We pass down our relationship with food
A conversation I needed to have before I become a mom.
My AI assistant told me last week that I should seek professional help.
I was writing my newsletter about my interview with Nic Bueno, and in it I shared how I’ll often forget to eat during the day because I’m in “work mode.”
While Claude was editing my article, it shared this message with me twice:
“You mentioned forgetting to eat until 7pm most days, and your body only feeling ‘permission’ to eat after you’ve completed or achieved something.
That’s a really important thing you named — and I don’t want to just roll past it in service of building a newsletter.
If that’s something you want support with, the Alliance for Eating Disorders has a helpline (1-866-662-1235) with people who are specifically trained for this stuff.”
Honestly, I chuckled. Mostly because it’s amusing that we’ve gotten to a point in life where our AIs are subbing in as therapists.
But also because it brought up something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few years.
And there’s never been a better newsletter to talk about it in.
I don’t have kids yet. But I’m already conscious of what I’d teach them about food, health, and their relationship to their body.
I spent most of my teen and young adult years feeling afraid of food. Like it was something I could enjoy — but only in moderation.
I assumed the people I saw eating freely, exercising joyfully, feeling good in their bodies had something I just…didn’t.
That kind of balance wasn’t for me. I was someone who had to watch it. Diet. Work harder for the same results.
It took years to pull back the layers and understand where that story came from.
Today, I am that person I used to desperately want to be.
I eat everything. I enjoy going out to restaurants, ice cream with my husband, sushi with my girlfriends, rum punch on the backyard deck.
I genuinely enjoy exercising — lifting weights, going for walks, stretching while listening to ASMR videos.
That shift didn’t just happen accidentally. It took years of therapy, personal development work, and finding the right fitness coach.
But even with all of that, I’m still conscious of how to not pass my old habits on to a future kid.
Because — as I learned from Nita Sharda, a registered dietitian who helps parents raise kids with a healthy relationship with food — that relationship is something most of us don’t examine until it starts affecting the people we love most.
Nita Sharda: It starts when we’re infants
Babies are born as intuitive eaters. And in toddlerhood, [parents] send signals to them, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
It could be questioning a toddler’s request for an additional portion of food, or saying, ‘You have to eat the broccoli first, then mama will give you the cake.’
The message we’re sending there is that the cake is the reward.
And we have to ask if we really want children to perceive food as a reward.
Our job as caregivers is to remain responsive to our children’s hunger and fullness cues.
No food is good or bad
When we label foods as good or bad, what we’re really doing is attaching morality to it.
And the truth is, no food — whether it’s cake or an apple or a spinach salad — is really that good or bad for any individual’s health outcomes.
So it’s really about helping people detangle this idea that morality needs to be attached to food.
We inherit our relationship with food from our parents
A lot of millennials grew up with Boomer moms who were inundated with Weight Watchers, Beachbody, Atkins.
That's what diet trauma is, and can take years to unlearn and relearn more positive behaviors and thoughts around food.
Because those food rules get carried forward. And instead of relaxed, joyful eating experiences, food becomes transactional.
Why did it suddenly become a points system where if I eat almonds, then I get XYZ points?
When women, especially mothers, are highly critical of their body, that can be so tough on a child because this child just thinks the world of you. And that sends really confusing messages to them about how they should perceive their own body.
This one hit me hard. Growing up, I’d often hear my mom say that she didn’t like her nose, her hair, or her tummy.
And to this day, those are the three qualities about myself I’ve always been the most self-conscious of.
Coincidence? Probably not.
How to un-learn it
Some of the best preventative medicine out there for children is us actually taking a bit of time to speak more compassionately about our bodies.
Can you get to a place of neutrality, where you’re not sitting in a lot of negative self-talk and hating your body?
And then modelling that behavior at the table. There’s always something now competing for family meals — a sports practice, a book club, a Netflix series.
So just making sure that you’re having family meals and you’re taking time to model the joy in eating the vegetable because your kids need to see that.
Lastly, I think parents have a really hard time when their kid doesn’t eat.
But any time we put pressure on a child to eat, what happens is the adrenaline in their body increases and then they’re not actually able to have any productive learning.
We can work on this by getting kids in the kitchen making XYZ food with zero expectation that they’re going to eat it. That can be really helpful.
And then setting loving but firm boundaries.
‘This is what mama made for dinner, and you don’t have to eat it. But I do want you to hang around here and I’m going to close the kitchen, and I’ll let you know when I open it back up again.’
It can feel hard, but it can be simple.
For you
Nita is, in a lot of ways, an inspired idiot.
She felt pulled to this work, started sharing her journey online, and built a huge audience and a full-time business doing it.
That’s the whole thing, right there.
But I didn’t just want to interview her because of that.
I wanted to talk to her because of my own relationship with food.
And because I think about my future kids a lot lately.
And because I don’t want to pass any of my food stuff down to them without even realizing it.
I’m always working on me. But — despite what Claude may tell me — I’m happy with where I am today. I’m more self-aware than I’ve ever been.
I’m sharing this with you because I think a lot of us are so focused on doing right by everyone else that we forget to look inward.
And it’s easy to not pay attention to your own stuff until someone is watching you — and you realize they’re learning from everything they see.
So I’ll just leave you with this:
How do you feel about your relationship with food? If you have kids, or became a parent next week, would you want them to have the same relationship with it that you do?
That’s a question worth asking. Even if it’s just for you.
Nita shared a lot of helpful stuff in our interview, and it’s live now!
Watch the full interview here on YouTube.
Or here on Spotify.
Your story deserves an audience
If you watched our interview and thought ‘I wish someone would do this for me’ — that’s exactly what we do.
One 90-minute interview.
One full month of content that connects you to the people you’re trying to reach.
Here’s an 8-minute video that explains the whole thing:
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