Raising Healthy Eaters When You Have an Eating Disorder

Many parents who have struggled with eating disorders or disordered eating have questions about how to help their children avoid the same fate. They may have questions about how to organize meals and what foods to offer in order to raise healthier eaters.

How Parents Can Increase Protective Factors in the Home

If you have struggled with binge eating and dieting, you may be tempted to limit your children's exposure to "fun" foods or to focus on your child being a "healthy" weight. You may feel unsure about how to promote health. This is not surprising given that we live in a world that is weight-obsessed and makes us concerned about our children having larger bodies.

Educate About Body Diversity

• Teach children that bodies naturally come in all shapes and sizes. There is no “right weight.” Most bodies do not conform to the unrealistic beauty standards maintained by our culture and media. Teaching children that there is not one body size or shape helps to normalize body diversity and encourage acceptance of one’s own body.
• Provide media and books showing people in diverse body shapes and sizes. This helps children to understand that there is no one "right" way to look.
• Avoid negative language about your own or others’ bodies. This can lead to children feeling bad about their own bodies.
• Model feeling positive about your own body. Talk about what your body allows you to do, rather than just how it looks.
• Appreciate your children’s bodies. Tell them what you love about their bodies, and avoid making comments about their weight or appearance.
• Avoid fat-shaming people in the media. This can teach your children that it is okay to make fun of people who are overweight or obese.

Promote Body Acceptance and Self-Care and Avoid Weight-Talk or Teasing

• Avoid talking to children about their weight. This can lead to them becoming obsessed with their weight and developing an eating disorder.
• Advocate that your children do not get weighed at school. This can be a shaming experience.
• Request that your child’s doctor not talk to them about limiting their weight. This can also lead to an eating disorder.
• Model and educate about self-care. This includes proper fueling, sleep, and rest, and listening to your body’s signals about when it is hungry, thirsty, fatigued, or needing to urinate.

Educate About Media Literacy

• Teach your child to think critically about the ads they see. Ask them to consider who wrote the message, what it is trying to sell, and what the message conveys.
• Check out the National Eating Disorders Association’s Digital Media Toolkit. This resource provides tips for talking to your child about media and body image.

Incorporate Family Meals and Discourage Dieting

• Family meals provide some protective factors in and of themselves. They are associated with many positive findings in adults who report having had family meals as children.
• Family meals offer an opportunity to model flexible eating and discourage dieting. You can also observe your child’s eating to potentially spot a problem.
• Dieting is a gateway behavior for many eating disorders. It is also linked to higher weights in adults.
• Support flexible eating practices that allow fun foods from an early age. Research supports that children who are restricted from such foods tend to eat more of these foods in the long run.
• When fun foods are not restricted, children are less obsessed with eating them.

Encouraging Growth of Intuitive Eaters

• Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding is a model that appears to have good promise for raising healthy and intuitive eaters.
• This model recognizes that children are born with an ability to eat what they need. It nurtures this natural ability to help them become competent eaters.
• In this model, parents are responsible for what, when, and where the child eats. The child is responsible for how much and whether they eat.
• Parents provide meals and snacks at regular times and intervals. They discourage eating in between.
• Parents trust that children’s bodies will naturally guide them to eat what they need from what parents provide.
• Parents provide a common meal for the entire family with multiple components from different food groups. They put them all on the table and let children serve themselves.
• There should always be at least one component the child is likely to eat.
• Over time, most children fed in this way tend to naturally expand and become more flexible eaters.
• Satter also encourages that if parents plan for there to be a dessert, they should put it out on the table with the rest of the meal. This ensures that the broccoli is seen as having a value equivalent to that of the dessert.

Promote Healthy Movement

• Reframe exercise as movement. This divorces it from the idea that exercise is performed in order to compensate for eating, losing weight, or otherwise managing weight.
• Encourage children to move their bodies in fun ways. This can include playing tag or other games, swimming, doing sports with peers, and participating in family activities such as hikes or bike rides.
• Exercise can be enjoyed for the range of benefits it provides. This includes cardiovascular health, body confidence, socialization, and improved mood.
• Avoid talking about the need to “burn off” a holiday dinner. This increases anxiety about enjoying food and sets up exercise to be a chore rather than a joyful expression.

Preventing Eating Disorders

• Eating disorders are complicated illnesses that stem not from a single cause but from a complex interaction of biological, psychological, and environmental factors.
• Eating disorder prevention is still in its infancy and there is no proven way to universally prevent all eating disorders.
• Research supports the use of models that challenge attitudes about appearance and educate about the effect of the media.
• Eating disorders do tend to run in families, but genetics is a big driver here.
• Parents cannot necessarily cause or prevent eating disorders in their children, but they can go a long way in helping their child to develop better body image, self-esteem, and a less fraught relationship with food. In doing so, they may even help protect against an eating disorder.

A Word From Verywell

Parenting is hard work and no parent is perfect. If you’ve struggled with your own eating, you are likely to be more attuned to your child’s eating. Please rest assured that even if you haven’t been doing the things recommended here, or have been doing some of the things we don't recommend, it's okay! And, it’s never too late to make a change. These good preventative strategies can be helpful for parents and children alike!

Resources:

• The Association of Size Diversity and Health
• The National Eating Disorders Association’s Digital Media Toolkit
• Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding