Excess (Part 5 of 7) - Food

When  I was a little girl every time I ate an onion, especially if they had any sort of crunch to them, I gagged. There are foods we don't like. It's a fact. I think boiled okra is the most disgusting vegetable known to man, but MOTH loves it. This generation of children has found a way around this pesky little problem. They just refuse to eat all the foods that don't look, smell, or taste appetizing. Then the parent feels like the child might starve and makes them anything they will eat. If you have more than one child, you're looking at up to 4 or 5 meal preparations at one time to keep each child happy. I'm very familiar with this phenomenon because my test child (eldest) ate nothing but chicken nuggets, fries, and Pop Tarts with the crusts pulled off for about 2 years. When we moved from our home when he was almost 3 we found a pile of Pop Tart crusts behind his bed. He had been smuggling them to his room. He was so skinny I was afraid to not let him have the handful of foods he would eat. When the twins came, my Pediatrician set me straight. The child will not starve. I began serving dinner and dinner was dinner. I don't make a child eat something they just can't stand because let's face it, there are just some foods I won't eat either. But I also don't make anything else and I don't allow them to either. I usually serve a variety of foods, that way there are several choices for the pickiest child in the house, and I do have one. The child who survived off chicken nuggets and Pop Tarts now eats a wide variety of healthy foods as well as all sorts of ethnic foods. He won't go near a Pop Tart. The excessive cooking and serving multiple meals each day just leads to unhealthy habits and children that think if they say they want something else it magically appears.

The other food excess is overeating. I have a real problem with portion control. I love my food. But I realize as an adult that there are consequences when I over indulge. I feel miserable for one thing. It makes my exercise program that much harder to do when I'm lugging around 20 extra pounds. It gives me indigestion on top of it all. Children need to be taught portion control. It's a form of setting boundaries and teaching self control. The statistics say that for the year 2010, 3 out of 4 children were either overweight or obese. This puts them at high risk for coronary artery disease by their 30s. We as parents are responsible for this. Excesses of chips, cookies, and snacking in general have created these startling statistics. Some of the other excesses I have spoken of in this series are annoying. This one is just dangerous.