How to avoid an eating disorder in your kids

28.8 million Americans will have some kind of eating disorder in their lifetime, many more will have an unhealthy relationship with food. If you have experienced an eating disorder yourself, or seen it in your friends or family, it’s natural to be concerned about your kids.

Luckily, there are solid strategies to help your kid adopt a healthy relationship with food, and avoid eating disorders later in their lives. Here’s a few simple strategies to doing so.

Don’t Label Food

Have you ever identified food as “junk” or “bad” food to your kids? Who hasn’t? You may also have identified a food to your kid as good, or healthy. Usually to encourage them to eat something that tastes bad to them.

Labeling food can actually lay dangerous ground for an eating disorder, making kids think about food in a moral way. It may cause your child to feel bad or guilty when eating certain foods, which can lead to them purging or other behaviors to try and “cleanse” themselves of the food.

Labeling a food as bad can also cause you to crave it, which may cause the child to want and eat the food more than ever before.

Instead, treat food as neutral. It’s neither good nor bad. If there’s no rebellious pleasure in eating ‘bad’ food, your child won’t find it quite as interesting to eat the bad foods. On the flip side, if ‘good’ food isn’t associated with your child’s least favorite foods, they may be more willing to explore.

Avoid talking about body image

Whether it is your own body, their body, or even someone’s in the store, avoid talking about their appearance to your kids. When you openly mention how much you hate your muffin top, or how big that man was in the store, you pave the way for your children to think negatively about their body.

Many eating disorders stem from poor body image, so by neutralizing talk about our body we can avoid spreading those thoughts to our children.

Emphasize health over weight

Instead of talking about a healthy weight, talk about good overall health. This shifts the focus away from the scale, and onto things like how they feel and what they can do with their bodies. If you look at your body as if it was something to celebrate, you’ll help them on the road to feeling better about themselves.

It’s also important to avoid complimenting your child on their bodies, instead focus on their mind, their skills, and other non-physical traits.

Eating disorders are a serious problem, and they can start forming from a very young age. Help your child by neutralizing talk about food, so that food becomes simply food to them, and they can just eat. While it’s never too late to start thinking about food in a healthy manner, the earlier the better. Even a toddler can learn to look at food as something neutral, and that’s a great thing for your child to be able to do.