Sublime

in your

traditional feeding methods are actively damaging in the modern world, resulting “in overeating and accelerated weight gain” as well as bad feelings around mealtimes. Feeding children too often can make them forget what their own hunger feels like. Large portions lead to overeating. And giving food to calm a distressed child teaches the child that

If you pressure children to eat whole plates of greens, you are teaching them to dislike the greens—and to dislike you, for that matter. If you persuade them to take tiny tastes (today and again tomorrow and the next day and the day after that), there’s a chance they will become lifelong eaters of greens.

We are all familiar, of course, with the truism “You are what you eat.” But over the past generation we have learned more and more about the nature of our hungers and how incredibly malleable they are. Scientists and authors like Brian Wansink and Michael Pollan have pointed out how our hungers are learned.

Food is an inescapable fact of life, and the task for each of us is to find a way to make our peace with it. Disordered eating is very different from alcohol addiction, whose cure is sobriety. When eating goes wrong, the antidote is not a life without food, but figuring out how we can bring ourselves to eat new foods in new ways.

What these “filling” foods are not so good at—paradoxically—is keeping us full for a long time. Highly refined starches and sugars give us a spike in blood glucose followed by a crash. When nutrition scientists talk about fullness, they tend to be less interested in immediate satiation and more interested in satiety: that slow-burn feeling of fulln

From toddlerhood to adolescence, a parent should be responsible for “what, when, where.” The child is responsible for “how much and whether.” Satter’s idea is that over time, a child offered good family meals with the freedom to eat as much or as little as he or she needs will grow up to become a “competent eater.”

taken me a long time to realize that part of eating well is making friends with hunger. We are not the starving children. To feel mildly hungry two or three times a day—when you are lucky enough to know that another meal is coming soon—is a good thing. All my life—except when I’d been attempting to lose weight—I’d responded to the gentlest of tummy