According to the latest figures, 52 percent of pet dogs in America are overweight or obese: about 43 million dogs. The cat statistics are even worse—an estimated 57 percent of cats, or 55 million animals, are overweight or obese. There has been an alar …

Childhood Obesity News has mentioned before that the young people taking part in the pilot studies of the W8Loss2Go smartphone app are strangely unexpressive about their unhappiness. This is puzzling because Weigh2Rock, Dr. Pretlow’s immensely helpful …

Addiction guilt is one of the facets of Dr. Pretlow’s investigation of childhood obesity, and today we look at what several experts say about guilt, and the subtle differences between guilt and shame. These observations include an assertion that might …

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 …

Yes, no matter what your philosophy of snacking is, someone out there disagrees with you and can prove his point. Consumers are inundated with advice about what, when, where, why, and how to eat, along with other input promoting the exact opposite to a …

In a Rudyard Kipling poem so infamous we won’t even link to it, the poet concludes that “the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady/ Are sisters under their skins!” In other words, despite appearances, a respectable high-society wife and the wife of a lowly e …

Here is an interesting observation from Dr. Pretlow, an insight gleaned from the pilot studies of the W8Loss2Go smartphone app: We initially thought that processed food wasn’t that much of a problem for obese kids, that it was mainly excessive amounts …

Here is a peek into the process of setting up the trials of Dr. Pretlow’s smartphone app, as he describes it: Recruiting and engaging youth for our two W8Loss2Go app pilot studies has been extremely challenging. We offered $50 per month compensation, a …

In the latest trial of Dr. Pretlow’s W8Loss2Go smartphone app, the buddy feature turned out not to be one of the most popular tools. Perhaps its true potential was not fully explored by the participants, who had many other things on their minds. The ne …

The journal Childhood Obesity (Volume: 10 Issue 4: August 1, 2014) published an editorial by Dr. Stephen R. Daniels (University of Colorado School of Medicine) and Dr. Aaron S. Kelly (University of Minnesota Medical School). “Pediatric Severe Obesity: …

For standup comic and TV personality Paul Gilmartin, the problem was alcohol, but as we know, addiction is the same phenomenon across the board, and the substance is almost incidental. His other problem was that he had no problems, a paradox he explain …

Childhood Obesity News recently looked at a study about animal-assisted intervention (AAI) which showed that a child would willingly get more physical exercise romping with a dog than playing with another child. The dog-paired kids did not report exper …

  Childhood Obesity News has been taking a closer look at what happened when two different groups of obese young people participated in trials of Dr. Pretlow’s W8Loss2Go smartphone application. Dr. Pretlow outlined the process in an earlier post,  …

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News went into more detail about Dr. Pretlow’s reflections on the two (so far) groups of young people who tried out the W8Loss2Go smartphone app. They started by filling out applications and motivation questionnaires, but D …

Today, Childhood Obesity News recalls Dr. Pretlow’s January 2 post, “Obese Youth and Motivation,” which was written once the Australian study related to the W8Loss2Go smartphone app had been concluded. It was difficult for his team to understand why so …

Recently Childhood Obesity News talked about obesity’s ghost — the tendency of former fat kids to be haunted by the specter of their younger selves. They sometimes suffer from insecurity and heightened anxiety, and even from weird fears like going to …

A couple days ago, Childhood Obesity News traced the early-development stages of Dr. Pretlow’s W8Loss2Go smartphone application, the long-term tool based on the substance-dependence treatment model. Now, an exciting milestone has been reached — the co …

Research shows that obese young people have a significantly lower quality of life rating — the same quality of life rating as young cancer patients who are on chemotherapy. Ostensibly, the low quality of life of obese youth is due to their being obes …

Childhood Obesity News has been following the development course of Dr. Pretlow’s W8Loss2Go smartphone app, whose approach is based on the addiction-treatment model of withdrawal and abstinence from problem foods and large food amounts. In 2011, this p …

To recapitulate: American historical figure Horace Fletcher preached the chewing of food into a state of liquefaction, as an aid to digestion and general well-being. Though he was for a time discredited, recent science has shown that there are indeed n …

Childhood Obesity News salutes the launch of an 18-week trial study of Dr. Pretlow’s W8Loss2Go iPhone app, in collaboration with three institutions in Alelaide, Australia — Flinders University, Flinders Medical Centre, and the Child and Adolescent Men …

In Australia, Dr. Pretlow’s W8Loss2Go iPhone app is the subject of an 18-week study, with the collaboration of researchers from Flinders University, Medical Centre, and the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS). As we mentioned, bariatric …

Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News introduced Ellen Burne, a bariatric surgery patient who indicated that a program like Dr. Pretlow’s W8Loss2Go iPhone application would have been a good thing for her younger self to have access to. (In the picture on o …

Readers of Childhood Obesity News will recognize Dr. Pretlow’s W8Loss2Go iPhone app on the device held by the radiant young woman. Now, it’s showing up in a new place, on the cover of Southern Health News magazine, published by Australia’s Southern Ade …

Last time, we talked about a group discussion arranged by the authors of Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. It was conducted with the goal of rejecting no suggestion, however weird, because the unimpeded flow of ideas turns out to be …

Over on the right-hand side of the page, under the heading of Presentations, there is a link to the presentation given by Dr. Pretlow at the 2013 European Congress on Obesity. It concerns the first trial of the iPhone W8Loss2Go application, and if you …

Surveys of the habits of American youth between the ages 13 and 17 find that half of them use social media on a daily basis. The American Heart Association (AHA), in a statement that will be published in the January issue of its journal, Circulation, r …

A couple of things came out of the Obesity Society’s Scientific Meeting, which was in fact the 30th such annual gathering, convened by what its website describes as the leading North American professional and scientific organization that represents the …

Dr. Pretlow seeks teen and young adults willing to test a new weight-loss app, W8Loss2Go.

The world’s youth are inundated with social media, and barring a lethal solar flare, that’s not going to change. Accusations of frivolity and sheer time-wastingness are justified. But social media’s dark side is strongly counterbalanced by the positive …