October 19th, 2010
Eat it…you will feel better.
by Michelle Shelton
We recently took our three youngest children on vacation to the East Coast. There were so many experiences that I figured I would write about a couple of them here. For those of you who know me, you know I am very aware. This is what my oldest daughter told me….mom we all know you are very aware of what is going on around you. Well, I choose to see this as a complement!
We stayed at a Holiday Inn Express in a small town close to New York City and then each day we drove to the Staten Island Ferry and rode it into the city. The hotel was a nice enough hotel. It was newer. It was clean and each morning they had a Continental Breakfast and we would go down and eat before our trek to the Ferry.
One such morning there was a man in the breakfast room. A very large man. If I had to guess I would say he was well over 330 pounds. He was also tall and it made him appear larger. He had a young boy with him that was about two and a half or three years old. The boy was in his PJ’s and he was playing on the floor at his father’s feet. He seemed to be enjoying himself playing with his trucks and didn’t want to eat anything. This seemed to really concern the man the longer it went.
As I watched the man, he made trip after trip to the food and he ate and he ate while his young son played on the floor. He seemed attentive to his son and he was watching him and talking to him. He kept asking him to eat and the boy would shake his head. Finally when the man was apparently done eating, he picked the toddler up from his toys and held him in his lap. The toddler started to fuss. He screamed and struggled to be let down. The man went to a place that was very soothing in his demeanor. He talked softer and appeared to be very patient. He told the boy he had to eat now as they wouldn’t be around food later.
The boy stood his ground. He shook his head at the food. Finally I heard the man say, “Eat the food and you will feel better.” The boy shook his head and grunted at his father once again.
The large man was clearly frustrated. The louder the boy fussed the more the dad would shove food into his son’s mouth and say, “It will make you feel better, eat it. Just eat it, you will see. You won’t be upset anymore if you just eat.”
I could see what was going on. A future eating disorder in the making.
For those of you that have taken our Dream Relationship Workshop, you know we talk about programing. The majority of programming takes place from birth to about eight years old. If you don’t know what programming is…think in terms of a computer. A new computer comes with an operating system and you load programs into the computer to get it to do what you want. It is the same thing with human beings. When we are born we have a basic operating system. Our caregivers teach us…they load programs. Some of those teaching are intentional and some are not.
From birth to eight years old, our caregivers load programs into us to get us to do what they want. They teach us to walk, talk, eat, feed ourselves and so much more. Many of these programs work for us…some, like the program this unsuspecting father was installing into his son’s brain, don’t. These are the ones that keep us stuck. In reality…we keep ourselves stuck once we are aware of our programing. Once we are aware, we can choose to do something different.
The thing about programing is you can only install into your children the programs that you have or programs of which you are consciously aware. If you are aware that a particular program doesn’t support you, you can offer your children something different. If you are not aware, you will instill in them, what you learned…no matter if it works or not. For example, this man obviously struggled with his weight. When I looked at him I could see struggled to perform simple tasks such as walk and breath. Yet, somewhere along the line, most likely when he was between birth and eight years old, someone had told him that eating would make him feel better. And, soon he began to eat every time he felt an emotion about something.
Now he is passing the same programming on to his son. It is not bad. It is not wrong. It simply may not work for someone’s health to be so overweight. As a matter of fact, we know obesity is right up at the top of the list when it comes to contributing to all sorts of health issues and even early death.
Michelle Shelton
Facilitator, Coach, Author, Speaker
Michelle is the co-creator of the Dream Relationship Workshop.
She and her husband, Paul, have five children and live in Gilbert, Arizona.
Visit her coaching site: www.boldtalent.com
and you canalso find her on facebook at: www.facebook.com/azmastermind
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