How our childhood links to food habits now
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Every food we eat now and our eating habits are linked to childhood. If you’re brought up having lots of chocolates and cakes during a meal or whilst spending quality time with your mother or father, you associate that as a happy time with your family.
As you grow older, when you see chocolates or similar snacks, you’re going to feel a positive connection to these foods.
If your parents liked to have a drink every night in a happy mindset to relax, you’re going to think having an alcoholic drink equant to happiness. If your family have ice creams during summer holidays, then you associate ice creams as being a treat during summertime. If your household growing up didn’t allow sugary/salty snacks, as an adult who now buys their own food, you’re picking those treats you weren’t allowed but your peers did. Every food we eat now is entirely linked to our past experiences in the way we were brought up.
From the cognitive behavioural side of things, emotional eating plays a huge part in our eating habits. From not feeling loved by your parents, so you turn to bread and cheese, to binge eating because your father was rude to your mother when she was overweight, and you felt like you were helping by eating all the food. A more common example of this is childhood trauma, including emotional and physical experiences, which is strongly linked to eating disorders such as bulimia and binge eating.
Food preferences change continuously throughout our lives from environmental circumstances – where we live and our economic standpoint of what foods your family could afford (was it home-cooked meals or were your parents working long hours and partial to the processed ready meals), to social surroundings – offline in family and friends to influences on social media, as well as biological changes such as our health condition and pregnancy.
How to change these eating habits starts with changing the pattern and undoing the learning as a child. If you can close that eating habit path, you can begin a new one with a fresh outlook. It’s not easy to unlearn a behaviour, so seeking external help may benefit you. On a basic eating point of view – introduce new foods to a favourite meal, get creative in the kitchen and try new recipes, offer different food groups in your meals and encourage healthy snack alternatives. We all have the capacity to change and create a more positive eating relationship.
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