Childhood Obesity News has been looking into the lives and thoughts of some formerly obese people to see what can be learned. For a CNN iReport, Linda Roche shared the story of her earliest educational experiences: By the time I started kindergarten I …

The reader will enjoy Dr. Pretlow’s account of his experiences at the 2009 ECOG  scientific meeting, where he conducted a plenary session and introduced the idea that the childhood obesity epidemic is caused by emotionally driven comfort eating, which …

A website called Experience Project contains a personal history titled “I Am Fat and Have Been Almost My Whole Life.” The writer describes herself as five-foot-three, 298 pounds, and 13 years old. Her day starts with 3 tubs of ice cream, then Mom cooks …

Fernando Botero Sculpture The varieties of fat acceptance range from mild to extreme. In the realm of health and safely, obesity must be acknowledged as something that exists in society, and is likely to continue for some time. Take the crash test dumm …

Every day, knowingly or not, we meet up with people who used to carry around excessive weight, and who somehow figured out how to get rid of it. More importantly, they figured out how to make it stay gone. We meet them online too, in discussion groups …

Consider Fattitude: A Body Positive Documentary. The jokes practically write themselves. “Heifer, I’m positive your body is fat!” When someone attempts to present obesity as a condition that is acceptable and maybe even desirable, the temptation for cr …

A few years back, someone posted a video online that featured a toddler, still on the bottle and quite chubby, who smoked 40 cigarettes a day. It went viral, accumulating 27 million views and inspiring a huge number of disapproving comments as people s …

Dr. Pretlow’s latest paper, “Treatment of Child/Adolescent Obesity Using the Addiction Model: A Smartphone App Pilot Study,” will soon appear in the highly-respected print publication Childhood Obesity and can also be found online. Today, let’s gain a …

A new paper, Treatment of Child/Adolescent Obesity Using the Addiction Model: A Smartphone App Pilot Study,  will appear in the next print edition of the journal Childhood Obesity. This publication signals another advance in spreading the idea of using …

The introductory material about Bite Size can be found in the earlier Childhood Obesity News post about Emily, one of four young people whose stories are told by the film. We also “met” Moy, a gaming enthusiast and novice filmmaker. Today’s discussion …

Bite Size is a captivating film that follows the weight loss journeys of four American kids. Childhood Obesity News already took a close look at two of them, Emily in Florida and Moy in Southern California. The other two young people are both from Miss …

The film Bite Size explores the lives of four young people, ranging from age 11 to 13, then catches up with them one year down the road. It tracks the weight loss journeys of two girls and two boys, all diagnosed as clinically obese. Two are coastal ki …

Comedian Doug Stanhope has an un-cordial relationship with his sister-in-law. In one of his bits, for a Showtime Special, he characterized her as a “humorless ____” with the second word being a very rude term indeed. But she should not have been offend …

Mardis Gras Childhood Obesity News is exploring the idea that for a large part of the Western world, the religious season of Lent has served as a trial run for quitting sugar. For some, it has no doubt been inspirational, and led to permanently sugar-f …

In the spirit of the previous post, “Why Everything You Know is Wrong,”  here are some contrarian viewpoints on various foodstuffs that are said to affect childhood obesity. Carbohydrates: Kris Gunnars collected a number of “debunked nutrition myths,” …

In Colombia, a charitable organization called Gorditos de Corazon (Chubby Hearts) received a heartfelt plea from the unemployed mother of 10-month-old Juanita Valentina Hernandez. For reasons that no one yet understands, the little girl weighs as much …

This site is dedicated to exploring the physical, social, emotional, and political issues surrounding childhood obesity. We invite you to explore some of our most popular — and controversial — posts and series. Here are a few examples: Why is childho …

Dr. Pretlow was one of the professionals interviewed on camera by Sabrina Register, of television station KCTS in Seattle, on the subject of childhood obesity.  The show mentions his W8Loss2Go smartphone app, and visits his very popular Weigh2Rock webs …

In the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” a child is captured by a witch who feeds him so he will be nice and plump to cook and eat. The story has analogs in many cultures. The website TV Tropes gives more than 30 examples of stories (including a Simpsons …

Here is the confluence of two trains of thought. The first concerns the omission of food addiction from the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The other is the quality of life experienced by an obese child – not a …

Hector Garcia called himself “the worst-case scenario” for reasons clear to anyone familiar with the thorough and revelatory account of his last four years on earth, as compiled by San Antonio Express-News staffers Jessica Belasco and Lisa Krantz. Garc …

Once they have become obese, children may experience a diminished quality of life for many reasons, some of which are more obvious than others. A lot of things in the material world are too small for their comfort — clothes, school desks, airplane seat …

When 600-pound Hector Garcia died in December, his life had been documented for several years by a team from the San Antonio Express-News. His mother told the reporter that “if she tried to refuse his requests for food, her son would get angry.” Dr. Pr …

From the moment any child is born, the main factor determining that child’s quality of life is the chief caregiver, often the mother. When this works out well, everybody wins. But the planet is full of less-than-perfect parents. Sometimes governments a …

Sunset in San Antonio Reporter Jessica Belasco and photographer Lisa Krantz spent four years documenting the life of a morbidly obese man for the San Antonio Express-News. Last month, the task culminated in a lavishly-illustrated story after Hector Gar …

People who get hooked on nicotine, alcohol, and street drugs all have something in common: they are also likely to be addicted to food. As food addiction expert Phil Werdell says: They often come to Overeaters Anonymous or one of the other food–related …

A baby is helpless, a child is powerless, yet somehow these little creatures become obese. Are they doing it to themselves? No. The earlier obesity sets in, the harder it is to reverse, so fat toddlers become fat grade school kids, and then fat middle …

Yesterday was Skip Sugar Day, at least in Greenwich, Conn., where city leaders proclaimed the event. Maybe next year it will be national. Meanwhile in that city, HALSAmd Research, whose mission is to address, educate, and coordinate medical treatment a …

What exactly is this BMI we hear so much about? A definition proffered by MedifastArizona.com goes like this: Obesity is defined as an excessive amount of body fat in relation to lean body mass. This is generally calculated by physicians as body mass i …

Last time, Childhood Obesity News considered why kids might lack motivation to take part in a free program that could help them achieve healthy weight; or why, once enrolled in such a program, they might drag their feet and hold back from full particip …