Things You Want Wednesday - a Good Grip on Food Issues

Shelly at Things I Can't Say started a weekly blog topic called "Pour Your Heart Out Wednesdays." Like last week's Mommyologist Glam Check, I've never actually participated, but when I decided to recommend these food-related books to moms and soon-to-be-moms I decided to go ahead and tell the whole story, so that you know where I'm coming from and why these books were so helpful to me.



I grew up in a family full of food issues. There were weight issues all over - both overweight and underweight, and lots of talk about weight, thinness, and calorie/fat counting. To be clear, I am in no way blaming my parents for the food issues I developed later in life. This was all my own doing and probably could have been avoided altogether if I had just asked some questions and did some reading.

I can still vividly remember the summer when I was 10 and I overheard my mom telling my great aunt that I had really "plumped out" since I had broken my arm and couldn't swim much that summer. I know I ate a lot of cookies, but I don't think I was really overweight. There was a period of about a year where I had some chubbiness, but doesn't every girl go through that? I like to think that it was just the weirdness of the age, because the next year I started on swim team and lost a decent amount of weight pretty quickly. Ever since then I've been on the leaner side. But really, what 10-year-old should be worrying about how much weight they need to lose? I remember begging the lunch ladies to tell me how many calories were in our lunches because I needed to make sure that I didn't eat too much.

Anyway, that comment really stuck with me (obviously, as I can still remember exactly where I was standing and what kind of gestures she was making at the time). I had a pattern of disordered eating off and on throughout high school and into college and I was very weight obsessed. I went from 14 to almost 20 without ever reaching over 100#. Food was not my friend. I'm sure the OCD didn't help things, because it was just another aspect of life to obsess about. I wasn't anorexic or anything, I ate enough, but my views on food and weight were certainly pretty fucked up, to put it bluntly.

So the reason I'm spilling all of this is because I'm so terrified that I'm going to pass on these habits to the Minion. The books I discovered were recommended to me by other moms on a parenting board that I frequent. I've read two of them so far and my entire view on food and how I should be feeding my kid has completely changed.

The books I'm talking about are written by Ellyn Satter. The two that float up in conversations most often are Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense and How to Get Your Kid to Eat... But Not Too Much.

The main gist of both books is this:

"You can't control or dictate the quantity of food your child eats, and you shouldn't try. You also can't control or dictate the kind of body your child develops, and you shouldn't try. What you can do, and it is a great deal, is set things up for your child so she, herself, can regulate her food intake as well as possible, and so she can develop a healthy body that is constitutionally right for her."

and you accomplish that by doing this:

“The parents’ job is to do the what, when and where of feeding, and it is up to the children to do the how much and whether of eating.”


So in simpler terms these are the basic rules that we follow:

1. Parents decide when kids will eat and what they will be offered (but make sure that at least one of the dishes is something you know the kid likes).

2. Kid decides which of the offerings to eat and how much of it they will have.

I wish I would have read these when I was pregnant - because of our latch issues I had to pump and bottle feed. I think that made it even easier to obsess over his breastmilk intake and whether he was eating enough. I measured and tracked and charted and worried about not making enough milk and not feeding him enough milk, and when we would go in for check-ups and his weight wouldn't be above the 15%ile I would feel like it was somehow my fault. Once I discovered these books and talked to our pediatrician about her philosophies, it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

Meal times in our house have been so much better since I was able to wrap my head around these ideas. A toddler won't starve themself. They'll eat when they're hungry. I'm not worrying about it anymore. I'm not obsessing about it anymore. That doesn't mean that I occasionally worry when all he eats for dinner is an apple, some cheese, and a rice cake, but at least I know that he'll make up for it the next day, and that I'm doing a great thing for him by allowing him to follow his own hunger cues and hopefully develop a healthy relationship with food. I can't possibly recommend these books enough.

So, yeah.... That was a freaking novel. This is also why food is so important to me. Good food, whole food, non-processed food, healthy food, and tasty food. I don't want food to be a scary thing in our house. I don't want there to be "forbidden foods." I want to set a good "everything in moderation" example. If you're going to eat, at least make it worthwhile.