In the short term, many obesity interventions achieve an encouraging degree of success, but a year or five years later, a follow-up shows a different picture. As Childhood Obesity News has described, cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT is designed to p …

In the areas of weight management and eating disorders in kids and teens, several different components are involved. Negative behavior cycles need to be broken, and patterns need to be restructured. Some behaviors need to be eliminated, and others put …

When a human is unhappy with the way things are going, three courses of action are possible: change other people (usually frustratingly futile), change oneself (difficult to varying degrees), or change the environment. Sometimes modifying the environme …

Attention modification training (AMT) has been employed with children before, to treat anxiety and a number of other mental health issues. One of its most important uses is the treatment of substance abuse problems. Since food is a widely abused substa …

Dr. Pretlow has always emphasized the importance of identifying problem foods, and there is a very good reason for that recommendation. Many formerly obese patients, when faced with the seemingly overwhelming task of cutting down on food, have found an …

Happy July 4th! There’s no better way to say “Thanks!” to America than by doing a little something to end our obesity epidemic, starting with our own families. Here’s a collection of suggestions. Reduce salt intake An Australian study of 4,000 children …

USDA StandardsIn 2012, the journal Pediatrics published the results of a study of the effect of “competitive foods” in schools. Those are snacks and drinks available from vending machines and snack bars, which compete with the meals provided by the sch …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the school-based intervention program Pathways to Health, which grew out of the risk-behavior reduction program known as PATHS. Pathways to Health is all about sharpening and strengthening Executive Cognitive …

The school-based program called Pathways to Health, which is concerned with obesity prevention, developed out of an earlier program called PATHS that was designed to prevent violence and substance abuse. While they may appear to be very different probl …

Britain’s National Obesity Observatory, in a paper on obesity and mental health, recommends focusing on psychological factors rather than on weight loss per se. Especially for the obese child, social support is the primary concern. As we have seen from …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the work of Steve Tobak, a man who tells powerful and highly paid executives what to do. They don’t have to follow his advice, of course — unless they want to get results. Change is a constant in the business …

Childhood Obesity News looked at management consultant Steve Tobak’s advice for high-powered executives, and noticed that wisdom about change applies across the spectrum of humanity, affecting even obese children. In a piece titled “Change Your Ways? 3 …

Steve Tobak is a management consultant and executive coach who gives advice to chief executive officers and other high-ranking businesspeople. What can he tell us about childhood obesity? Maybe a lot, because, after all, each of us is the CEO of our ow …

In the pages of Reddit.com’s Fat People Stories, you might find a 400-pound eighth-grade boy who believes that change is impossible. Also, you might find a former binge eater who was raised by overweight and nutritionally ignorant parents to become an …

It has been proposed that anti-obesity campaigns should pay closer attention to the microbiome. That is the collective name for the incredible number of tiny creatures that live inside us, also known as bacteria. Their intentions are good, bad, or indi …

People who have reclaimed their health by losing large amounts of weight often have stories to share, sometimes about the turning points in their lives. The first one, courtesy of Reddit.com, comes from a 23-year-old former obese child who lost 180 pou …

If there is a category of childhood obesity survivor superstars, the personality known as “boogie2988” (YouTube) and “uberwolf0” (Reddit) surely belongs in it. His YouTube channel contains hundreds of short videos — character sketches, talks about ele …

What motivates kids to do the stuff that helps them lose weight and get healthy? That depends on the kid — but some seem to respond to dog-assisted intervention. Not much research has been done yet, but the idea has a lot going for it, such as empiric …

The company that conducted a study of obese Mayo Clinic employees used to be called Gympact before the name was shortened to simply Pact. Their program is available online, where it is used by at least one adult Childhood Obesity News visitor, who endo …

At first glance, it seems as if media product such as a weight-loss TV show, or a large-scale international public-relations event like Dubai’s “Your Weight in Gold” competition, might tell us something about the relationship between weight loss and th …

Will people do anything for money? Even do whatever is necessary to lose weight? The idea of paying the obese to slim down is a total reversal of the dominant paradigm, where it is the obese who must pay for gym memberships, pre-portioned meals, exerci …

Recently Childhood Obesity News talked about obesity’s ghost — the tendency of former fat kids to be haunted by the specter of their younger selves. They sometimes suffer from insecurity and heightened anxiety, and even from weird fears like going to …

For first-person childhood obesity experiences, nothing can beat the message boards at Dr. Pretlow’s Weigh2Rock  website. Nevertheless, Childhood Obesity News has been reaching out across the Web to find examples of weight-loss motivation in children. …

By 2008, fitness was catching on in China, and the country had well over 160,000 gyms with, in the words of Megan Shank, “spinning, yoga, step, salsa and even pole dancing — anything to entice office workers.” Depending on the usual factors that influ …

Katie Couric has filled a lot of roles in front of the camera, including network news anchor and daytime talk show host. For an episode of Katie titled “Kids Who Have Battled Obesity and Won,” one of her guests was Keyanna Williams, a teenager who was …

Roberta Russell wrote a book called Are There No Cures which asked the question, “What Works in Psychotherapy When It Does Work?” Here is the answer she found: It is the feeling of alliance between the therapist and the patient, as perceived by the pat …

At UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, a team looked into how sleep deprivation impairs the brain, specifically in regard to food choices. Twenty-three adults took part, undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging after a good night’s …

Sean Croxton is being listened to by a lot of people these days. They even wear shirts emblazoned with the letters JERF, an acronym for his slogan “Just Eat Real Food.” He promotes the idea of personal responsibility because it’s so obviously the fines …

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News looked at earlier work done by the STRONG Kids Project in its attempt to identify the main causes of childhood obesity. This research program is hosted by the University of Illinois, and its name is short for Synergist …

The Fat Acceptance Movement is one of the more puzzling and problematic societal currents of the past few years. Many strange theories are afloat. Some people think that recognizing the health hazards of obesity is the moral equivalent of condemning ob …