it's portion control! Ho! Ho! Ho!

In my never-ending effort to find more resources for parents, I recently finished two more dissapointments. These have kept me thinking though.

The first was a cook book by a Chef who cooks great food for school lunches. It looked wonderful, lots of yummy recipes– and then I read the classic admonitions that seem to be everywhere about childhood obesity. How parents need to control how much of the fattening food the kids eat, while bribing with "better" foods. He tells parents to demand the child eat three brussel sprouts as the price for another serving of meat or potatoes. He extols the virtues of portion control for weight control.

The second book was a general book about eating and weight for children by a Harvard trained physician. Again the same advice on control, portion size, restriction etc.

What did both authors have in common? They looked like Santa Claus- big bellies and all. They might both have excellent levels of fitness, blood pressure etc, I don't know. What gets me mad, and confused is that here are two men, whom the CDC would no doubt call "obese" if not "morbidly obese" giving out advice on restraint and control when it comes to feeding our kids. I feel like asking, "How's that working for you?"

Our society has it all wrong when it comes to helping kids achieve the healthy weight that was meant for them. We know that restraint and control (feeding or withholding to try to get a kid to lose weight) doesn't work.

So I will continue to search for resources and in the meantime will continue to recommend anything by Ellyn Satter. Do you have any resources you like?