It’s Season 3 of The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel talk through tough topics related to family meals and parenting. Missed our first two seasons? You can check out all of our episodes here.

In this episode — the second of a two-part series — we return to our conversation with Diana Rice, registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, and certified parent educator on a mission to help families ditch diet culture and enjoy healthy relationships with food.

She’s the voice behind the online platform Anti Diet Kids, and owns Tiny Seed Family Nutrition, a weight-inclusive nutrition counseling practice. Her first book, Food Positivity: How to Ditch Diet Culture and Talk to Kids About Food, was published by Wiley earlier this year.

Episode Highlights:

• Go to 3:05 for Diana’s thoughts on self-regulation, felt safety, attunement, and body trust
• Go to 9:30 for a conversation about the importance of attunement and connection at family dinner, and how food positivity arises from that
• Go to 13:57 for Diana’s food suggestions for busy families
• Go to 19:09 for Bri’s fun suggestion for families who want to raise food-positive kids
• Go to 22:44 for Annie’s ideas for conversation starters that will help with a food-positive mindset

Related Links:

• Episode 20: Food Positivity with Diana Rice (Part I)
• Printable Food Critic Cards
• Four Weeks to Better Family Dinners
• Staying Food Positive in a Body Negative World
• How to Raise Kids with Positive Body Image
• Eating Disorders and Family Meals
• Episode 4: Picky or Problematic?
• Episode 6: Table Trauma
• The Welcoming Table 

Episode Transcript:

Bri: Welcome back to the Family Dinner Project podcast. I’m Bri DeRosa, and today we are airing part two of our episode with Diana Rice. Diana is a registered dietician. She runs Tiny Seed Nutrition. You may know her from social media, where she runs the account Anti-Diet Kids, and she’s also the author of the new book, “Food Positivity.”

So in the first part of our conversation with Diana, we covered a lot of topics. We’re going to pick up right where we left off, just a little bit before the end of the last episode when Diana was talking with us about some of the skills that neurodivergent kids, and really all kids, need to thrive at the table.

And we were talking about self-regulation particularly, where episode one left off. So today, part two, we’re gonna pick up on that conversation. We’re gonna talk a lot more about some of the other things that Diana thinks are really important, felt safety and co-regulation. We’re gonna give her best recommendations to parents about how to build those things into your family meals.

And we’re going to, of course, cover food, fun, and conversation ideas that you can try out at home. So enjoy this episode with Diana Rice. 

Diana: I do think that when we wanna control whether our kids are eating Oreos, it’s because we’re hearing, childhood disease is increasing and body size is increasing and we’re like, “I gotta do something about this,” when really it’s more of the cultural landscape and the services we’re providing to people, and whether parents have the emotional support to not have anger outbursts, or, or get into toxic relationships and all those things that are gonna support kids. And so forget about the vegetables. That’s gonna do way more for kids’ health long term.

But for the things that we can control, instead of I’m gonna only ever pack healthy food for, quote-unquote, healthy food for my kid, there’s a chapter on nutrition in Food Positivity out of, I think, 22 chapters, and that’s it.

21 chapters are about the social ways to support your kid so that they reach that point of self-regulation where they can make nutritionally balanced choices that are right for their body. And so the, the way that it’s laid out in the book, talking about self-regulation, is that self-regulation is not necessarily something that kids are born with.

We do see this when they’re able to, whether they’re being breastfed or bottle fed, whenever they feel full, it’s the same as us having a plate of food in front of us and being like, “Eh, I’m done,” basically turn away from the bottle, and that is certainly something we want to preserve in infancy.

But as we get into less feeding on demand, which is what we do for infants, and more scheduled meals, packed lunches, family dinners, saying no to cookies right before dinner, all this stuff, the child actually needs the parent to facilitate the skill of self-regulation.

And so there are three things that need to be in place for that. It is felt safety, and ACEs play a huge role in that, but also it’s hard for parents, even parents with a lot of resources, to grasp felt safety, because you know that your kid has a roof over their head, has plenty of food, has a safe school.

You know that they have literal safety, but if the child is going to be forced to eat the broccoli off of their plate at the table, then the child may not have felt safety. The child feels that this table is not a safe place for me. And that’s particularly tricky with neurodivergent kids because the way that we think they should act is not the way that comes naturally to them to act, and the things that they need to feel safe, whether it’s, maybe the environment is too loud for them, or somebody is chewing, or they need to be able to wiggle while they’re eating.

Culturally, we’re like, “No that’s inappropriate,” and so we don’t support that. And so that’s one thing to change is there’s a whole chapter as well on supporting kids with specific feeding challenges, and neurodivergence is one of them.

But, for a kid to achieve self-regulation, they need felt safety. They need the parent to be co-regulating with them. And so a lot of parents are familiar how this works with emotions. You wanted the toy truck. Billy’s playing with the toy truck. It’s okay to have big feelings, but right now it’s Billy’s turn to play with the truck,” right? That’s You know you’re saying to the kid what you hope they will subconsciously say to themselves, when they’re a little bit older “It’s okay if somebody else is playing with the toy first,” right?

But they’re learning it from you. And like I was saying before if you don’t have those skills of we can always have more brownies later or whatever it is, then it’s a– it can come a lot harder. Or you have an objective of this kid has to eat the broccoli or else he’s not gonna be healthy, then you’re– it’s not gonna come naturally to you to do that co-regulation of whether it’s a, a scary new food on the table, or the kid is, honestly it was a hard day at school and they can’t focus on eating because they’re still processing their emotions.

And then the last one is body trust, which is what I was saying before of, as a parent, I trust your body, one, to grow to whatever size it’s supposed to be, big, small, in the middle, your body is your body, and I trust it, and then I trust you to work things out. Maybe you will eat too much ice cream and have a stomachache or throw up.

It’s not actually my job to stop you from doing that 100% of the time. I always say you can stop your kid from doing that before school drop-off. That’s okay, right? But we, but, it is also– the example I always use is Halloween candy. It’s a really great tactic to let your kid on the night of Halloween eat as much candy as they want, even if they’re gonna get sick, because that’s you demonstrating trust in them that they’re gonna be able to work it out, and they’re not gonna be able to reach the point of “Yeah I actually don’t want that,” or to not even bo- be like, “Okay that one is, a banana Laffy Taffy,” “I’m not gonna waste my time with that thing,” right?

Versus, “I gotta eat any sugar I can get my hands on ’cause I don’t know when the next time I’m gonna have it.” So you gotta trust that the kid actually is born with this ability to achieve self-regulation. And then when all of those things are in place, you support it by being attuned to your child with co-regulation.

You support it by staying calm and regulated yourself. With body trust, you support it by respecting their genetic blueprint. When you’re able to do those things, and the reason that it’s all laid out chapter by chapter is that if parents hadn’t missed these skills themselves in their own upbringings, you wouldn’t need a book about it. But, just like if you wanted to learn a second language, you would need some resources on that, this is the book on how to do it.

And again, talking about neurodivergence, I think that attunement and felt safety piece is really important. Something that I say really often, actually, I have one kid who’s neurodivergent. I’m neurodivergent myself, and I tell people that there’s actually not a huge difference in raising neurodivergent kids in that, yes, the actions that you take might be different, but the fact that you have to be attuned to your kids and their own unique needs, that’s something you have to do whether or not your kid is neurodivergent.

It can just be, I think the cultural moment that we’re in right now with neurodivergence is that we weren’t even, even five years ago, we weren’t even recognizing just how many kids and how many adults are programmed to be neurodivergent. And so a lot of the behaviors like wiggling at the dinner table or not wanting your foods to touch or only liking a handful of safe foods are not accepted as okay.

And then when we try to condition those out of the kid, now their felt safety is compromised, and now their self-regulation is gonna be compromised, right? And so the real key is getting to know the unique supports your kid is gonna need so that they can achieve all those things of, felt safety and body trust and regulation, and go off into the world and become a college student who doesn’t eat a whole box of Oreos unless they really want to eat, unless it’s just delicious and they want to eat it, but not because they feel like they compulsively can’t stop.

Bri: Yeah. There’s so much there in that answer, and I so appreciate the point that regardless of the situation, regardless of the child, regardless of whatever, the attunement piece is the piece that parents need to zero in on. And that’s the family dinner thing Annie? 

Like the whole research around family dinner and why it makes us happier, why it makes us healthier, why it strengthens our relationships, is really about tuning into the people that you are eating with and being mindful of that connection, right? 

Annie: If we just boil it down to the essence- Yeah.

Yes, that’s it. It’s a reliable time of the day to do that. And food- food generally helps with that. If it can be– if food can be eaten in a relaxed way where there isn’t a lot of conversation about the food, but it’s just there to be enjoyed, it eases the relaxation and the connection and the pleasure of being with other people.

Diana: Yeah. I can actually trace my interest in food and nutrition back to the fact that my family always had family dinner. I know a lot of– I know it, it, part of the conversation right now is like, “Oh, schedules these days. Can’t we connect in other ways?” For whatever reason, my family always had family dinner, and I always looked forward to it.

Even we would be most of the time eating tuna sandwiches and tomato soup, right? But I looked forward to those moments with my family. And then in thinking about my passions in life, a lot of dieticians actually go into the field because they wanna be able to control nutrition. My, my driving force is exactly what you just said, Anne, of like there’s connection to food, and it’s, it brings people together, and it’s joyful, and it’s satisfying.

And I was like, I want my whole job to be about that.” That sounds so awesome. 

Annie: I think we can hear that. We can hear that this, in this whole conversation. There’s a kind of light and there’s a passion, obviously- … but also a joy and appreciation of this topic.

Diana: I think that’s why the, the book is called “Food Positivity.” I hate the idea that people could be negative about, about or fearful of it. This is such a positive thing. It’s so great. It’s food. 

Bri: No I know. And it is, and it’s so strange to think about how we, we warp those mindsets, right?

Because, yeah if I think about, one of the things that, that we’ve become semi-known for on threads at least, is like I often will share about the monthly family dinners that we instituted with my mother-in-law. She’s older, she’s alone, she’s aging in place, and so we started a thing where we drive up to her place with food once a month- and some of our nieces and nephews join, and we do like a Sunday family dinner where she doesn’t have to cook, she doesn’t have to clean. It’s all done for her, but it’s at her house, so she doesn’t have to leave. And the joy of trying new recipes for those dinners, getting people’s feedback, watching her enjoy a meal that has been cooked for her, sharing memories, sharing family stories, right?

Like, all of these things, that is so rewarding. And there is no part of those dinners that’s like, “Who’s eating too much?” “I shouldn’t be eating the dessert that so and so brought because it’s too many cal-” Like there’s none of that. Nah. No. We’re not doing that. Yeah. And it’s one of the most restorative things that we have built into our family’s life.

And I just think about that, and then think on, on a microcosmic level, the nightly family dinner, how my own mother was, like, very body conscious. And I remember how many dinners were just completely ruined for me because she would be like, “This soup is only 200 calories a serving.”

And I’d be like, “Great.” Like- Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That just killed every desire I had to enjoy the soup, and now I’m worried about how many bowls of soup and how many servings it… yeah. Like there’s so, such a difference in the way that we approach each other, even, when we’re worried or not worried about what’s going into our bodies. 

Diana: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And that, that practice of the monthly family dinners you’re talking about, that’s gonna add years to your mother-in-law’s life just in and of itself. I can, I could, I can just feel it. 

Bri: Oh, yeah. No, and it’s such a gift and a joy to be able to do it.

It’s such a gift to be able to give to someone, to have that connection in their lives when they’re at a life stage where connection is harder. And the food is the vehicle that allows us to do it. But again, it’s about the coming together.

So I feel like we could talk about this forever, but we always end our conversations with food, fun, and conversation that people can bring back to their family dinner table tonight. And so Diana, food positivity. Yeah. Bring, bring us home with what is your food idea, suggestion, or thought for families today?

Diana: So I am really big on rejecting the notion that everything has to be homemade. The kind of analogy I always use is we don’t sew our own clothes anymore, and nobody feels guilty that they didn’t make home-sewn clothes because we work full time in industries that are not textiles, right?

And yet food, we– there’s still this pressure that it should be fully home-cooked even though we have these really demanding schedules. So I’m very big on products that still are satisfying, still provide the nutrition that we need, but we didn’t have to cook them. So I actually made this, this last night.

It was just like some pre-made lightly breaded chicken. It comes in a big freezer bag. You just put it in the air fryer for 20 minutes. And then what I love to do is serve– everybody gets more or less the same food, but my husband and I are eating A salad with a bunch of veggies in there and the chicken is chopped up on top.

My kids are eating the chicken dipped in ketchup, maybe with some steamed broccoli on the side. My kids actually really like broccoli. 

Bri: Mine do too. 

Diana: I know, yes. Maybe some garlic bread. If there’s tomatoes in the salad, maybe they’ve just got cherry tomatoes that they can eat. And so I’m really big on meals like that where, you know, the adults still have something very satisfying.

I would much rather eat a big salad with chicken in it than chicken here and broccoli here, although I guess I eat that sometimes. But, so there’s lots of things like that. Sometimes when I make pasta I’ll put like, just it’s spicy and I put all these vegetables and stuff in mine, and my kids are eating pasta with red sauce and some frozen meatballs, right?

It’s still more or less the same meal. And what I’m seeing right now, because my oldest kid is 11, and there is, there’s actually a lot of information in the book about stages of cognitive development, and 11 is just about approaching the final destination of cognitive development and critical thinking.

And it’s timing up with her being like, “I’ll have some salad. Can I try that?” And now when we have a meal like that, she wants to have the salad. And I also have a nine-year-old, so I’m making the chicken separately for her. And if my nine-year-old decides she never wants the salad, like that’s okay too.

She gets to have that preference. But one thing that we know about the many benefits of family dinners is that seeing the adults eat it and model it over and over again. I think we forget, especially in America, that be- that’s your culture. Even just a, a bag of frozen breaded chicken tenders and a bagged salad can be…

That’s our culture, and our kids are learning that. And that, that’s okay because what we really want is for them to go off to college and buy a bagged salad and feed themselves.

Bri: No, I literally had that conversation with my college kid recently. We were cooking together while he was home, and I was showing him how to make a meal that he really loves that’s simple to make, and it’s like a salmon thing that gets baked in the oven, and some vegetables that he really likes. Like a very, a very him kind of a thing. But we were talking about, and here’s how if you get apartment release from the dorms next year when you will be eligible, and if you will be living in a place with a kitchen, here’s how you could change up the component parts of this meal. And, instead of having to chop and cook the vegetables, you might get a bag salad kit. And remember, here are the ones that you like, right?

And instead of, if you can’t afford the salmon on your student budget, right? You could do these vegetables and this rice dish that you made, but with a rotisserie chicken. Or you could get the frozen chicken d- ’cause we keep those in the freezer too, right?

Like that’s, you could get the frozen chicken tenders. And he, like we talked about all of those component parts because that is the training of how do you build a meal that works for your schedule, works for your time, works for all of those things. Yeah. So I really appreciate that hack, and the whole build your own thing is something that we’ve talked about for years.

Diana: Yeah. And what you’re doing there is same as like, there’s like this cliche that like kids go off to college and they can’t do their own laundry. At some point when the kid is in high school, you’re probably saying, “I think you can handle your own laundry now. Here’s how you turn on the machine.” That’s basically what you’re doing. You’re raising adults, right?

But the problem with food, especially if we’ve got weird hang-ups about calories and how many calories are in the soup, is that we’re only ever teaching our kid how to eat as little as possible or h- the bene- or skipping meals and stuff like that.

And so they get to college, and whether… They might not even be trying to diet, but they didn’t see an adult feed themselves three times a day. And so they think that’s a normal thing for adults to do. And so just like we’re teaching them to do their own laundry, we gotta be teaching them to feed themselves regularly with satisfying food.

Bri: I think that is such a huge piece. And speaking of that, I’m gonna transition to our fun idea for today. And I think for me, the whole idea of food positivity and of trying to raise eaters, competent eaters, I guess I would say- 

Diana: Yeah. No that’s a clinical term from Ellyn Satter, actually.

Eating competence. 

Bri: Oh, I love that for me. Yeah. Look at that. Yeah. If we’re gonna raise competent eaters, I think one of the, the most fun things you can do is find formats in which to try new things. Just– And I encourage people, first of all, to do this, whether at home or make it an opportunity to go to a restaurant you’ve never tried.

Go seek out a type of cuisine that you’ve never experienced. Even try, oh, this is a, an ice cream shop that has flavors that we’ve never experienced before. Find one thing that feels exciting and adventurous without pushing your family’s boundaries too far. You know your kids, right? Or yourselves. Some adults have their own selective eating preferences, and that’s cool. But find a way to experience a new food at least once a month together.

And I think, we have these food critic cards on our website and I’ll link them in the show notes. I think that’s a really fun way to make it an activity and to get kids engaged in the process of understanding that I am trying this. I might not like it. It’s okay and safe to not enjoy it. And I can fill out this little critic card, and it has smiley faces and whatever. They don’t even have to be able to write. But I can fill out this little card evaluating why I don’t like it. I can have my opinion. I can express my opinion freely about this thing, whether I like it or I don’t like it, and that’s all part of the learning experience.

And I think that is incredibly important because we spend so much time– I hear it all the time. People say to their kids, “Oh, no, you won’t like that.” It- … you don’t actually know.

Okay? You don’t know what they’re gonna you don’t. You know what you don’t like, and we can sometimes make reasonable predictions, but telling a kid right off the bat, “You’re not gonna like that,” is the fastest way to ensure that they don’t try anything new.

You’re just gonna tell them don’t even try. So I think make it fun. Once a month, commit, and try the food critic cards because they help with the whole activity of it all and make sense of the experience, as an experience. 

Diana: I love that. So- And I love that it’s once a month because parents are under a lot of pressure, to have family dinners at all.

And so I love that just a once a month, and it can even– When I was growing up, we did, we always did– so I have three siblings, so that’s, six of us total with my parents. For some- for everybody’s birthday, we would go to a different ethnic restaurant. I lived in– I was lucky to grow up in an area with a lot of ethnic cuisine, and it– we didn’t have the cards, but I credit that with branching out from tuna and tomato soup, of we would go get Ethiopian food and, sushi and– The sushi wasn’t very popular in the mid-’90s and, like th- things like that.

And, I don’t know that we were doing it as like a, an activity. I love the idea of, getting kids to voice what they did or didn’t like with absolutely no pressure that they come around to liking it, right? But, to take the pressure off parents, like if you can afford it, it can be a restaurant.

I– my kids are really into these like international snack boxes, like you order and you get like snacks from Spain and Japan and, like it doesn’t have to be something that you cook, ’cause I know parents are already under so much pressure to cook. 

Bri: And it could even be, you know what? Make English muffin pizzas, but make one that has totally different toppings that they’ve never tried before, and then it’s a tiny thing. It’s not– You haven’t wasted your whole grocery budget or all of your time, right? So there are different ways to scale this that allow you to still experience this, and I think that’s really important.

Annie, how about conversation? 

Annie: It’s funny because one of my conversation ideas is follow-up on the critic cards, but let me just frame out. I have a bunch of conversation ideas, and they all– food in terms of their, your senses rather than exploring food around how many calories a particular food has.

And emphasizing the joy and pleasure of food. So that’s my big bucket idea. These are some of the questions: What food do you wish you knew how to cook? What’s your favorite smell of any food that you have? What color or colors do you most love to see on the dinner plate?

And per the food critic cards, as you’re trying a new food, what three words come to mind when you taste this food? Crunchy, salty, whatever. So it gets out of, “I like it, I hate it, it’s good, it’s bad,” but it encourages a child to really think, what is the sensual experience of this particular food?

And finally, what food do you enjoy eating every day or most days?

Diana: I love all those. 

Bri: Yeah, I do too, and I think that whole thing of being descriptive is really valuable, right? 

And it’s good for adults too. Because if we’re in this place of having been programmed, so many of us, to think about food as calories or inputs or nutritional, macros, all of these kinds of things, it might be really healthy for us to step back and be like, “No, it’s spicy, it’s savory, it’s slippery, it’s crunchy,” and just focus on what is the sensation. Yeah. What am I enjoying? 

Diana: It can help you get to know your own satisfaction. Like, I don’t like it when savory dishes are cooked with sweet, like molasses or sugar.

And I just, it’s not my favorite. It’s, that’s my satisfaction. When I’m looking at a menu, I’m not picking what is the fewest calories. I’m, I might see if something is cooked in apple juice or something. I’ll be like, “Eh that’s not my jam.” I’m gonna go with the spicy one or something like that.

And I love the idea of giving kids, especially neurodivergent kids, because they may be more likely to have taste and texture preferences, the language to express what the, what it is that they’re tasting, what they do or don’t like about it. And then we have to uphold their agency to do that. And not say, “Oh, you’re lear- you’re learning to like spicy flavors,” or whatever. It’s like, “No, you get to be a person who chooses that you don’t like mushy or you don’t like spicy.” And then what’s really great is for the parent to then, make some accommodations on, if the kid really doesn’t like, mushy potatoes, something, what, I don’t know what it is, and that’s that attunement piece.

Bri: Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. So there has been so much in this conversation. And I have really appreciated having you with us, Diana, and learning from you. We’re gonna link your- 

Annie: Me too. Yeah. 

Diana: Thank you. Thank you for it so much for having me.

This was such a great conversation. 

Bri: Oh, thank you so much. And we are going to link Diana’s book and website and socials in the show notes, and all of the resources that we’ve talked about today, so you will be able to find everything you need. Thanks for being with us on the Family Dinner Project podcast, and we’ll see you next time.

Diana: Thank you.