Dietitian on why it is OK to overeat this Easter

Dietitian Lyndi Cohen reveals why eating butter-smothered hot cross buns and chocolate eggs this Easter is actually a good thing.

Easter is a time for many traditions: butter-smothered hot cross buns, novelty pastel animals, excited wide-eyed egg hunts and scolding kids about how much chocolate they eat.

Your concern as a caring parent might be “if I don’t set limits, my kids will just eat until they feel sick! Surely, that’s unhealthy”.

As an accredited practising dietitian, I’m telling you, you can still be a responsible parent and not have to micromanage your kids’ chocolate consumption. In fact, research shows the opposite is true – more flexibility around food can help create lifelong healthier eating habits.

It might surprise you, but allowing kids to experience that sick-from-eating-too-much feeling, builds your child’s internal feedback loop so they can learn for themselves that “when I eat too much chocolate, I don’t feel good”. This is critical.

People actually binge on chocolate as a result of losing touch with what their body is telling them. We want our kids to be able to listen to what their tummy says, because as adults, we’ve often lost track of our internal hunger management system – our appetite.

Dietitian Lyndi Cohen says overeating isn’t bad for kids. Picture: Supplied.

Given some independence around food, children will likely self-regulate

As parents, if we can get out of their way, to help them listen and respond to their body’s innate cues, they will develop an internal motivation to eat well (side note: in general babies and toddlers should avoid chocolate).

When they become adults, this can transform their thinking from ‘I shouldn’t eat too much chocolate because it’s bad for me’ to a much healthier perspective of ‘I don’t want to eat too much chocolate because it doesn’t feel good’.

So the good news is you can save your energy, worrying each time another brightly coloured foil piece litters the floor. Yes, it might be tempting to jump in with phrases like “eat your greens, then you can have some chocolate”, or “you’ve had enough”, but try not to interfere.

We want our kids to learn that chocolate is just food, and they can eat it without becoming obsessed with it. After all, research suggests parents who place too much control over discretionary foods like chocolate can contribute to children having a long-term obsession with these foods.

We want to teach children that chocolate is just food so they don't become obsessed with it. Picture: Getty Images

There’s room for all foods in a balanced diet

Kids who have regular access to all foods can choose to eat as much as they feel like and stop when they’ve had enough – that’s intuitive eating. It’s unhelpful to categorise foods as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. While there may be foods that are healthier than chocolate, this does not make chocolate a ‘bad’ food – that deserves feelings of shame or judgment when enjoyed.

As for bribery, as a mother of a toddler I’m not above it, but food-as-reward can be a slippery slope to emotional and binge eating. I’m not keen on planting the idea that some foods have to be earned, as I know first-hand how this can lead to the opposite idea – that eating those foods must be followed by ‘working them off’ or, essentially, ‘earning’ them after the fact. I spent a decade as a binge eater, on this diet-bingeing cycle, before I finally quit dieting and lost 20 kilos.

Using food-as-reward can be a slippery slope to emotional and binge-eating. Picture: Getty Images

The most powerful tool you have as a parent is the example you set

Try to be mindful of your language around Easter eating. Things like “I shouldn’t be eating this”, “I’m going to have to go to the gym tomorrow” might seem harmless, but to tiny ears they signal feelings of guilt or shame. Just like one smoothie bowl won’t make you healthy, one, or even 100 mini eggs won’t “ruin” everything. Repeat after me: health doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing.

So this Easter, when your kids are vibrating off that sugar high, remind yourself of this: the long term benefits of letting kids regulate their own intake of food – even if it means allowing them to eat an unhealthy amount of chocolate – is worth the short term impacts. Making food choices that feel good for your body is a far more powerful motivator than food rules or limits.

Lyndi Cohen is a dietitian and best-selling author of The Nude Nutritionist and is known for calling out nutrition nonsense, challenging diet culture and promoting healthy body image. You can follow her on Instagram here, or get her Back to Basics app which has relaunched to now include a hunger check-in for chronic dieters.