Solving Picky Eating by Taking the Focus off the Food: Empowering Patients Toward A Healthier Tomorrow
For many families, mealtime has become a daily source of stress. Parents worry about nutrition, negotiate over vegetables, prepare separate meals, or wonder why a child who once ate almost anything suddenly refuses entire categories of food. But what if solving picky eating requires looking beyond what's on the plate?
In this educational webcast, Katie Kimball, CSME, founder and CEO of Raising Healthy Families and author of The Picky Eater Playbook, joins integrative and functional medicine physician Dr. Jill Valerius to explore the often-overlooked factors that can influence how children experience food and family mealtimes.
Drawing from her experience as an educator, mom of four, healthy kids cooking advocate, and speaker of the TEDx talk Picky Eating Isn't About the Food, Katie challenges parents to reconsider picky eating as simply a battle over taste or nutrition. She explores how factors such as sensory processing, physical discomfort, pressure, stress, and parent-child power dynamics may contribute to food resistance—and why well-intentioned efforts to encourage "just one more bite" can sometimes make eating more difficult.
Rather than focusing solely on getting a particular food into a child today, this conversation looks at how families can create the conditions for greater curiosity, confidence, and connection around food over time.
Katie will share practical strategies parents can begin using right away to reduce mealtime pressure, encourage positive exposure to new foods, and help children participate more actively in their own food experiences—including the powerful role that cooking and interacting with food away from the dinner table can play.
The conversation will also introduce ideas from Katie's forthcoming book, The Picky Eater Playbook: Stress-Free Strategies to Jumpstart Healthy Eating Habits in Kids, offering families a fresh perspective on raising capable, confident eaters while protecting something even more important than tonight's serving of vegetables: a child's long-term relationship with food.
Key Takeaways / Learning Objectives
- Understand why parents are fed up & reasons we might have so many more picky eaters than ever before.
- Discover what might picky eating be about if it isn't about the food.
- Learn quick actionable tips you can implement to reduce stress at the table (which may even result in new foods going into your children)
- Explore the best way to supercharge every picky eating intervention
- Learn about the new book "The Picker Eater Playbook" being published November 2026
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