Food As Reward

The day I was out walking with tamile and we started talking a little bit about what exactly food is to us and how we see it.  One of the things the we realized as we talked was that we both see food as a reward.  In seconds as we talked both of us rattled off a number of examples where we rewarded ourselves with food for a job well done.

• A new job? lets celebrate by going out to a restaurant.
• Kids Birthday? lets have the family over for dinner & cake.
• The kids sports team did well? Then lets get the Ice-Cream on the way home.

I'm pretty sure that you get the idea. Not really sure what the origin of this behaviour is but it seems  to be pretty consistent across most of the people I know.   More then once I've seen a coach with the whole sports team out for Slurpees or Ice Cream.

We need to get away from this.  Why should food be used as a reward?  I guess in a lot of ways it is just easy.  Food is everywhere so that makes it super easy to get and give as a reward. With a little extra effort a better reward shouldn't be to hard to come up with.

• A new job? What about getting some new clothes or something cool to have with you at the job.  Like some kind of desk sitter.
• Kids Birthday? Have the family over for gifts and a visit.  Skip the cake, it is a tradition that isn't really needed.  A quick bit of Google-Fu says cakes come from around the 1400s in Germany.   Maybe we need to change just how we do cakes, Maybe there is some type of better option.  I'm not to sure what it is but I do want to try and figure it out.  Maybe just skip the icing?
• Sports team did well?  Save the money you would have used on ice cream and get them something they can you use for the next game.  Maybe some better equipment, help pay for team photos, have Gatorade on hand for the next game (Sure it is food, but at least it is good you)

Anyways hopefully this will at least give you something to think about.

I was going to say that I hoped this post gave you some "Food for Thought" but I thought better of it.

There is a quote I found that is apparently attributed to Drew Carey;

"Eating crappy food isn't a reward, 

it is a punishment"