With Heavy Adults As Role Models, What Can We Expect?

Did you see “Weight of the Nation” on HBO?

Several things struck me.

First, many of the nurses, doctors, and parents who were trying to help the overweight children were also overweight.  So children have overweight adults “teaching” them how to be a healthy weight?  I assure you, that irony is not lost on the children…

Most likely, these adults have been riding the diet train themselves, and are convinced that the way to be thin is through food restrictions and a “good food” versus “bad food” mentality.    But haven’t we seen an absolute failure of diets to produce permanent, healthful weight loss?

Yet these adults are imparting this “wisdom

We need to teach all of those obese children in that Louisiana town that there is extreme joy and pleasure in eating when hungry.  And that betraying your body by eating when you are not hungry is not joyful.  It is a habit.  And bad habits can be broken.  And good habits can take hold.

But if the adults around them have them convinced that eating in response to diet rules will help them get back into normal size kids clothes, then they truly are doomed.

Teach them to connect with their own bodies and discover what they truly like.  Help them learn to listen to hunger, and how little food it takes to quiet their hunger.  And teach them how much better it is to eat when hungry rather than to eat for entertainment, or as I like to call it, Eatertainment.

Teaching our kids to eat for reasons other that physical hunger has caused obesity.  Teaching them to eat for physical hunger only is the way out.