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.

Fat kids and low self-image almost go hand in hand. Kids who are overweight need a healthy, balanced eating plan without damaging their self-image that is already damaged.

It is important to remember that it is better to handle the problem when it is small. It is much easier to handle 2 extra kilos than 5 or, God forbid, 20.

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.

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.

Obesity in the world is increasing and numbers are a real worry. Statistics from around the world puts USA as the leading country with 30% of its population being obese, followed by Mexico with 24%, UK with 23% and Australia with 21%. Closing the list with 3% obesity are Korea and Japan. These numbers increase every year and if, many years ago, we talked about “the overweight issue”, now we are talking about something that it is much bigger - obesity.

Many overweight people are shocked when the doctor tells them they are obese. Overweight? Yes, we are used to it, but obese?! That is a whole new game. Houston, we have a problem!

We live in a very special era. We are exposed to things today that 100 years ago we could only dream of. Think for example, 100 years ago, only lucky people living next to the ocean knew how a whale sounded. Today, every 3-year-old can tell you how a whale sounds and looks.

Technology has helped a lot to bring the world to our homes. In the beginning, there were photos, then moving picture and now live telecasts, showing things as they happen. We heave reached a point where we do not leave home and we think we can experience life through the screens of our TV and our computer.

But we cannot!