I had a hippie mom too, with few snacks or soda in the house, lots of homemade whole foods and rare dinners out and I was still tubby myself. It took me until my late 20s to realize that healthy food was still not all-you-can-eat food. I don’t know why your friend’s child is overweight, but for me it was that I was an emotional eater and my “full” switch doesn’t seem to activate and I often ate- and still can eat- far more than I need.
I have things mostly under control as an adult but I’ve talked to friends about this. One friend has the same nonfunctioning full switch and, like me, can eat and even enjoys eating to a point of discomfort. Another friend loses interest in eating when full, just like that, but her fiance is like me and will just keep eating unless he makes a conscious decision to stop, or runs out of food. The three of us who can keep eating struggle with our weight, the friend who just stops has never had any weight issues. I don’t really understand it, whether I was born this way or became this way somehow, but I find it interesting.
Yes. Different people can have vastly different levels of sensitivity to their body’s signals of satiety. Works that way in animals, too: some pets you can free-feed with no problems and some will eat until they blow chunks.
Here is the thing though - this isn’t an all you can eat household either. I don’t think its emotional eating. I think this is the case of a kid with a slower metabolism than the rest of his family, who gets slightly less exercise than the rest of his family, and who gained a few extra pounds young that were going to come off when he “stretched out.” He hasn’t gotten tubbier as he has gotten older, he’s been maintaining a very similar BMI because his diet has adjusted to his activity level - but he hasn’t decreased his BMI either.
I can see where his metabolism might be slower than the rest of his family, and he also might be eating a little more than the rest of his family. If dinner is brown rice and chicken and veggie stirfry it is still possible to overeat, and if someone isn’t as clued into when to stop an cup more of brown rice at a meal is 200 extra calories and at every meal that adds up. And what parent really wants to get into stopping a child from eating, especially if it’s healthy, whole food?
My experience from talking to people is that they don’t know the calorie impact of healthier foods. I was working out with a friend and she told me that her husband made her a bunch of burritos to take to work for her lunches. The burritos consisted of burrito-sized whole wheat tortllas, rice, beans, veggies and salsa. Anyone who has ever looked at a Chipotle burrito calorie count knows that a burrito can easily be half your daily calorie needs. But she didn’t see it that way, to her it was a light lunch because it was full of healthy ingredients, made by her loving husband.
Too many people think that “healthy” means “rabbit food”. That’s not true, because healthy food can be calorie-dense. It just depends on how much of it you eat.
I would say that it’s the opposite: most people think healthy food means whole, unprocessed foods, like beans, whole grains, lean meat, veggies, olive oil, etc. And then they eat too much believing that they’re eating healthy.
I was brought up in backward French countryside by a grandmother born in 1899, daughter of sharecroppers. So, probabbly almost as far away as you can get from a contemporary urban or subbbburban American teen. Still, I’m not sure how it wouldn’t apply. Food for snacks was simply not available in the house. Ok, there were fruits, bread, butter, jam and generally black chocolate (but had I eaten the whole bar of chocolate, there wouldn’t have been anymore until whatever my grandmother would have felt like buying another). Everything else required cooking. No snacks, no candies, no cookies, no soda, etc…
I guess I could have gorged myself on bread, butter and jam, but had it led to me becoming seriously overweight, I’m pretty sure that would have led to the solution the OP seems to think isn’t feasible. Food locked up in the pantry.
This way of life certainly isn’t in accordance with current American (or even French, for that matter) way of life but frankly I can’t see why it couldn’t be implemented if excessive food consumption was becoming a problem with a particular kid. Obesity is a serious issue, and I can’t see what would be wrong with having only the food planned for meals and even then strictly limiting caloric heavy (mostly sugar-heavy, in fact) foods (cereals with sugar, soda, desserts..). What else is there to do? Letting a kid become morbidly obese??? It seems to me there aren’t many other sensible options.
Of course, a dedicated child could use his allowance to buy food, could gorge at his friends’ place, etc…But the “you can’t prevent a kid from eating tons of stuff at home” is certainly false. If the stuff isn’t there or is, indeed, locked up, you most certainly can.
Sorry for the other kids “deprived of their favourite snack”, but most of the time, they shouldn’t be snacking, either, and especialy not “their favourite snack” which is likely to be as crappy as you can get, so it seems like a win-win situation to me.
One’s appetite can be stretched over time by a diet that trains one to be hungrier than one ought to be. This is why snacking is bad for someone like me. If I snack regularly at work, I start to need snacks regardless of how much I ate for breakfast and lunch. It becomes a habit and then it becomes it an addiction.
A kid who is hungry a lot, unless they are experiencing a growth spurt, probably has gotten that way because over the years, eating just a little more than they need has led their cravings to be too much for their developing willpowers to contain. If they have a sweet tooth, then that is the case even more so.
That said, I don’t doubt for a sec that different kids have very different metabolisms. I see this clearly with my two cats. The skinny one eats more and begs for food more often than the fat one does. The skinny ones is also slightly less active than the fat one. So if my cats were kids, I honestly don’t know how I’d fix the fatter one’s weight problem without giving her a self-hating complex. It makes me sympathize with families who are dealing with this dynamic in their households.
My parents grew most of our vegetables, bought whole wheat, borderline hippy etc, but I almost never just ate the lunch I took to school- you see, my school had an ‘empty lunch box’ policy- you weren’t allowed out to play until everything was eaten (with the intention of giving parents more control over what the kids actually ate). However, there wasn’t the staffing to check who really ate what, and on the average day I’d eat what basically amounted to two or three lunches, because some of the kids wanted to go play football, and I wasn’t that bothered…
Plus I wasn’t picky, and some other kids were- one kid gave me his raisins every day for two years, 'cos he didn’t like them, 'til his Mum found out
I didn’t really get fat as a kid, luckily, but I’m not sure how they could have prevented it if I had done.
