Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family
How to Eat, How to Raise Good Eaters, How to Cook
Second Edition
Copyright 2008 Ellyn Satter
Kelcy Press
4226 Mandan Crescent
Madison, WI 53711-3062
800-808-7976
ISBN 978-0-9671189-2-5
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Ellyn Satter.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Satter, Ellyn
Secrets of feeding a healthy family/Ellyn Satter.
p. cm.
Includes index
ISBN 978-0-9671189-2-5
1. Children-Nutrition Popular works. 2. Nutrition Popular works.
3. Diet Popular works. 4. Food habits Popular works. I. Title.
RJ206.S247 2008
613.2-dc21 99-33165
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Also distributed by:
Ellyn Satter Associates
800-808-7976
www.EllynSatter.com
Developmental editor: Clio Bushland
Layout and Cover Art: Karen Foget
Typesetting: Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the nifty people who, against all odds, still love to eat.
ALSO BY ELLYN SATTER
Your Childs Weight:
Helping Without Harming
Child of Mine:
Feeding with Love and Good Sense
How to Get Your Kid to Eat
But Not Too Much
ELLYN SATTERS FEEDING IN PRIMARY CARE
PREGNANCY THROUGH PRESCHOOL:
Easy-to-Read Reproducible Masters
ELLYN SATTERS NUTRITION AND
FEEDING FOR INFANTS AND CHILDREN:
Handout Masters
ELLYN SATTERS FEEDING WITH LOVE
AND GOOD SENSE:
Video and Teachers Guide
ELLYN SATTERS FEEDING WITH LOVE
AND GOOD SENSE:
Vignettes and PowerPoints
Ellyn Satters
Montana FEEDING RELATIONSHIP
Training Package
For more materials based on the
Satter Eating Competence Model and Satter Feeding Dynamics Model,
see www.EllynSatter.com
Contents
The secret of feeding a healthy family is to love good food, trust yourself, and share that love and trust with your child. When the joy goes out of eating, nutrition suffers. |
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. |
Competent eaters enjoy food and eating and they are comfortable with their enjoyment. They feel it is okay to eat food that they like in amounts they find satisfying. |
Appetite is a natural and life-giving inclination. Appetite is compelling, but it can be satisfied. It is normal to get enough and to stop eating, even of highly enjoyable food. |
Essential to eatings rich reward is having enough to eat. The irony, in this land of plenty, is that most of us fear hunger, not because we risk food insecurity, but because we obligate ourselves to undereat. |
To develop the meal habit, prioritize pleasure. To keep up the day-in-day-out effort of regular meals, those meals must be richly rewarding to plan, prepare, and eat. |
The essential themes of eating competence are permission and discipline: 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. |
Provided parents do their jobs with feeding, children eat as much or as little as they need and grow predictably in the way nature intended for them to grow. |
Effective feeding depends on a division of responsibility. Parents do the what, when, and where of feeding; Children do the how much and whether of eating. |
How to have pleasant mealtimes; how to orchestrate snacks; how to make wise use of planned substances; how to manage family meals in restaurants. |
The name of the game with raising children is to give it your best effort, find out if it works, and then tinker with it. |
To celebrate eating and take good care of yourself with food, you have to cookand keep on cooking. |
Build a foundation for being a good, fast, efficient, and wholesome cook. |
Like eating, cooking can be a creative act that gives you a change of pace and restores your energy. |
To get the vegetables and fruits you need, eat them because you enjoy them, not because you feel obligated. |
Planning can be used or abused. Use planning to lower your stress level, not to pile on jobs. |
To position yourself to plan and cook a mealor to grab the ingredients to throw one togetheryou have to shop. It is not always fun. |
Negativity, fear, and avoidance are not good motivators. Optimism, self-trust and adventure are good motivators. This chapter blesses the food. |
Mastery in any of the three areashow to eat, how to raise good eaters and how to cookincreases your mastery in the other two. |
Figures
Recipe Listing
To help you with your planning and cooking, here is a list of all the recipes in the book. Recipes that are indented are variations.
Eating is supposed to be enjoyable. For too many of us, it represents trouble: trouble with eating, trouble with feeding, trouble with cooking. We continue to enjoy eating but we worry about getting carried away and eating too much, especially of the wrong kinds of food. We value cooking but have lost the skills to allow us to be matter-of-fact about managing food and feeling successful at it. We have high standards for feeding our children but find those standards slipping in the face of time pressures and our childrens reluctance to eat what is good for them.
Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family takes the trouble out and puts the joy back in. Its like you are standing at my shoulder, telling me what to do, e-mailed a reader. I was so proud of the meal I made that I prepared it the next day for a shut-in neighbor, wrote another. Your message, Everyone gets offered the same meal has made all the difference to our family mealtimes, a relieved mother told me over the phone. I loved the part about You are a family when you take care of yourself, said a young husband who was still waiting and hoping to become a father.
To take the trouble out and put the joy back in, make feeding yourself a priority. To that end, Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family addresses all sorts of families: adults living alone, couples without children, singles, couples and even-unrelated groups of people with or without children. In both the How to Eat and How to Cook parts, Secrets gives lots of practical advice and encouragement about feeding yourself singly. The Fast Meals for One section in the How to Keep Cooking chapter is new and especially fine. I said in the previous edition I wished I had had this book to give my children when they left home. Now I wish that even more.
Secrets is organized into three parts: How to Eat, How to Raise Good Eaters, and How to Cook. Each part has a prologue and an epilogue. The prologues prepare you for the information and give you the context for understanding it. The epilogues address where to go from there and how to apply the information.