This booklet helps you master a kinder, gentler way of eating. It does for you what my colleagues, trainees, and I have often done in our respective practices with people who struggle with eating: help you become eating competent. Being a competent eater is feeling good about eating and doing a fine job with it-being relaxed and confident about taking good care of yourself with food. Throughout this booklet, I am careful to give you permission to eat as much as you want of food you enjoy. My Ellyn Satter Institute (ESI) colleagues, who are expert with eating competence and with helping with eating, contributed content and reviewed this manuscript again and again. Throughout, our emphasis is to give you strong permission to eat. At the same time, we carefully what we wrote to get rid of critical words and phrases-those that decode as "don't eat so much; don't eat what you enjoy."