Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘eating disorders’

My friend said to me, “Look around you. There are more sick people than there ever were. The food we are eating is not nutritious enough. There is too much antibiotics in meat, too much processed food and too much cancer. People are dying because of extra use of chemicals in their life. What’s your opinion?”

I had to make a decision on the spot. I knew she wanted me to support her for her kids to recognize it as something “all mothers think”, not just her being fanatic. The problem was that it was just her being fanatic.

I said, “Really?! I am looking around and I’ll tell you what I see. My dad is 77 years old and he is a pretty healthy person. My mom is 71 years old and loves doctors and medication. 6 years ago, she came to visit us and we travelled around the North Island of New Zealand for 12 days. We spent most of the day on our feet and even trekked (with then 3-year-old Noff) for about 6 hours. My mom did very well and she was 65 then. My dad did even better than she did and he was 72 years old. I am looking around and what I see is that those sick people who eat junk, food that is not nutritious enough, consume too much antibiotics with their meat and gobble up cancer-inducing processed food, those people live longer”.

Ouch!

Before you think I am crazy, here are the facts.

We happened to watch a TV piece on top models’ body image, eating habits and self-inflicted damages.

Top model Jessica Gomes (24) said the pressure on models to be slim was enormous and that models are afraid to miss out on work opportunities in the highly competitive fashion industry, so they use some excessive methods to keep themselves trim. She said models run for days on a mix of lemon juice and maple syrup, which also “cleanses”. To keep their energy up and be able to work, they drink coffee and use Cocaine.

The article mentioned Ana Carolina Reston (see her in the pictures), a famous Brazilian model who died from Anorexia at the age of 21, weighing 40kg (88lbs). Her mother told the press Ana had eaten nothing but apples and tomatoes for 2 months before she died.

Although the article did a very good job showing models who decided to eat normally and still got excellent jobs, Ronit and I were left with a very painful question:

Where are those top models’ parents?

From time to time, I get frustrated watching my youngest daughter Noff (8) eating junk. Inside my head, I hear the scream, “Help!” I am sure many parents feel like me when their kids eat junk.

This morning, I had a revelation!

You see, in our family, she is the odd one out. If you ask the older kids what is the best sandwich in the world, they will say, “A multigrain roll with tomatoes, lettuce, mayonnaise, avocado and alfalfa”. If you ask Noff, she will say, “Nutella (chocolate spread), Jam or Fairy Floss (Cotton Candy)”.

It is scary for me as a mother to watch her eat.

“Why would you put this poison in your body?” I ask her.

“Because it tastes great”, she says with gleaming eyes.

This morning, Noff opened the freezer, took out frozen blueberries and ate them in the car on the way to school. Then, I had a revelation.

In the past 8 weeks, I have written about the damaging effects of watching too much TV. Last week, I suggested measuring the amount of time your kids watch TV and keeping a record of the kinds of programs they watch. I hope this has given you a good understanding of what you are facing.

Today, I will cover kids’ personality types that are more subject to TV addiction and need a bit more care and attention.

Many studies have been done on the influence of TV on viewers (in fact there have been 4,000 studies on the effect on children alone, which you should not read if you love watching TV). Excessive TV viewing raises concerns in five major areas: Health, Behavior, Outlook on life, Relationship and Education

As an author, people ask me about the origin of my stories. Almost every person who has read my stories has asked, “Are they real?” Maybe this is a good opportunity for me to write how I came up with them, because some of the stories are so real it was painful. All my characters are based on real people whose personalities I borrowed without their knowledge, but some parts of the stories are twists I created to convey a message.

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.