Anxious Eaters

What makes fad diets so appealing to so many people? How did there get to be so many different ones, often with eerily similar prescriptions? Why do people cycle on and off diets, perpetually searching for that one simple trick that will solve everything? And how did these fads become so central to conversations about food and nutrition? Anxious Eaters shows that fad diets are popular because they fulfill crucial social and psychological needs—which is also why they tend to fail. Janet Chrzan and Kima Cargill bring together anthropology, psychology, and nutrition to explore what these programs promise yet rarely fulfill for dieters. They demonstrate how fad diets help people cope with widespread anxieties and offer tantalizing glimpses of attainable self-transformation. Chrzan and Cargill emphasize the social contexts of diets, arguing that beliefs about nutrition are deeply rooted in pervasive cultural narratives. Although people choose to adopt new eating habits for individual reasons, broader forces shape why fad diets seem to make sense. Considering dietary beliefs and practices in terms of culture, nutrition, and individual psychological needs, Anxious Eaters refrains from moralizing or promoting a “right” way to eat. Instead, it offers new ways of understanding the popularity of a wide range of eating trends, including the Atkins Diet and other low- or no-carb diets; beliefs that ingredients like wheat products and sugars are toxic, allergenic, or addictive; food avoidance and “Clean Eating” practices; and paleo or primal diets. Anxious Eaters sheds new light on why people adopt such diets and why these diets remain so attractive even though they often fail.

How can grasshoppers help parents and feeding professionals teach anxious eaters about new foods? Marsha Dunn Klein, an internationally-known feeding therapist, provides the answer in this book—highlighting that most anxious eaters do not enjoy the sensations and varibility of new foods. In seeking to help them, she asks what you’d need to do to help yourself try a worrisome new food, such as a grasshopper. Drawing on her own experience trying grasshoppers while learning Spanish in Mexico, she personalizes the struggle of children to find new food enjoyment, providing a goldmine of practical, proven, and compassionate strategies for parents and professionals who work with anxious eaters. Learn how to: • find peace and enjoyment during mealtimes; • find ways to help anxious eaters fearlessly try new foods; • navigate the sensory variations in food smells, tastes, textures looks, sounds: and • help anxious eaters (and their parents) develop a more positive relationship with food. Because parents are absolutely central to mealtime success, the author incorporates parent insights throughout the book. Using encouragement, novelty, and fun, she invites everyone back to the table with a sensitive and pressure-free approach.

How can grasshoppers help parents and feeding professionals teach anxious eaters about new foods? Marsha Dunn Klein, an internationally-known feeding therapist, provides the answer in this book--highlighting that most anxious eaters do not enjoy the sensations and varibility of new foods. In seeking to help them, she asks what you'd need to do to help yourself try a worrisome new food, such as a grasshopper. Drawing on her own experience trying grasshoppers while learning Spanish in Mexico, she personalizes the struggle of children to find new food enjoyment, providing a goldmine of practical, proven, and compassionate strategies for parents and professionals who work with anxious eaters. Learn how to: - find peace and enjoyment during mealtimes; - find ways to help anxious eaters fearlessly try new foods; - navigate the sensory variations in food smells, tastes, textures looks, sounds: and - help anxious eaters (and their parents) develop a more positive relationship with food. Because parents are absolutely central to mealtime success, the author incorporates parent insights throughout the book. Using encouragement, novelty, and fun, she invites everyone back to the table with a sensitive and pressure-free approach.

Initially developed by co-author Cheri Fraker in the course of treating an eleven-year-old who ate nothing but peanut butter, bread, and milk,Food Chainingis a breakthrough approach for dealing with picky eating and feeding problems at any age.Food Chainingemphasizes the relationship between foods in regard to taste, temperature, and texture. InFood Chaining, the internationally known feeding team behind this unique method shows how to help your child enjoy new and nutritious foods, no matter what the nature of his picky eating. The guide also includes information on common food allergies, improving eating skills, advice specific to special needs kids, and a pre-chaining program to help prevent food aversions before they develop.Food Chainingwill help you raise a lifelong healthy eater.

Why does your toddler get upset when his or her routine is disrupted? Why do they follow you from room to room and refuse to play on their own? Why are daily routines such as mealtimes, bath time, and bed time such a struggle? This accessible guide demystifies the difficult behaviors of anxious toddlers, offering tried-and-tested practical solutions to common parenting dilemmas. Each chapter begins with a real life example, clearly illustrating the behavior from the parent's and the toddler's perspective. Once the toddler's anxious behavior has been demystified and explained, new and effective parenting approaches are introduced to help parents tackle everyday difficulties and build up their child's resilience, independence, and coping mechanisms. Common difficulties with bath time, toileting, sleep, eating, transitions, social anxiety, separation anxiety, and sensory issues are solved, along with specific fears and phobias, and more extreme behaviors such as skin picking and hair pulling. A must-read for all parents of anxious toddlers, as well as for the professionals involved in supporting them.

First published in 2006. Food, Morals and Meaning examines our need to discipline our desires, our appetites and our pleasures at the table. However, instead of seeing this discipline as dominant or oppressive it argues that a rationalisation of pleasure plays a positive role in our lives, allowing us to better understand who we are. The book begins by exploring the way that concerns about food, the body and pleasure were prefigured in antiquity and then how these concerns were recast in early Christianity as problems of 'natural' appetite which had to be curbed. The following chapters discuss how scientific knowledge about food was constructed out of philosophical and religious concerns about indulgence and excess in 18th and 19th Century Europe. Finally, by using research collected from in-depth interviews with families, the last section focuses on the social organisation of food in the modern home to illustrate the ways that the meal table now incorporates the principles of nutrition as a form of moral training, especially for children. Food, Morals and Meaning will be essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.

Eating Anxiety argues that our culture's obsession with diet, obesity, meat, and local foods enacts ideological and biopolitical responses to perceived threats to both individual and national sovereignty. Exploring discourses of food politics, Chad Lavin links the concerns of food--especially issues of sustainability, public health, and inequality--to the evolution of the world order and the possibilities for democratic rule.

Written in easy-to-understand, everyday language, The Rules of "Normal" Eating lays out the four basic rules that "normal" eaters follow instinctively — eating when they're hungry, choosing foods that satisfy them, eating with awareness and enjoyment, and stopping when they're full or satisfied. Along with specific skills and techniques that help promote change, the book presents a proven cognitive-behavioral model of transformation that targets beliefs, feelings, and behaviors about food and eating and points the way toward genuine physical and emotional fulfillment. Readers learn how to reprogram their dysfunctional beliefs, manage uncomfortable feelings without turning to food, and establish new eating habits that tune their bodies into natural sensations of hunger, pleasure, satisfaction, and satiation. Filled with humorous insights, compassion, and practical wisdom, the book outlines balanced attitudes and patterns that benefit all types of eaters.