But putting it away, rather than throwing it away directly off my plate, seemed to somehow ease the anxiety/guilt associated with it. And sometimes I just needed reassurance that, if I got hungry an hour after finishing my meal, the rest of it would still be waiting for me. This helped with that as well.

I’m getting better, slowly. I still hate waste. I’m learning ways to deal with it. (Why hello, hungry friends of mine! Would you like some leftover pasta? Some soup? Some baked goods that I cannot possibly finish on my own? You would? Oh, yay!)

I still seem to understand my system and my needs well enough to address them in a healthy fashion. One doesn’t have to inhabit a perfect body to have good eating habits. One simply has to know what works for you, and how to healthily work around limitations. This isn’t a contest to see who is the MOST COMPETENT OF ALL. It looks more like a good yardstick, to me. A helpful suggestion. A frame of reference.

http://familyfeedingdynamics.blogspot.com/2010/03/my-kid-is-drinking-milk-again-finally.html

If anything isn’t bullying, it’s this method, which Katja uses.

Take from me….be happy with 160#. It’s not a ridiculous weight. I have long wanted to kick myself in the ass for not being happier with myself when I was much smaller than I am now. If I had, I may not have grown to be over 300# because I wouldn’t have tried all those weird diets, exercise and starvation and my metabolism wouldn’t have been destroyed.

So, seriously, really do understand that you are fine just the way you are. If your weight doesn’t change no matter what you eat….obvious, your genetics cause you to weigh 160. Love yourself just the way you are!!!

There is a strange paradox about enjoying food more, but ultimately thinking about it LESS, and finding it less burdensome, that seems to occur when people improve their eating competence. I think you’ve described the same thing in your example of your husband’s traditions.

I just wanted to say that I love Ellyn Satter and this whole concept that you describe of competent/”happy” eating, of finding the balance between eating 100% on intuition and planning some aspects of eating.

My comment is that I believe these things are particularly difficult to accomplish in American/late capitalist culture, because our food cultures and traditions have broken down. My husband is from a European country where people still mostly eat the same way: at the same times every day, a range of traditional (homemade) dishes, AT home most of the time. Eating is a social, joyful occasion around which the rest of life centers. Meals are never a time for restriction but an occasion to nourish the body and to relax, and to ENJOY THE TASTE OF FOOD.

Everything is so ritualized there that you don’t really have to think about ‘what to eat’. Eating is more labor intensive but because the food shopping, food preparation, the serving of the food, and the eating of it are all done basically in the same way (with many little variations of course, it’s not like they eat the same exact recipes every day!), much of the labor is totally automatic and doesn’t cause the least bit of anxiety.

Here in the U.S. most people are not able to eat in such a context. We must think about food more, and we are less likely to be able to have stable, predictable, enjoyable, social meals as a matter of course. I think recreating a healthy food culture is the best way (if the most daunting) to create “competent eaters” who are HyAES.

Between that and the concept that I don’t need a diet to tell me how to eat right, I’m slowly learning to be food-guilt-free, eat when I’m hungry and eat what I want. Finally!

I guess what I don’t understand is where people are actually attributing things to Satter, and her model, that aren’t actually true. I have a pretty intimate knowledge of the model, and I can say with confidence that many of these interpretations are actually false on an objective level, though I understand where those intepretations are coming from — whether it’s past personal experience, or cultural pressures and messages. But I think it’s important to try to get past those interpretations in order to discuss what Satter is actually saying and promoting — misinterpreting her message based on a personal associations, while understandable, is a bit derailing to the topic at hand.

I also think that we haven’t gotten (yet) into more of the complexities of either eating competence as a model, or Satter’s methods of feeding children, which means we haven’t yet even touched on how you’d deal with dyspraxia, or other therapeutic issues and restrictions. We will get there eventually, and I do think most of Satter’s model is adaptable to these realities. But I cannot write a blog post that is going to encompass every possibility right from the get-go.

I’m genuinely sorry for that, and I do try very hard in most of my posts to add footnotes and parenthetical asides denoting where exceptions occur, but obviously I didn’t do that this time.

I also want to add that disability is an important issue for me, and I’m trying to be a lot more aware of how what I say and what I practice applies to disability. But I am fairly new at this, and I don’t always succeed. That’s why I rely so much on my commenters to add complexity to the discussion that I am, guaranteed, going to leave out in my posts.

I also want to say that not being able to try a lot of new foods does not make you eating incompetent. It is only one factor among several, and it is still possible to score well on eating competence even if you have certain difficulties and obstacles with eating caused by a disability. The assessment for eating competence takes into account many different behaviours, and degrees of behaviour — meaning that people who are eating competent are still going to have a range of diverse habits and practices around food, while still meeting some basic criteria that makes them score highly on the test.

The wording of “competence” (aside from obviously not being my invention) is problematic in some ways; I can’t deny that. People ARE going to interpret it in a specific way, largely because of the pressures of the culture we live in and the assumptions we make about eating and people’s value as human beings based on their eating habits. However, I have to accept that words are only ever rough and imperfect proxies for complex concepts. I’m not even sure that there is a term that could appropriately describe what the concept of “eating competence” describes without being problematic in some way.

I’ve just come to accept that the term, while far from perfect, is at least a roughly functional term for a very useful concept.

Doritos, by the way, are way better than saltines even when you’re NOT sick ;)