A Chance to Heal: Be There or Be Square
A Chance to Heal is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation that originated in the mind of Rachel Silver. As a 17-year-old, Silver needed help to treat her eating disorder, and her position in life was such that money was no object. But not everyone is in such a comfortable situation. While undergoing her own treatment, Rachel […]
Live-In Addiction Programs and Permanent Change
Many live-in addiction treatment centers include food addiction in their agenda, and a place called Shades of Hope, located in Buffalo Gap, Texas, specializes in “eating disorders and co-occurring addictions.” Oprah Winfrey is profiling this center in her new series, “Addicted to Food.” Here is the center’s definition of food addiction: Food addiction is loss […]
Comfort Eating and Carrie Fisher
Yesterday we discussed the difficulty, for parents and health professionals concerned about childhood obesity, in having a positive effect, or making any impact at all, on the production, advertising, or availability of junk food. Call it less-than-optimal food, call it pseudo-food, or call it ingestible matter that does the body more harm than good. Especially, […]
“Jelly and the Donuts” Vs. Childhood Obesity
Childhood obesity is such a complicated problem that we need to come at it from every possible direction, and chip away at it from any angle that looks promising. Dr. Pretlow has been calling attention to the fact that food addiction is real, and needs to be treated like any other addiction. Many young people […]
Prediction for 2011: Food Addiction Will Still Exist
Dr. Mark Hyman does not speak in polite euphemisms, but titles an essay in the bluntest terms, “Food Addiction: Could It Explain Why 70 Percent of Americans Are Fat?” Yes, it could! This is what Dr. Pretlow has been saying all along. There really is such a thing as food addiction, and the sooner we […]
Peer Groups Work for Many Addicts
So many different fields have something to contribute to solving the childhood obesity problem, and there are a lot of things that can be done, both large and small. We’ve talked about change that can be undertaken right at home, like chewing more thoroughly and drinking lots of water, or even amateur aversion therapy. We’ve […]
Motivational Interviewing and Childhood Obesity
In “What is MI?,” Stephen Rollnick, Ph.D., and William R. Miller, Ph.D., talk about the spirit of motivational interviewing, which tends to downplay formal technique. The authors summarize it in seven key points, which are also briefly summed up here, but explored much more fully in their article. Drs. Rollnick and Miller explain the usefulness […]
Food Addiction Paradigm Early Adopters Gettinger and Winfrey
We’ve been going on and on about the difficulty of introducing the concept of food addiction. And it is in many ways an uphill push, but not a hopeless one. Today, we salute some people who have opened their minds enough to look through the psychological food dependence-addiction lens, and see a way out of […]