Fighting Childhood Obesity with Portion Control

Many of today's adults grew up in an era of "the clean plate club" and lectures about "starving children in Africa" as parents encouraged, threatened, and even punished in order to get kids to eat all the food they were served at dinner time. Researchers feel that this short-changed those children, who are now adults, and didn't learn learn portion control and self-regulation. And there are plenty of signs today that our portion control is out of control. Restaurants regularly serve much more than the quantity and calories that an average adult needs; up to twice the sizes of the servings from 15 years ago. One fast food burger can use up your entire daily allotment of calories and/or fat. Super-sized soft drinks won't fit in your car's cup holder.

Not surprisingly, there has been a backlash against "clean your plate" and "eat all your food" as these same adults raise their own children. They are not guilty about the affects of their dinner choices on the children in third world countries. And they are oh-so careful about their words at the table so as not to create any type of eating disorder in their daughters. But most of us are concerned, at least subconsciously, about wasting food. That is why we carefully dish out the amount the child "should" eat, moms quickly scarf the leftovers off their kids' plates as they do dishes (guilty!), and we store leftovers we know that no one will eat, until they are sufficiently gone bad, so that we can toss the food without guilt.

What we are missing is the opposite of "clean your plate" encouragement, and that is the encouragement "would you like to save the rest for later?". If you give a kid an ice cream sandwich, and you are going to toss what he doesn't eat, the kid will try to eat the entire ice cream sandwich. Hey, it's good! If you offer to save some in a baggie in the freezer for later, many kids will take you up on that offer. Sure, they still eat the calories later, on another day, but you are encouraging the child to stop when he/she is full with no negative consequences. And the next day, the child eats the other half of the ice cream sandwich. That just cut the desert intake in half.

So, stock up on baggies and storage containers, and practice noticing when your child is slowing down and eating out of habit. Offer to save things for later, and really do, so that kids can learn portion control. And maybe you can learn some tips too. As long as you don't raid the freezer for that other half of the ice cream sandwich after the child has gone to bed (guilty!).