National Center for Overcoming Overeating

This insightful book offers a common-sense, relaxed approach to healthy eating based on the method of self-demand feeding. Contrary to the belief that children must be forced to eat what's good for them, to clean their plates, and to avoid all sweets, Kids, Carrots, and Candy presents evidence that children will naturally self-regulate their eating if rigid rules are not imposed upon them. By trusting natural hunger cycles and letting children choose when, what, and how much they eat, food becomes demystified, and a lifetime of fears, fights, and anxieties around food, weight, and diet are eliminated.

We have a positive and practical proposal. We believe that people - adults and children alike - know how to eat. Demand feeding - eating when you are hungry, exactly what your body craves, and stopping when you have had enough - is the natural alternative to dieting. Demand feeding cures eating problems in adults and prevents eating and weight conflicts in children.

Eating problems among children and adults have reached epidemic proportions. Twenty-three percent of our nation's children are obese. At the other end of the spectrum, it has been reported that as many as 1 out of 200 girls ages 12 to 18 are anorexic. Twenty years ago, dieting was a 10 billion dollar industry. Today, it is a 35 billion dollar business. Sixty-five million Americans choose from 30,000 different diet plans yearly. The body-fixing messages that bombard our children daily are overwhelming and are a major cause of the eating problems we see today among children.

In one study, conducted at the University of California, more than half the 4th grade girls interviewed considered themselves overweight, when only 15% actually were overweight. Fifty-one percent of the nine-year-olds and 81% of the ten-year-olds were already experienced dieters. Many studies document that diets - the recommended prescription for body-fixing - make you fatter, cause more food obsession, lower your self esteem, and actually put you at risk for early mortality.

The most current research attests to what we have learned from over twenty years of clinical work with children and adults. In 1991, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study done by Dr. Leann L. Birch of the University of Illinois. Her research of 15 children, ages two to five, demonstrated that an "orderly mechanism" controls a child's food intake. There was no pattern to what and how much a given child ate at each meal, making it look chaotic, when in fact, each child consumed the same amount of calories daily. The findings indicate that a child's energy intake is tightly regulated. This ground-breaking study proves that a child's body is self-regulatory and that external controls over a child's eating or food restrictions are unnecessary.

In 1992, Dr. Mary Steinhardt of the University of Texas at Austin, with Carol Munter and Jane Hirschmann, completed a study which documents that demand feeding cures compulsive eating. The study, based on a two-year follow-up of 420 women who read the national best seller, Overcoming Overeating, by Hirschmann and Munter, demonstrates that demand feeding effectively reduces eating preoccupation, body preoccupation, and emotional eating.

Twenty years ago, we began working with women who were the casualties of the diet industry. Our clients were desperate. They had spent a lifetime trying to get their appetites under control in order to lose weight. As a result, they had become food junkies and were much fatter than ever before. It came as a surprise to them to learn that dieting was the source of their problems with food and weight. They had always blamed themselves. We suggested demand feeding as the solution. They needed to go back to the beginning of their eating lives and start over, reconnecting the experience of hunger with the experience of eating. They needed to become attuned feeders of themselves in order to relearn what they had once known at birth - how to eat.

The newborn, who cannot yet walk, talk, or even turn over, teaches us that the body is self-regulatory. In fact, a baby is born knowing how to eat. Every mother listens for that hunger cry, feeds the baby, and watches when she turns away, falls asleep or otherwise signals that she has had enough. This process of getting hungry, being fed, and feeling full is at the heart of our earliest experiences of comfort and security.

Each time you feed an infant when she is hungry, you are responding to her need and letting her know that she is cared for. Thousands of such interactions take place around feeding, changing, rocking, comforting, teaching, and generally providing for her welfare. These caretaking experiences allow a child to feel secure and, ultimately, to begin to care for herself.

Unfortunately, parents are encouraged to stop demand feeding fairly early and to start feeding their children on a schedule; i.e., at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Parents are also given endless advice on what and when their children should eat in order to grow healthfully. Very soon, the battle lines are drawn. Children are on one side wanting to eat when, what, and how much they choose. Parents, representing the culture, are on the other side wanting to impose the rules and restrictions about eating that they have been taught are in the best interests of their children.

Food wars begin. Dinnertime becomes a nightmare. The "picky" eater is chased with food while the overeater is deprived of food. Consequently, children start craving the foods that they have learned are off-limits and, as a result, they become increasingly alienated from their natural mechanisms for hunger and satiety. Becoming easy prey for diets and food fads, they no longer know how to eat.

Children must be in the driver's seat when it comes to their bodies and to their eating. The national agenda for the 90's should include a children's bill of rights which grants them control over this very natural process - eating.

Many of you reading this book have seriously struggled with your own food and weight issues. We sympathize with how difficult it must be for you to figure out how to raise the next generation without falling into the same traps your parents fell into. This book offers you the necessary guidelines for raising your children free of food and weight conflicts.

As parents, we need to encourage our children to eat with their natural hunger and to live comfortably in their bodies. This is the challenge we all face, as well as the reason for reissuing this book.

We wish you good luck and a hearty appetite!