One of the most powerful reminders that diet culture has affected you, is witnessing an unaffected child select their food.

“What do you want, darling? We could get popcorn, Malteasers, chippies… We could get it all! Anything you want, you choose.”

I was so excited. This teacher-only day was a special day together for my five-year-old and I. We had been planning it for weeks, so when we rocked on up to the cinemas, I was ready to splash out big time.

He didn’t so much as give the options a cursory glance. He just looked at me in this funny matter-of-fact way he has, and he stated, “I’m not that hungry. Maybe you just pick one.”

I’m constantly amazed by how untouched by diet culture he is.

He’s allowed junk food. We don’t have it all the time but when we have it, he can have as much as he likes (provided he shares with his little brother!). And when you can have as much as you like of something, it becomes less desirable. He doesn’t feel denied or deprived, so he doesn’t covet it because it’s forbidden.

It’s just, no big deal.

When he was younger, I’d tell him he could pick a treat at the supermarket. Sometimes it would be a chocolate bar, sometimes biscuits in the shape of animals, and once it was baby carrots.

I’m serious, he chose baby carrots as his treat and he was excited about it, too.

There have been times when other people have said things to him about healthy and unhealthy food, and since he started school it’s been more of a challenge to insulate him from diet culture.

A couple times he’s come home and proceeded to tell me that such-and-such told him that he shouldn’t eat Oreos, or fudge, or once it was even yoghurt, because it’s ‘bad for you’.

My reply has been that different foods do different things for us. Meat makes your muscles strong. Vegetables and fruit keep you from getting sick. Milk makes your bones strong. And cookies and chocolate and chippies? They don’t do anything to help your body, we just have those because they taste really good and it’s fun.

And although I think this message has sunk in, I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been concerned that the lone voice of his mother won’t be enough to shield him from so much talk of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods.

But yesterday, he showed me just how much I needn’t worry (at least for now).

“Well, should we go celebrate by going to the bakery? I could get you a fluffy and a donut? Or anything else you want?”

“No, thanks,” he said in that polite matter-of-fact tone I love. “I just feel like having a glass of milk at home.”

While I was a secretly a little bit gutted, because I kind of had my hopes up for coffee and donuts, I was also wonderfully relieved. Treat food is yummy and all, but it’s still no big deal for him.

It’s a huge mindset shift for a lot of people to get back to the point of a child like that. When society hasn’t embedded the idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food in you. When you haven’t been told you couldn’t have something because, “It’s not good for you.” When food is simply food.

Honestly, most of my clients are utterly terrified of eating treats. They think if they start they won’t stop and it’ll incite a full-on binge. When I tell them to have anything they want, whenever they want, in whatever quantity they want, they recoil.

And some try to allow treats in small amounts, instead of going all out like I instruct. If they do this, they inevitably get stuck. Just think about it. If you have a mindset block that you’re allowed chocolate, but only four squares of it, you’ll have the four squares and want more (maybe you’re hungry, maybe it tastes good, and maybe you want more precisely because you’re not allowed it). But you feel guilty about wanting more because you already decided that four squares was ‘enough’.

Maybe just four more? But that’s it, you tell yourself. That will be more than enough. So you have four more. Now you might not be that hungry anymore, and it’s not even tasting that good, but it’s still off-limits, so you definitely want more. And you feel bad about it.

This is far more likely to lead to a binge and reinforce the idea that once you start, you can’t stop. But it’s been an entirely self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you had instead sat down with four entire blocks of chocolate and told yourself to have as much as you please, yes you might go a bit crazy.

At first.

But it won’t last. Because, in a way, giving yourself permission to binge on treat food actually prevents the binge.

(Now, there’s a bit more to binge eating than just that, it’s also tied to emotions. But this denying oneself junk food is often a big part of it.)

If you can give yourself the mentality of a child, because you know you can always have that food if you want it, you might just find that those cookies and chocolate and chippies become just the same as every other food – no big deal.