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Talking Tummies
What Does Hungry Feel Like?
By Teri Brown
The human body is a wonderful refinery. You feed it nutritious food and it transforms that food into boundless energy for us to use. Food as fuel is an important concept in helping our children develop healthy eating habits. One of the most critical steps in promoting those habits is learning to discern true hunger from the hunger caused by boredom, emotions or habit.
Kelly Muzyczka, mother of three from Pittsburgh, Pa., believes that it is very important to teach your children what true hunger is and not to eat out of habit or social reasons. "I think it's very important that children are encouraged to respect what their bodies tell them," Muzyczka says. "The weirdest thing I ever heard was someone saying, 'You should have snack soon because if you don't eat now, you won't be allowed to eat until dinner.' What does that teach a child? When you eat is more important than when your body is hungry. It makes no sense to me."
Linda Kazakis from Greenville, S.C., is also very in tune to how and when her children eat. She believes it is important to teach children why they get hungry in the first place. "Teach them from the get go what food is for and what it is not for," Kazakis says. "You eat to live and you eat as healthy as you can to feel the best you can."
Peggy O'Shea is a Boston-based registered dietician and president of the Massachusetts Dietetic Association. She believes that teaching children to know how hungry feels is crucial to their future health, but maintains that children have an innate knowledge of their own needs. It is our job as parents to reinforce those appetite cues in order to maintain a healthy balance.
"If a child says they are hungry just after breakfast and is told they 'just ate' or that they must 'wait until lunchtime,' they may begin to ignore the normal hunger cues and instead recognize eating in relation to time of day or associate eating with certain activities," O'Shea says. "Instead, consider offering a small, healthy snack – if they are hungry they will eat it. This will help to ensure that the body isn't retrained to focus on external cues rather than true hunger needs."