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The Eating-Honesty Bind traps kids between wanting to be honest about their hunger and wanting to score a treat. Photo: Alenavlad | Dreamstime.com

This is a follow-up to “Are Your Kids Telling The Truth About What They Eat?“

When my daughter was about 4 years old I discovered the Eating-Honesty Bind.

I had sweetened the pot of a boring morning spent running errands by promising my daughter that I would take her for an ice cream when we were done schlepping around the city.  The chores were out of the way around lunchtime, and so I asked my daughter if she was hungry.  She didn’t answer.

Now, my daughter is: (1) a chatty kid; (2) well-equipped to assess her hunger; and (3) into food.  Her silence was strange.  It puzzled me, and then it piqued my interest: What was the problem? And then it hit me.

My daughter was in a bind.  She wanted some ice cream, but…

• If my daughter answered she was hungry, she knew I would make her eat lunch, and then she knew, with equal certainty, that she would be too full to enjoy her ice cream.
• If my daughter answered she wasn’t hungry, she feared I might not let her have any ice cream.  After all, eating when not hungry is a no-no.

Crunched into the intersection of wanting to be honest about her hunger, and wanting to score some ice cream my daughter was totally immobilized.

The Eating-Honesty Bind is where eating problems begin. And where they fester.

It’s where you know what you want, but you don’t know how to get it.  The Eating-Honesty Bind is a baaad place.

Anyone whose ever been tempted to toss down a cupcake moments after having devoured a full serving of ice cream knows the problem: if you fess up to being full you can hardly justify consuming more, but if you’re truthful with yourself you risk knowing you’ll have to pass up the treat.

Adults work the Eating-Honesty Bind out for themselves in a variety of ways: they forgo the second treat, they sample the second treat, and they overlook the question of hunger vs. satiation and dive right into the second treat.

But parents don’t usually give kids these options.  Instead, we use healthy food as the gateway to nirvana.  In other words, we trade peas for pie.  In the process, we teach kids to lie: not just to us, but to themselves too.  It’s one of the ways parents teach kids to overeat.

Eating-honesty is:

• Knowing whether you’re hungry
• Knowing whether you want to eat

The Eating-honesty bind is:

• Not being able to be truthful about your hunger.
• Needing the right answer to gain access to the goods.

If you want your kids to be honest about eating, you have to let them get the goods, whether they’re hungry or not.

That’s what I learned that fateful day.

In the end, I asked my daughter if the Eating-Honesty Bind described her dilemma—“ah, duh!” It did!—and then we resolved the situation by sharing a small salad. Finally, we made a beeline for that cool, creamy, sweet, delicious ice cream treat that was waiting for us directly across the street.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~