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, […]
Childhood Obesity and Minority Groups
Full disclosure: John Foreyt, Ph.D., wrote the Foreword to Overweight: What Kids Say, and he’s a friend. In fact, so good a friend that in the Acknowledgements section of the book, Dr. Pretlow says, This book wouldn’t have happened were it not for the inspiration and encouragement of Dr. John Foreyt and his conviction that […]
The Weight of Secrets and Shame
The following is a guest post by Dr. David L. Katz, director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center. The article was originally published on Prevention.com, and has been modified and updated for Childhood Obesity News. About a year ago I appeared on MARTHA: The Martha Stewart Show to talk about — what else — living […]
Fiction and Nonfiction for Tween Girls
One of the obvious drawbacks of childhood obesity is that it hangs around and becomes adolescent obesity and, eventually, adult obesity. Sure, many people have overcome their propensity to be overweight, and they are heroes. Ruby Gettinger and others have documented their own histories, including the recognition that food addiction was controlling their lives, and […]
Embrace Your Hunger
We have mentioned Oprah Winfrey‘s chagrin when she had been told by her doctor that she would need to “embrace hunger.” Many of us would be better off learning to feel pleasant anticipation of a good meal rather than a craving for junk food. We could experience for ourselves the truth in the old saying, […]
Food Addiction: Just Say Cheese?
There are many obvious connections between childhood obesity and the proliferation of fast food restaurants. A large number of fast food meals have one thing in common: cheese. There has been a lot of talk about the possible addictive qualities of that substance. This is not news. Back in 1988, Dr. Douglas Hunt published No […]
Eat for Success, Part 4
We’ve talked before about various possible solutions to the childhood obesity riddle, including the simple ones. Not that a “solution” means that someone will only need to do that one thing, and immediately lose 100 pounds. But simple solutions are good because they give a person a foothold, a starting place. A journey of a […]
More on the Early Adopters of the Food Addiction Paradigm
Food addiction is misunderstood but real, says Cheryl Williams, in a piece called “Food Addiction: Similarities and Differences to Drug and Alcohol Addiction.” As so many others have noted, one of the differences is that we need food to live, but not drugs or alcohol. (Dr. Pretlow always points out another difference that is especially […]
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 […]
Professionals Must Recognize Emotional Component
When the body is considered as nothing more than a physical entity, all the answers are so easy, and everyone knows them. To lose weight, burn more energy and stoke the machine with higher-quality fuel, and less of it. Ta-dah! Or not. Except in the case of very small children and the incapacitated, the inescapable […]