Family Matters

“Fat” kids suffer a lot from problems associated with being overweight. Many grown ups carry feelings of self-loathing and self-disappointment following the negative treatment they got during their younger years.

Kids’ eating habits are very important for parents and it is very frustrating to prepare food and find out your kids do not like it.

If you look at this issue from an emotional point of view, it has to do with control. Your kids are exercising control over what and when they eat, while you try to keep that control. Once you look at it this way, though, the solution is simple.

Most of the parents in the world want their kids to have healthy eating habits. Nowadays, when there are so many temptations around, it makes it harder to eat only healthy food. Fortunately, the younger your kids are, the easier it is to help them establish healthy eating habits.

Let me make myself absolutely clear: I am against the use of labels and medication to “cure” concentration problems and hyperactive behaviour. In 22 years of professional work, I have met plenty of people with these challenges, and there were ALWAYS other ways to make them perform better and feel better. Always!

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is very trendy. If you search on Google, you will see that there are 34,800,000 hits for it (this is today, but I am sure tomorrow it there will be more, if only because I am adding this post…). It is amazing that as the years goes by, the percentage of kids and people with ADHD goes up. Do you have an explanation to this?

In this post, let me try to give you some explanation to this inflation in the diagnosis of ADHD.

Many people ask me about my great skin. I have heard it so many times that I am already convinced that I have great skin. I went to the shopping centre last week and stopped at a stall to get my make-up done, just for fun. The make up artist told me numerous times, “You have great skin” while she was putting creams and make-up on my face.

“What kind of moisturiser do you use?” she asked me.

When I told her it was just a simple moisturiser from the supermarket, she was very surprised.

I recently spent some time coaching a woman suffering from Anorexia Nervosa. She weighed 32kg and would not eat to save her life!

A study in high schools in Canada found that 50% of girls were on a diet because they thought they were overweight. If your daughter is young and you think, “I’ll deal with it when she is a teen”, think again. Records show that eating disorders are increasingly seen in children as young as 10. A research in Canada in 2002 found 37% of Canadian females aged 11, 42% aged 13 and 48% aged 15 say they need to lose weight. By the way, 52% of them started dieting before the age of 14.

What can we do about it? I think we can do a lot.

For a while, I’ve been thinking of ways to motivate my readers to live an inspiring life that will make a difference. Many people think that the way we can make a difference is by doing big things and I think we need to re-define the meaning of “big”. I think we can make a difference, a big difference, by changing the depression statistics in the world. One person at a time, we can teach how to put happiness in our hearts and chase away the darkness. And you are probably asking yourself, “And how do we do that with no budget, without the support of the government and without organizing ourselves in a formal way?”