Remove the Halloween Spotlight From Eating

In this season, the goal is to minimize the acquisition, retention, and consumption of candy. Mainly, the first. If acquisition can be minimized, the other two threats become moot. One way might be to set a crude physical limit, by for instance using a smallish plastic pumpkin with a handle, and going home when it’s full.

The goal, leading up to Halloween, is to fill up a chunk of time with creative activities that kids enjoy. With any luck, they will be motivated to invent even more alternative (and minimal-calorie) activities for next year. Theoretically, a savvy parent could plan a whole month’s worth of spare-time activities centered around Halloween without anyone ingesting a single gram of sugar. One answer is to remodel the holiday by switching the emphasis to creativity and participation.

This might be an opportunity for some neighborhood bonding, if you can get other families on board with setting up attractive non-food-related activities. And on the home front, what could be better than spending quality time with little people who value your attention more than sugar? If you want a candy-less Halloween, or anyway one with less candy, and provide enough entertaining activities, that just might be possible.

Exercise

Do you live in a city where haunted houses materialize just before Halloween every year? Visit them on foot, if possible. Weather permitting, kids can paint their faces and ride around on bikes. They could wear any crazy stuff, as long as they can see where they’re going and no trailing scarf gets caught in a wheel. Maybe, the day after Halloween, folks could go out with bags and pointed sticks, or grabber tongs, and pick up trash.

Get in the spirit by making the holiday about giving rather than getting. In some communities, groups of little kids dress up and visit retirement homes and assisted-living facilities. You might promote the idea that showing off costumes and delighting the seniors is reward enough. The grownups arrange ahead, of course, for no sugary treat distribution, and kids have a splendid time parading around, collecting a ton of approval.

The creative arts

Many parents shy away from pumpkin carving because of the mess factor. This is where those cute little miniature pumpkins enter the picture. They too can be carved, etched, drawn on, or studded with fake gems. One low-impact project in the time that precedes the holiday is to write and illustrate an original ghost story comic book. Maybe last year you checked out the post-Halloween sales and got hold of a bunch of blank masks. They can be colored with paint or crayon or marker. Stuff can be glued onto them, including hair-like substances at the top or bottom edges. Odds and ends of frippery can be attached.

Long before October 31, the exchange of ideas can begin about what to wear. A Saturday afternoon spent browsing the racks and shelves at a thrift store can be so exciting, kids might even forget to nag for soda and junk food. Explore the costume possibilities for all family members. Of course, animals can wear them too. Many dogs dress up quite satisfactorily; cats almost never.

At home, as we discussed, a yard is the ultimate bonus playground for Halloween fun. Spider webs are the obvious go-to decoration, and they are moderately priced at stores. And so on. You get the picture. Redesign the Halloween tradition to emphasize creativity and family togetherness, and maybe by the time the actual holiday rolls around, candy will be the last thing on your kids’ minds. It’s worth a try!

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by DaPuglet/CC BY-ND 2.0

Ramping Up to Halloween

When it comes to looking forward to Halloween, parents can open up the possibilities. With imagination and luck, the paradigm can be altered to where candy is the last thing on kids’ minds. Suggest trying something new this year. Parents can be genuine, generous, and spontaneous in planting these notions. Any kind of official family meeting probably feels, to a kid, like a courtroom or at the very least, a board meeting. So try subtlety. What notions might be subtly introduced?

Let’s start with decor. Do you have a front yard? In that case, kids can create a visual environment that will be the envy of the neighborhood. Even if there is only a side yard, backyard, or garage to work with, it is possible to create a spooky environment for your children’s own enjoyment, and to share with invited friends. As an added bonus, a project of this kind makes the holiday more about giving than getting, which is always nice.

The idea here is to create some family traditions that are even more attractive than trick-or-treating. Kids like to make things, and they also very much enjoy spending time with their parents’ attention focused on them in a way that is not critical or judgmental, but benevolent.

R.I.P.

So if you don’t have any large cardboard boxes around, obtain some from the back rooms and alleys of local businesses. Then help your kids design, and color or paint, life-size grave markers, either comical or dead serious (evil chuckle), their choice. Hold the tombstones up with sticks, or fastened to upturned plastic buckets, or just lean them against a fence or wall. Cardboard is also good for making black cats with arched backs, weird little gnome figures, and so forth. Another advantage of cardboard is that it doesn’t need to be stored until next year, but can be recycled.

Woo-hoo-hoo

Did you know that if you take a glass soda bottle and partly fill it with water and blow across the top of it, an eerie sound is produced? You might have a child who would be happier making scary sound effects than trekking around the neighborhood. Is there a front porch? Rather than collect candy with the mob, a theatrically-inclined child might prefer to make the porch their stage, in a sinister costume, stirring a cauldron, cackling wickedly all the while.

If you don’t have that kind of space, is it possible to temporarily spookify one room with an orange light bulb and some silhouettes cut from dark paper tacked to the walls? Or even try miniaturizing. Turn a cardboard box on its side, paint it, and make a diorama or room box. Decorate and furnish it with scraps and bits, and see what kind of spooky lighting effects can be accomplished with a glowstick or two.

Inspiration abounds

Feeding the words “make haunted house” into YouTube will produce pictures of many inspiring do-it-yourself Halloween projects. Haunted house creation can be done on the cheap, and plenty of Americans have become local heroes by creating homemade creepy scenes. Furthermore, it can be done on a very limited budget, plus scrounging.

It can become a year-round project, to check out second-hand stores, garage sales, and other likely venues for used props and wardrobe items. Many cities have Facebook groups or similar online arrangements for matching up donors of free stuff with people who want, for instance, a bushel of plastic pumpkins or several square yards of leftover “cobwebs.”

The whole idea here is to create absorbing activities that a child can take part in, and fill the weeks that lead up to the holiday with these activities. Every minute that a child spends painting props or creating fright wigs, is a minute they are not using to feed their faces. Imagination and ingenuity can be sparked, and maybe even lead to new interests that will influence a child’s educational path or vocational inclination. Some day, when your daughter or son is the most acclaimed makeup artist in the horror movie field, and also not morbidly obese, you might look back on these humble beginnings as the best idea your family ever had.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by Nezumi66/Public Domain

More Morbidity — Coming Storms

Many medical professionals have spoken up about the urgency of recognizing the increased risk to health and life when obesity combines with other physical ailments. For instance, Dr. Aparna Govil Bhasker:

Obesity must be taken very seriously because it affects almost every organ in the body. Effects of obesity can be divided into metabolic and hormonal issues, bio-mechanical problems and organ-specific diseases.

An extensive Swedish study that we will be talking about more ended up with a dire Conclusion:

This prospective cohort study shows that individuals who had obesity in childhood already have an increased risk of death by early adulthood, compared with a population-based comparison group. Among those who had obesity in childhood, 1 in 4 had obesity recorded as a cause of death. Identifying specific factors that may impact the risk of early mortality in individuals with obesity in childhood is important, to enable preventive actions and to promote long-term health.

Recently we spoke of the very high odds that any case of childhood obesity either co-exists with, or soon will co-exist with, a co-morbidity. Together, they add up to a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The number of potential co-morbidities is quite large. They can affect the entire body or various parts and systems, and interact with obesity to the patient’s detriment:

• Brain — reduced executive functioning and working memory, increased impulsiveness, poor cognitive function
• Cancer — obesity has been linked to at least 13 types of malignancies
• Cardiovascular — problems including, but not limited to, essential hypertension, coronary artery disease, ventricular hypertrophy, venous varicosities, impaired microvascular function
• Central nervous system — decreased sympathetic nervous system responses, multiple sclerosis
• Cutaneous (skin) problems — intertrigo, acanthosis nigricans, hidradenitis suppurativa, hirsutism, increased risk for cellulitis, carbuncles
• Eyes — myopia, intraocular pressure
• Gastrointestinal — gall bladder disease, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, fatty liver infiltration, reflux esophagitis
• Metabolic syndrome — diabetes, insulin resistance, systemic low-grade inflammation
• Orthopedic — bone damage, joint damage, defective cartilage, osteoarthritis, slipped capital femoral epiphyses, fractures, chronic lumbago, deformed feet, osteoarthritis
• Periodontal disease
• Psychological — anxiety, depression, addiction
• Reproductive, obstetric, perinatal — potential problems too numerous to mention here
• Respiratory — obstructive sleep apnea, increased predisposition to respiratory infections, increased incidence of bronchial asthma

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Understanding The Health Conditions And Diseases Associated With Obesity,” NDTV.com, 01/17/21
Source: “Association of childhood obesity with risk of early all-cause and cause-specific mortality,” PLOS.org, 03/18/20
Image by Robert Sullivan/Public Domain

Let’s Talk More About Morbidity

“Threat multiplier” is a term that refers to something that needs to be taken into consideration when preparing for defense. A military installation might have a plan in place to protect the buildings, equipment, communications, and personnel. But climate change is a threat multiplier that needs to be also taken into consideration. What if a flash flood occurs? Both the attackers and the defenders had better give some thought to how their operations will be handled in case of an unexpected weather event.

In the same way, in conjunction with any number of disease processes, obesity is a threat multiplier. It works both ways, and while it has become fairly obvious how pre-existing obesity can negatively impact the treatment of many conditions in adulthood, not enough is known about problems in childhood (aside from overeating) that can contribute to obesity in the short term. As one group of researchers described the situation in a paper about the hip disorder, slipped capital femoral epiphysis,

Long-term outcomes of childhood obesity are well described; however, there is poor understanding of short-term outcomes that may cause early childhood disability.

When taken together with already existing obesity, many common conditions will function as threat multipliers. In many cases, the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. Obesity alone needs A, B, and C in the management plan. Cancer alone needs D, E, and F. But for an obese patient who develops cancer, the treatment and management plans will probably need more than A, B, C, D, E, and F. When the patient’s life is threatened by more than one morbidity, the problems can become exponential.

For instance, there is extensive literature on the subject of anesthesia when an obese patient needs a surgical intervention. In 2012, bioengineering students at Rice University had to invent a device that used suction cups to hold up a patient’s abdominal fat so his lungs could expand and take in oxygen during surgery.

After interviewing heart surgeon and electrophysiologist Mehdi Razavi, journalist Brian Alexander wrote,

Medicine is struggling to make accommodations. Doctors often check blood pressure using cuffs meant for thighs… Surgical tools have to be enlarged in order to reach through layers of fat. Obese patients require higher doses of radiation during imaging tests like CT scans.

Some patients won’t fit into MRI scanners. Surgical tables have been redesigned to handle patients weighing up to 450 pounds. Needles for injections have made been longer so they can penetrate fat layers and reach muscles. Even lab test results have to be interpreted differently.

Dr. Razavi also pointed out that if a patient needs a higher dose of radiation to effectively perform a test, the doctors and other medical personnel are also exposed to higher doses, a risk factor they do not welcome.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Childhood Obesity and Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis,” PublicationsAAP.org, October 2018
Source: “Too fat for anesthesia? Suction cups hold up patients’ guts during surgery,” NBCNews.com, 05/10/12
Image by Presidencia de la República Mexicana/CC BY 2.0