How to Raise an Intuitive Eater: Raising the next generation with food and body confidence

by Sumner Brooks

In many cases, this looks like dangling the idea of a tasty dessert over your child’s head in order to get them to eat their veggies or their dinner. This completely normalized and common approach sends a loud and clear message: The dessert food is special, you have to earn it, you can’t just have it because you want it. This way you won’t be unhealthy and you can have this “bad for you” thing that is so pleasurable and yummy, but only if you eat other things first even if you don’t have room for it because you’re full from dinner. What happens after repeating this scenario over and over again is that it makes the reward foods very powerful. Similar to the effects of restriction, rewarding with food makes these foods the very foods your kids will prefer and choose when you’re not around. In the short term, they may eat their broccoli in order to get the ice cream. But in the long term, they’ll run the other way from the broccoli unless they truly enjoy it.7 When we use food to change behavior, it detaches food from its primary role, which is to satisfy hunger.