I had the pleasure of meeting with a wonderful, insightful,
intelligent 17-year-old woman who came to my office for weight-loss counseling.
She weighed 345 pounds. She said that her lifelong obesity made her feel that
she had been born into debt and had been unable to pay it off.
According to the American Obesity Association, the prevalence of
obesity in our children has quadrupled to nearly 16 percent in the last 25
years. We are always searching for the causes of our kids’ corpulence in their
excesses: fast food, TV, video games, snacks, genetics, laziness.
All of these contribute to our nationwide obesity epidemic, but none is its
cause.
Food is more than fuel. From breast milk to birthday cakes, foods
carry powerful emotional attachments. We use food to express love and approval
to our children, to distract or appease them, and sometimes to assuage our
parental guilt. Meanwhile, portion sizes in restaurants increase and we deserve
a break today to get away from the inescapable reality that when we eat more
calories than we use, we get fat.
The cause of childhood obesity is simple. Early on, we teach our
kids to disconnect hunger from caloric needs and attach it to emotional needs.
They learn to overeat because it feels good. The problem is feeling good is
never good enough. The key to treating obesity is to learn what it is we are
feeding with all of these extra calories, then to find healthier ways to
nourish it. Prevention is better: as our kids learn how to feed themselves,
let’s love them for knowing when they are full.
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2006.
