Raising Intuitive Eaters

“How can I help my kids eat healthier?”  

“My child only wants to eat junk food!” 

“The amount of sugar my child eats is stressing me out.”

“Meal times are a battle  to get my child to eat!”  

These are some of the many questions and comments I receive as a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. It’s usually from my clients who are meeting with me to heal their own relationships with food and body. They want to know how to implement this for their children so they can spare them the same grief and angst they have experienced.   

Here are a couple of my top tips when teaching and counseling with parents who want to reduce the emotional distress around food and feeding their children (and themselves).  

• Stop labeling foods as good and bad. Doing that turns food into a moral situation when there is nothing moralistic about food. Food is food. Children are generally very literal thinkers. If a food is good or bad, then that inevitably can make them “good” or “bad” for eating it.  

• Using food as a reward and/or a punishment is very problematic. It happens all the time. Just today I heard a dad tell his young daughter that if she went into class she could have cookies and if she didn’t then she wouldn’t get cookies for a week. I get that it can be tempting to use food as a bribe to coax our children into performing certain tasks or eliciting wanted behavior. That can lead to an unhealthy emotional connection with food, among other things. It can cause overeating of those foods as well as learning to use food to cope with emotions.  

• Let your children decide how much food they want to eat at snack or meal time. No one (not even well-intentioned parents) can ever know the appetite, food preferences, fullness levels or satiety of another person as that changes from meal to meal and day to day. Your child is born with all the innate wisdom he or she needs to feed themselves. It’s already inside them! We do them the disservice of telling them how many bites they need to have before they are finished etc. This sends the message that they can’t be trusted to listen to their own tummy and body. In time they stop tuning in and then start to ignore their own intuition, and not just when it comes to food.  

The good news is that you can start right now to make positive changes in your family when it comes to food! You as the parent get to provide a variety of options and an all foods fit mentality. Take away the negative energy around “bad foods”. Obviously, an apple and a brownie don’t have equal nutrition, BUT we can create an equal emotional reaction to those foods. 

When we have a positive, shame-free environment in which to choose our foods and fuel our body, we can do so without judgment and guilt which frees us to truly eat according to what our body is communicating to us.  

Intuitive eating is empowering for children and adults! Remember this will take time and patience. The end goal is not to create a perfect healthy eater. It’s to give them a foundation of peace and confidence around food and their body. That will be a far greater pay off in their lives.  

Lastly, you will only be able to help others as far as you have helped yourself so if you could use more support, I would love to work with you on your journey!  Happy Eating! 

You can contact me at Alicia.hill.ie@gmail.com 

Alicia Hill

Wife and Mama of 4

Intuitive Eating Counselor