Why Are We All So Obsessed With What We Eat?

We tackled a giant issue in our first episode of Comfort Food: How can we stop obsessing about what we eat? We discuss how this relates to feeding ourselves and our kids and offer real-life strategies for relaxing a bit to help reduce mealtime drama and increase enjoyment. Here are more resources on some of the specifics that came up during our conversation.

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Considering How We Learn to Eat

Here’s the story Virginia wrote for the New York Times Magazine, about helping her daughter Violet learn to eat again. There will be much more of Violet’s story in Virginia’s upcoming book, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America, which you can preorder here.

You Decide What to Offer, They Decide What to Eat

This is a good starting point for everything you need to know about Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding model. We both use it with our families because it’s such a great way to diffuse any power struggles during meals.

Stop Apologizing for What We Eat

Virginia mentioned this story that she worked on about why women, especially, need to stop apologizing for what we eat. Seriously, this one mental shift can make a giant difference in how you experience your own meals.

Try These Tips for Introducing New Foods

It can be super hard not to stress when you offer a child a new food or one they usually like and have it flatly denied. These 10 Simple Ways to Help Toddlers Try New Foods can help.

Remember that You Can Cook for Fun

One of Amy’s tips for how she personally reduces her own amount of food obsession is to try to put the enjoyment back into cooking and eating. On occasion, that looks like letting the kids eat ice cream for dinner or baking a pie just because the mood strikes. It’s important not to lose sight that while food is about nutrition, it’s also about having fun together! (That’s a blueberry peach pie based on a recipe from How to Cook Everything, Amy’s favorite all-purpose cookbook.)