Eat and feed with joy
The Ellyn Satter Institute blogEat and feed with joy
Explore how to eat, how to feed, how to address picky eating, overweight, underweight and special needs. Get tips on coping with interference from well meaning family, doctors, and teachers. Learn how to reconcile what you want to eat with what you are supposed to eat!
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Help Us Give Freedom
This holiday season, give the gift of freedom: Freedom to enjoy mealtimes with your child; to eat without fear, guilt, or anxiety; to know you can handle whatever feeding or eating challenge comes your way. This is the freedom parents and adults experience after...
Breaking News!
Newsflash! Woman breaks dieting cycle, discovers stopping point! Sally is a 28-year old, unmarried, professional woman who learned from her mom at a young age "how to diet." She was a regular attendee at Weight Watchers meetings by the time she was twelve, and dieted...
Turn the Tide from “Eating-without-Eating” to “Eating-with-Competence”
Brenda is a 45-year old mother of four whose "eating-without-eating" consisted of finishing off her children's plates of food while standing at the kitchen counter, bingeing on cookies while standing in the pantry where nobody was watching, and skipping meals then...
No fun: the ups and downs of dieting
An all too typical first meeting with a new client struggling with eating, weight and with their relationship with food goes something like this, “I have issues and I’m so hoping you can help me. I’ve been trying to lose weight on and off for as long as I can...
Positive or negative, it’s still pressure
Do you remember when you were a kid and your swimming teacher wanted you to jump into the pool from the high dive board? At every swimming lesson, the pressure just built up to jump off that board. It wasn’t even required to pass the class, but the other kids were...
Look to Canada for the Joy of Eating
Canada, you're the latest to acknowledge that pleasure in eating is not only okay, but important! You have left US behind. Our neighbors to the north have re-written their dietary guidelines to recognize the importance of joy in eating. That's something the U.S....
Do you worry about having enough food?
How frequently do you worry about having money for food? Do you go hungry in order to provide for your children? Your concern for them is impressive. However, children know you are doing it, and they feel bad about it. Why not consider some surprising strategies that...
Starting family meals
How you feed your child differs from one developmental stage to the next. Initially you feed from the breast or from a bottle, holding your infant close to you. Their task is to suck, swallow and breathe whilst you support their body in your arms. Once they start...
Feeding Children with ADHD
Parents whose children who are being treated with medication for ADHD have particular feeding challenges. The medication spoils children’s appetites, children eat poorly, and parents worry that their child’s growth will be stunted. Often, parents and their children...
Enjoy the milk you love
The bad press surrounding saturated fat has mostly harmed the reputation and enjoyment of milk and milk products, since the early 1970s. Not all saturated fat is bad However, the evidence for branding saturated fat in dairy foods as “bad”, was never too strong to...
Explore
More about feeding
- Follow Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding
- Avoid pressure
- Avoid restriction
- Evitando la Presión
- Children know how much they need to eat
- Family-friendly feeding tips
- How children become competent eaters
- How children learn to eat new food
- Sit-down snacks
- Using “forbidden” food