The dietitian is known as the translator of scientific nutrition knowledge

into practical application. As the field of dietetics grew, and the impact of

eating behaviors on nutritional status was recognized, dietitians became

the health care professionals whose responsibility it was to deliver to the

patient information about diet. Dietetic education focused heavily, and

still does, on the sciences. Dietitians are well prepared for their task of

understanding the scientific aspects of the interrelatedness among the hu-

man body, food, nutritional interactions, and medical requirements. They

have the knowledge to design eating patterns to meet almost any nutritional

requirement. They are less prepared, however, in the process of "trans-

lating the knowledge" to the patient to motivate eating behavior change.

Theories presented in Effective Counseling Strategies for Dietary Manr

agement have been practiced in the counseling field for many years. In

addition to behavioral counseling, the other approaches to be presented

are client-centered therapy, reality therapy, rational-emotive therapy, and

transactional analysis. Transactional analysis will be discussed from the

perspective of interpreting and understanding interactions rather than from

the perspective of practicing the theory.

The book is organized in the following manner. Each theory is introduced

with a brief historical narrative. One factor shared by the theories is that

each was developed by a person trained initially in the psychoanalytic

school of personality originated by Sigmund Freud. Whether or not one

agrees with Freud s approach to understanding the personality, it is im-

portant to note that hc was the initiator of the study of personality. The

theorists presented in the book have another thing in common: they felt

a need to understand human behavior beyond the scope developed by

Freud. They sought to explain human behavior from a more "normal"

perspective. Freud developed his theory using a few mentally and emo-

tionally_disturbed patients. In some aspects of the theories, the influence

of the psychoanalytic approach may be evident.