Leave A Comment For Your Free Copy of ‘Eat With Joy’

Last updated on: March 13, 2013 at 6:00 am by Rachel Marie Stone

Leave A Comment For Your Free Copy of ‘Eat With Joy’ 2013-03-13T06:00:53-04:00 Rachel Marie Stone

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I have a guest post at Amy Julia Becker‘s lovely blog, Thin Places. Amy Julia is also graciously hosting a giveaway, so if you head over to her blog and leave a comment, you’ll be entered to win a free copy of Eat With Joy—the kind made out of paper!

Amy Julia asked me to write on something related to eating with joy with children–and that’s just what I did, starting with my first pregnancy with my now seven-year-old son, Aidan:

Since my early teens I’d viewed food as a dangerous temptation: fresh bread with butter, plates of pasta marinara, and squares of quality chocolate conspired to make me fat and unhealthy. For years I thought of myself as “healthy” for getting by on apples and Diet Coke much of the time. If food was delicious, it could only be a trap. If I craved something, or overate, I berated myself for my selfishness. In my warped way of thinking, this “discipline” pleased God.

[…]

Our culture, so radical in its individualism, had taught me, implicitly and explicitly, that my body was my own; that no one had a claim on it but me, and, also, that it was infinitely malleable. The discourse around pregnancy had other claims: not only should I be eating a perfect diet to optimize my child’s health and intelligence, I should be taking prenatal vitamins and practicing prenatal yoga. At the same time, in the pregnancy magazines at the doctor’s office, I was seeing advertisements for “getting my body back” once the pregnancy was over and for nursing tank tops that promised to conceal my “baby belly” after delivery. I felt I was receiving conflicting messages: the first being that my baby’s well-being was entirely dependent upon my eating and exercise; the second, that my body was mine, and that I should take measures to keep it that way, or at least, to conceal its pregnancy-inflicted flaws.

It goes on to talk about how I learned to accept food as God’s good gift, and how, imperfectly, of course, I try to teach my children to accept food similarly.

Go to Amy Julia’s blog, read the rest of the post, and leave a comment for your free copy of Eat With Joy: Redeeming God’s Gift of Food.

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Amy Julia Becker

Eat With Joy: Redeeming God's Gift of Food

eating and pregnancy

eating with children

fear of gaining weight

instilling healthy attitudes toward food in children

pregnancy and weight gain

Thin Places

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