In a study for the Journal of the American Dietetic Association , researchers looked at the causes of unhealthy adolescent eating behaviors, and they are many! This is some of what you are up against:
- rapid growth means high caloric and nutritional needs
- skipping breakfast becomes a common practice
- many adolescents become less physically active
- kids eat away from home more
- there’s a need for peer acceptance
- the family has busy schedules
- junk food is convenient
- junk food tastes good
- junk food is heavily advertised to adolescents
- adolescents associate junk food with pleasure, being with friends, weight gain, independence, guilt, affordability and convenience – it is seen as normal
- adolescents associate healthful eating with family meals and eating at home, and liking healthy food is seen as an oddity
- family dinners decrease in many families to only a few times a week
Your attempts to address the behavior mirror the results of other studies (Scaglioni, et al). Researchers found that restricting what children can eat works in the short term, but in the long term it increases the intake of food, increases eating in the absence of hunger, hampers the ability to self-regulate, causes negative self-evaluation, and contributes to weight gain in 5 to 11-year-olds. Pressuring children to eat was likewise unproductive. Studies where children were rewarded with positive attention for eating healthy foods also resulted in long-term negative effects on the quality of the children’s diets and their preference for those foods.
Suggestions that came out of the studies are as you would expect:
- role model healthy eating
- eat together
- don’t make kids finish a meal when they say they are full
- choose food well for the family and make rules about where foods can be eaten – make them rules for the house not rules for the child
- choose a wide variety of nutrient-dense foods – choice is important – it gives the child control
- limit TV/ video game time to 2 hours/day
- make healthy foods convenient – carrot sticks instead of whole carrots, bowl of chopped fruits instead of whole fruits – and let them eat as much as they like
- remember that they do need to eat a lot, and that will mean a balance of fats, carbs and protein, not just carrot sticks. As you noted, she needs to feel full.
There are other studies that look at the emotional causes of poor eating amongst adolescents. In one study (Snoek, et al), researchers found that “higher levels of emotional eating by parents were related to higher levels of adolescents’ emotional eating.” High levels of psychological and behavioral control over adolescents were also associated with higher levels of emotional eating. This suggests that it may not be about the food at all, but about the stress the child perceives and possibly about the way stress-handling is modeled in the family. A follow-up to this study (van Strien, et al) looked at emotional eating and depression in adolescents that might be genetic.
So if a smorgasboard of healthy, convenient, unrestricted foods doesn’t help, you might want to look at addressing or alleviating the other stresses in your child’s life that might be contributing to emotional eating.
Each of these cited studies is set in the context of many other similar studies which are internally cited. They may be available through your local library or through interlibrary loan from a nearby university library.
