or guardian or even a sibling with certain eating habits, you may have developed them yourself. You may have started developing those eating habits as a child and then carried that over into adulthood.

For example, if you had a parent that would measure their food and count calories, you might start doing the same as a teenager.

There are lots of other ways that the things you observe in apparent can affect your eating habits now, so many that i could not even list them in this podcast episode. But in general, observing certain behaviors or hearing certain things from your parents could absolutely be affecting your eating habits now.

Luckily, we can change that, just like we can change all the other things, which is by focusing on what you want to believe about food and yourself now going forward. And what you believe about food and yourself, will then change how you feel and then affect your eating behaviors.

Alright, so the last one I wanted to discuss, and this is by no means a comprehensive list of how your childhood affects eating habits now, but these were just a few of the big ones that I wanted to share with you. This last one is being told that you were too fat or too skinny. Or basically anything negative about your body as a child or teen.

If you had a parent or guardian, or even siblings or friends or anyone else in your childhood who either said something once to you about your body or multiple times, that could have influenced your eating habits now.

It will more likely influence your eating habits now if it was something that was said frequently to you. So, whether their actual words were “you’re fat” or “you’re too skinny”, it’s your interpretation of what they said.

So how you think about what they said will certainly affect how you feel and then your actions going forward.

And if someone said something negative to you about your body, that’s just their opinion in the moment. They may have been having a really terrible day and just wanted to be terrible to everyone around them and said that to you. Not good behavior at all, but just know that it’s not you, it was them.

And just because someone says something to you about you, does not mean it’s true. Whatever anyone says to you about you is just their opinion. That’s it. And it may not even be their opinion in general, but like I said sometimes in the moment someone is in a crummy mood and says something that they really didn’t mean.

How being told something negative about your body shows up for you later in life with eating habits, is that once you believe that you are too fat or too skinny just because someone told you were, your actions will be affected. And if your actions are affected in childhood because of this, of course there’s a likelihood that’ll carry over into adulthood, because they’ll end up becoming habit for you.

So, if a parent told you that you were too fat and you’re only 10 years old, you might start trying to diet at a young age. This can cause a dieting cycle or a dieting habit for years to come. If you were told that you were too skinny, then you might start to try to overeat at meals to try to “correct” that. This could lead to an overeating habit, eating more food than is necessary for your body.

So, for sure, the things that a parent or another person in your life told you as a child, that was negative about your body, can you contribute to the eating habits that you currently have.

But I can help you see how these things they told you weren’t true and how they’re leading to your current eating behaviors and how if you want to change those eating behaviors, we simply need to start working on changing how you’re thinking about yourself and how you’re thinking about food going forward.

Because once you change how you’re thinking now, you have the power to much more easily change your actions rather than trying to change your actions by keeping the same thoughts that you currently have period or keeping the same mindset that you currently have.

This is an important take home from this episode. Regardless of your past, how you think now is what’s affecting your current results. So, if you want to change your current results, like break a bad eating habit or lose 20 pounds, you need to change how you’re thinking now.

On your own this may seem impossible, but that’s why coaching is life changing and really gaining popularity. Because as an eating habit and weight loss coach, I help you to not only change your eating habits or lose weight but make it even easier for you to do so and to continue doing so by helping you with your thoughts, so that it’s much easier to change the actions.

Alright, that’s what I have for you on how your childhood affects eating habits now. If you’re tired of your eating habits, especially ones that you feel like you have developed because of your childhood, I can help you. To talk about it more, I invite you to schedule a free consult.

I take the time to find out all the challenges that you’ve had, what you’ve tried already, what your goals are and your true desires, and then a layout a plan of action so that you can see how exactly you would get the results you want.

So, to schedule a free consult and start feeling better now and start addressing these eating habits now, whether your goal is to lose weight or not, schedule a free consult by going to katemjohnston.com/consult. (If you’re reading this, then schedule a consult with the calendar below.)

Take care with you next week.