Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family: How to Eat, How to Raise Good Eaters, How to Cook

by Ellyn Satter M.S., R.D., L.C.S.W., B.C.D

Overview

This readable, entertaining, and light-hearted book by Ellyn Satter, based on solid scientific evidence, will transform your life. In writing about eating, feeding, and cooking, Satter also writes about emotional health and positive family relationships. Satter encourages you to celebrate eating. Eating is okay. Eating enough is okay. Enjoying eating is okay. Eating what you like—and discovering the joy of cooking—is okay. Raising your child to do the same thing is more than okay, it is brilliant! How can this be? Won’t taking off the brakes on eating and weight make you eat way too much and gain a lot of weight? Based on her research and experience with Eating Competence and the Satter Division of Responsibility in Feeding, Satter says no. On the contrary, discovering the joy of eating—becoming eating competent—lets you connect with your inner self that knows how to eat.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780967118925
Publisher:	Kelcy Press
Publication date:	10/01/2008
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	672,899
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Readers say that Ellyn Satter’s books transformed their lives: Satter writes not only about food, eating, and feeding, but about emotional health and positive family relationships. Satter gives her blessings to all food, and to you for eating it, by sharing her conviction that you and your family are more important than your diet. Satter’s research confirms that being positive and self-trusting with respect to food and eating does more for your nutritional, medical, and emotional health than adhering to a set of rules about what to eat and not to eat. Will letting yourself be positive and joyful with eating make you fat? Despite your worst fears, it will not. People who are competent with eating—who approach food and eating with optimism, self-trust, and curiosity—weigh less than those who guide their eating with negativity, self-denial, and avoidance.

Table of Contents

1. The Secret in a Nutshell. When the joy goes out of eating, nutrition suffers.
PART I, HOW TO EAT
Prologue. The eating competence model says to celebrate eating and take good care of yourself with food. It says nothing about what or how much to eat.
2. Adjust Your Attitude. Competent eaters enjoy food and eating. They feel it is okay to eat food that they like in amounts they find satisfying.
3. Honor Your Appetite. Appetite is compelling, but it can be satisfied.
4. Eat as Much as You Want. Essential to eating's rich reward is having enough to eat.
5. Feed Yourself Faithfully. To develop the meal habit, prioritize pleasure.
Epilogue. Eating competence is made up of the permission to eat food you enjoy in amounts you find satisfying and the discipline to feed yourself regularly and reliably and pay attention while you eat.
PART II, HOW TO RAISE GOOD EATERS
Prologue. Provided parents do their jobs with feeding, children eat as much or as little as they need and grow predictably.
6. The Feeding Relationship. Maintain a division of responsibility: Parents do the what, when, and where of feeding; Children do the how much and whether of eating.
7. Stuff to Know to Have Family Meals. How to have pleasant mealtimes: Orchestrate snacks; Make wise use of controlled substances; Manage family meals in restaurants.
Epilogue. When raising children, give it your best effort, find out if it works, then tinker with it.
PART III, HOW TO COOK
Prologue. To celebrate eating and take good care of yourself with food, cook and keep on cooking.
8. How to Get Cooking. Build a foundation for being a good, fast, efficient, and wholesome cook.
9. How to Keep Cooking. Like eating, cooking can be an energizing creative act.
10. Enjoy Vegetables and Fruits. Eat vegetables and fruits because you enjoy them, not because you feel obligated.
11. Planning to Get You Cooking. Planning can be used or abused. Use planning to lower your stress level, not to pile on jobs.
12. Shopping to Get You Cooking. To plan and cook a meal - or to grab the ingredients to throw one together - you have to shop.
13. Choosing Food. Optimism, self-trust and adventure are good motivators. Negativity, fear, and avoidance are not.
Epilogue. Mastery in any of the three areas - how to eat, how to raise good eaters and how to cook - increases your mastery in the other two.
APPENDIXES

Interpreting and Using the ecSatter Inventory (ecSI)

What the Research Says about Meals

What Surveys Say about Our Eating

BMI, Mortality, Morbidity, and Health: Resolving the Weight Dilemma

Energy Balance and Weight

Select Foods That Help Regulation

Nutrition Education in the Schools

Children and Food Regulation: The Research

Children and Food Acceptance: The Research

Iron in Your Child's Diet

Diet and Degenerative Disease: It's Not as Bad as You Think

Children, Dietary Fat, and Heart Disease: You Don't Have to Panic

A Primer on Dietary Fat

Sodium in Your Diet

Interpreting the News