For a recovering addict, there is no “just one drink” or “just one bite.” The substance or behavior are really a secondary issue, as it all boils down to addiction to feeling good.

The bad news is, we don’t know why some children arrive in the world equipped with a hardiness that others lack. The good news is, hardiness can be acquired.

Bariatric surgery is the only obesity treatment that has resulted in significant long-term weight loss, but there is a 20%-30% failure rate for teen weight-loss surgery.

Over the past few years, the idea of performing irreversible, life-altering surgery on young people has become normalized.

Even if advertising does nothing more than stimulate hunger, rather than desire for one particular brand, it is still effective in the larger sense.

Drugs used to help quit smoking also seem to help people hooked on sugar, by treating the sensory addiction component of eating addiction.

Studies show that a person’s emotional state affects taste perception, and stressed people crave sweets more intensely than those in a positive frame of mind.

It becomes increasingly clear that obese young people can get cancer before they are old enough to legally drink, vote, or marry.

Eating addiction is the more accurate term for what is widely known as “food addiction” — a combination of sensory and behavioral components of addiction.

The photographer titled this “Talk about junk in the trunk!” Food addiction has been discussed here many times. Like other popular expressions, it is an incomplete shorthand term for something that takes more than a few syllables to say. The addiction …

Childhood Obesity News has been connecting the dots between the role of the gut microbiome in obesity or the absence thereof.

Healthy Eating Research program from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focuses on effective policy and environmental strategies.

The lack of alternate motivation is part of the definition of addiction. What motivates someone to deal with addiction?

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles will road-test the W8Loss2Go smartphone application, created by Dr. Pretlow.

If kids were allergic to any foods, they would need to avoid them forever. Is obesity any different?

Dr. Pretlow suggests that a lack of motivation for losing weight might be the fear of withdrawal symptoms.

Lack of motivation appears due to fear of withdrawal symptoms and fear of losing a major coping mechanism (eating).

FDA approved ReShape Dual Balloon, an adults-only device implanted into stomach for six months, to combat obesity.

In a very recent post, we quoted Dr. Ruopeng An, whose research team determined that… If people simply substitute diet beverages for sugar-sweetened beverages, it may not have the intended effect because they may just eat those calories rather than d …

At Kansas State University, journalist Darrah Tinkler interviewed associate professor of psychological sciences Don Saucier about how eating can provide social validation, which means monkey-see/monkey-do behavior that allows a person to fit in and gai …

Childhood Obesity News has, not surprisingly, published quite a few posts about Dr. Pretlow’s innovative W8Loss2Go smartphone application. For review purposes, here is a handy guide to many of them, all in one place. Dr. Pretlow’s Huffington Post Guest …

Current information about gastric banding comes from Cheryl Ann Borne, the individual behind the website My Bariatric Life. A very useful page outlines the criteria and preparatory steps. Borne says: After you have been approved for gastric band surger …

In his Huffington Post article, “Eating Addiction: There’s an App for That,” Dr. Pretlow gave weight-loss surgery a mixed review. On the one hand, he credits bariatric surgery with being the only obesity treatment that has resulted in “significant long …

Addiction to overeating is real, and one of the most interesting things about it is how recognizable the symptoms are to anyone who has ever been addicted to (what are seen as) the harder substances, like alcohol and narcotics. Actor and comedian Russe …

This is what I’d say to a teen, or even a pretty smart kid, who’s a lot like I was then. Full disclosure: The Childhood Obesity News blog exists for many reasons. One of them is to show any overweight or obese young person that W8Loss2Go is a good idea …

Publication by the Huffington Post is a pretty big deal, so we are pleased to find Dr. Pretlow’s byline there. This piece, titled “Eating Addiction: There’s an App for That,” presents the complete rundown on the W8Loss2Go smartphone application. Boiled …

Available both online and in the print edition of the journal Childhood Obesity is Dr. Pretlow’s paper, “Treatment of Child/Adolescent Obesity Using the Addiction Model: A Smartphone App Pilot Study.” As Dr. Pretlow says: This publication signals anoth …

Stress triggers the fight-or-flight reflex, and it doesn’t even require a stressor as obvious as a pinched tail. Boredom is a little-recognized and under-appreciated stressor, which many children and adults intuitively self-medicate by chewing gum. The …

Stress triggers the fight-or-flight reflex. Laboratory rats can’t flee, and have reasons of their own for not fighting, but they still want to feel better. Given the opportunity, they will take drugs or use food as a drug. For the most part, stressed-o …

On happiness scales, obese patients have rated their quality of life as being similar to that of cancer patients on chemotherapy. So why don’t they just stop overeating? Because overeating is not really the cause of their obesity, but rather the sympto …