Reply to "Health panel urges interventions for children and teens with high BMI"

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Reply to ""Health panel urges interventions for children and teens with high BMI""

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why doesn't the nutritionist want your child to log calories? [/quote]

How is this even a question? It sets teen girls up for disordered eating patterns. To the OP- your daughter may be overweight, but your approach is setting her up for a lifetime of disordered eating to boot. Did she ask for your advice? Does she want your help with her weight? If not, then you’re doing much more harm to her than good.

My advice to the OP:

-model healthy eating and attitudes toward food and weight 
-verbal affirmation from you regularly - whatever non-weight related things you can praise 
-be a listening ear and provide advice if asked but do not be critical of her weight or body
-be attuned to what’s going on socially. Does she have good peer influences? Any chance she is or has been bullied? You need to ask her good, thoughtful  questions.[/quote]

One could make the argument that eating oneself into overweight status is already an eating disorder.[/quote]

Exactly this! She already has disordered eating. If your kid had some other kind of health disorder, you would jump in to help. But, with food, everyone is supposed to passively sit back and watch their kids balloon up for fear that their kid will become “disordered.” But they already are!

She’s not going to thank you for telling her she was a cute chubby teen when she’s a chronically overweight diabetic 45 year old.[/quote]

NP. I was overweight as a tween/young teen. Not obese, but about 30-35 pounds more than the ideal weight I eventually settled into as an adult. My parents’ “concern” led me to calorie count and restrict obsessively. Lost weight and my parents were so proud, yay! But the calorie restriction led to a massive over correction in which I started binge eating every day after school, which led to incredible feelings of shame (I let my parents down!), and then about a decade of hardcore secretive bulimia.

Which is all to say that weight loss is an incredibly delicate matter for a teenage girl. There’s so much wrapped up in it, I urge parents to tread very lightly and be very careful not to shame your girls for enjoying food. (I still struggle with this as a parent.) Build them up in other ways, keep them busy, get them moving, but the focus should not be on the food and the calories.[/quote]

Do you think you would have been any less screwed up if your parents had handed you pills as a teen and told you it was because you have no self control?

Because the LuLus on this thread think that’s A-ok, but that feeding your kid steamed vegetables and fish and telling them to put down the second slice of cake is child abuse.[/quote]

NP. I don’t think it is child abuse, but I also don’t think you can control this in a teen.  So you feed them fish and vegetables for dinner.  What’s stopping them from making themselves some rice, or eating a couple bowls of cereal after? Or a peanut butter sandwich? Are
You going to guard the kitchen? Lock the cabinets and frig? And then what about at school, sports, and friends houses or just going out with friends? These things are largely centered around providing junk food options. If a teen was so included, they could easily eat hundreds of calories worth of junk most days, without you buying it, approving, or even knowing. [/quote]

Here’s the thing though—as a PP said, t[b]he overweight kids almost all have at least one overweight parent [/b]and the bad habits start there. So this fiction that mom is serving fish and steamed veggies and tofu snacks and junior is fat because his friends stuff him with junk food doesn’t exist. It’s just all excuses.[/quote]

Why, it's almost as if there's a genetic component![/quote]

It’s almost as if there is a behavioral component! If mom changed her eating, so would the kids because they wouldn’t have a choice. Mommy’s choices directly impact her kids. [/quote]

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