The Family Food Culture Behind Weight Regain
What happens when changing how you eat also changes how you belong in your family? It's a question we rarely consider when trying to understand repeated weight regain. We tend to concentrate on food choices, portions and calories, without giving much thought to the family circumstances in which we first learned to eat.
Yet every family has its own food culture, and its influence can continue long after childhood.
Two streets apart, two very different food cultures
I was ten when I first discovered just how different family eating arrangements could be. I'd gone to a friend's house after school. Nobody was home, so she headed straight for the kitchen, opened the cupboards and fridge, and began helping herself to whatever she wanted. There was chocolate cake, bread, lollies and plenty more. As she ate, she passed food to me. I ate everything she offered, eventually making myself sick.
In my family, eating between meals wasn't allowed. We had to ask permission before having food, meals were portioned out, and we were expected to finish everything on our plates. My friend was perfectly comfortable helping herself. I was accustomed to eating what I was given. We lived two streets apart, yet we'd grown up with entirely different understandings of how eating worked.
I didn't have a name for it then. Today, I call it Family Food Culture.
When food becomes part of family loyalty
Carmela's story shows how Family Food Culture can become involved in repeated weight regain.
Her father left when she and her sister were young. Their mother created a close family life around cooking and eating. She taught her daughters to bake, and there was affectionate competition over who could make the best cakes.
Their meals were generous, comforting and thoroughly enjoyed.
As adults, the daughters remained close to their mother. Friday nights became a family ritual, with everyone cooking together and enjoying substantial meals followed by desserts. All three women carried considerable extra weight. They regularly began diets, abandoned them and returned to their familiar Friday evenings.
It would be easy to focus on the portions and desserts. But those meals were also how this family maintained its closeness. Changing their eating meant changing something they valued.
What happened when Carmela came home?
Carmela's husband was transferred to Japan for two years. During that time, she developed a different way of eating and lost much of the weight she'd carried throughout adulthood. When she returned to Australia, she was happier with her eating and her health. She was also delighted to be reunited with her family. But the Friday night gatherings hadn't changed.
Her mother and sister still enjoyed the familiar generous meals and desserts. Carmela no longer wanted to eat that way.
For the first time, she felt different from the people with whom she'd always shared those experiences. Nobody needed to deliberately exclude her. The family was continuing a much-loved tradition, but Carmela's relationship with it had changed. She recognised that maintaining her new way of eating meant finding another way to participate in family life.
This was about far more than declining another serving of food. It involved affection, loyalty and belonging.
What might your Family Food Culture reveal?
Your Family Food Culture is as individual as your fingerprint. The rules, relationships and expectations surrounding food during childhood can become so familiar that we barely recognise their influence.
With the holiday season approaching, many of us will soon return to our families of origin. Familiar meals and rituals may draw us back into old eating patterns, even when we'd prefer to eat differently.
If you've repeatedly lost and regained weight, your childhood food environment may contain important clues about why certain changes have been difficult to maintain.
The Family Food Culture diagnostic from the Weighting for Happiness Project provides a structured way to uncover those influences, including the authority, choices, routines and relationships that shaped your early eating.
Carmela needed distance from her familiar family arrangements before she could recognise their influence. You don't need to move to another country to begin understanding yours.
Before another family gathering, and certainly before another diet, discover what your own Family Food Culture may have to tell you.
Listen to the Podcast Episode 66:
OR wherever you get your Podcasts.
And Explore the Family Food Culture diagnostic at Weighting for Happiness.
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