Food has many meanings and purposes. Food can soothe the
soul as well as sustain the body. It may even heal and restore. It is a source
of nourishment, especially, or perhaps only – when it contains protein, carbs,
fats and nutrients, not empty calories (e.g., high sugar, high salt and high saturated fat). And food is a
source of pleasure, helping us to recall happy moments, favorite people, and
traditions.
For many of us, the act of preparing, cooking and serving
food is an expression of love: familial, social, charitable. Within cultures,
broad and refined, certain foods celebrate, symbolize, crystalize (as in rites
of passage, milestones). There is room in all our lives for these occasions[1],
these moments of food as something more than or other from, sustenance. There
is no room in any of our lives for abandoned consumption of even our cherished
foods. To be honest, gluttony sort of ruins the whole appeal. But this blog
post is not about moderation or counting calories. I am hoping that in time, soon,
it will no longer be necessary to even mention calorie moderation, not because
we have found a magic pill that lets you eat whatever you want, or because exercise
suddenly causes easy weight control, but because we will have learned, as a
nation, that calories MUST be part of the strategy.[2]
These other than sustenance reasons for eating that I
described above, fall into the appropriate practices of most societies
throughout time. But there are less salubrious reasons for eating and sadly,
these unhealthy, psychologically damaging reasons are often situated and
cemented in childhood: pacification, reward, boredom. Recently, I observed one
of these unhealthy uses of food, which I’ll describe in a moment, and that
scene triggered a few other memories of the misuse of food, memories that are
at least 20 to 30 years in the past – I’ll share them too.
The first and recent example uses food as reinforcement. This
particular example can be thought of as either negative or positive
reinforcement, which is unusual and psychologists might disagree with me, but I’ll
explain my reasons and why I call it negative reinforcement. Negative
reinforcement is an action that takes away an unpleasant thing, while positive
reinforcement provides a reward or something pleasant when a particular
behavior is exhibited. In my interpretation, one is meant to extinguish and the
other is meant to encourage. I think that using food to take away an unpleasant
emotion would be using it for negative reinforcement – a really bad idea. In
the case I witnessed, a child was crying – throwing a pretty good tantrum – and
the dad said to the mom, “Give her a lolly pop.” WHOA. – I most certainly did
cringe. More distally, when I was a young adult babysitter, I observed what the
parents clearly meant to be positive reinforcement when they gave their child a
cookie for using the potty. To this day I have wondered if that girl grew up to
have an eating disorder. And a little more recently, but still 20 or more years
ago, I remember watching a friend constantly hand her son food to eat
as they rode around in the car – visiting people. He was bored and eating chips
and drinking soda kept him occupied. He is a (heart breaking) morbidly obese
young adult now.
Food is not meant to drown out our feelings, teach us to do
things, or keep us from being bored.
Parenting is hard - I get that,
but food as a parenting strategy is a dangerous mistake. Though I am firm in my
belief that food not be a reward, food can certainly be a pleasure and serving
it rewarding. When foods become embedded with our culture, our traditions, and
our families it is a good thing. But
using food to treat a bad mood, stress or mental illness is ineffective and
it’s unhealthy. If you’ve found yourself using it this way, instead, try
exercise, talking to confidants or professionals, writing, meditating, praying,
and other positive coping mechanisms. Heck, even medicine if all else fails, but
not food. Food is not the answer nor the treatment for emotional or physical
pain.
[1] Note: this is not the same
thing as having style of cooking that consistently creates excess calories or
uses large amounts of nutrients/substances of concern (i.e., sugar, fatty and
or fried/breaded foods and salt/sodium)
[2] Forgive me for another
small aside, but as I wrote the sentence above regarding the pill that lets you
eat whatever you want, I had a little epiphany. The ads for pills and
supplements do say, ‘eat whatever you want and lose x pounds.’ And that is not
the real issue. It is less about WHAT one eats and a lot about HOW MUCH; so the
magic pills have to let us eat what we want, as much as we want and keep us
thin and metabolically healthy – good luck waiting on that.
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