How kids react to overweight parents, and the case against eating in haste
Like father, like daughter, not so much
CalorieLab colleague Dr. J sent the following item my way, and an interesting item it is, about Grant, age 40, whose weight got up to some 380 pounds, and his daughter Emma, age 15, who in reaction to his weight problem developed one of her own, but not the one you might think. Here’s a synopsis.
Grant, always heavy, would just laugh off the concerns and recriminations of his wife and Emma, even joking that he’d be lucky to live to age 50, and would then go back to stuffing his face, which he did in a manner Emma began to find repulsive. The message she got from dad was, “I love food more than my daughter and would rather eat myself to death than be a part of her future.”
Her response was to eat less and less, losing two or three pounds per week: “The last thing I ever wanted to be was as fat as him.”
It took a fainting spell at school before she came to grips with the fact of her anorexia, and its emotional source, which in turn confronted Grant with his own obesity, and its emotional source: as comfort food, ingestible love, to make up for a lonely and loveless childhood. In any case, Grant is now losing weight, and Emma gaining it, and both are happier and healthier, The End.
The moral, perhaps, of the story
But there are two points worth mentioning that can be drawn from this anecdote. First, no person is an island, even those who are nearly the size of one, and the health being harmed by your gross overweight and self-indulgence may not be yours alone, but also that of a loved one.
Second, this would seem to have some bearing on the question of whether overweight parents tend to produce overweight children because of their common genetic makeup, or because the kids copy the parents’ behavior. Clearly, if “fat” genes were running the show, Emma would have responded to stress by eating, as Grant did.
Some families may indeed be afflicted with a genetic predisposition to overeat. Or it might be that for many, as in Grant’s and Emma’s case, the gene in common causes one to react to emotional strain by engaging in risky behavior, whether it be gorging, starving, boozing or doping. The point is that parents who do not take their physical health seriously shouldn’t be surprised if their offspring adopt the same attitude.
When stuffing your face, lower your pace
If Why We Eat can play as significant role in weight gain as What We Eat, so, it seems, can How We Eat. One reminder of this is provided by a recent study in Japan that found that men and women who ate quickly, and ate until they were full, had higher BMIs and caloric intakes than those who did not, and were three times as likely to be clinically overweight.
This is not a groundbreaking discovery, mind you, but merely the latest evidence of a principle familiar to weight-control experts: the faster you eat, the more likely you are to gain weight. This is because it takes your brain 15 to 20 minutes to register the fact that your stomach is full and to shut down the hunger signals.
As a result, those people who eat at a leisurely rate have generally consumed less food when they begin getting the “all full, stop eating” message than those who wolf it down. Indeed, in one study, a group of rapid eaters packed away an average of 646 calories per meal, while a slow-eating group polished off just 579.
And one more statistic: 11 minutes. That’s the duration of the average meal consumed in the United States. Which means that by the time the typical American diner’s brain sounds the “enough food” alert, the damage is done, probably including dessert.
Add to these facts other benefits of casual consumption, such as tasting food more intensely and reducing the odds of acid reflux and painful heartburn, and it’s hard to argue with the premise that when it comes to dining, slower is better. Take your time.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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I tend to believe that children will always emulate their parents to some degree, simply because parents are their main role model. However, it does not follow that this means they will COPY their parents behavior. So, in the case of food, if the parents have positive habits surrounding food, the children will follow this. However, if the habits are negative, the child stands a chance of adopting negative habits, although not necessarily the same ones as the adult. I think this is what happened in this case.
- Dave