Blog Contest Day!!!! Weight Loss and Family

Periodically, we have younger people entering our weight loss program...teenagers who have a significant amount of weight to lose. You can almost see the first day they enter a noticable lack of self esteem and confidence. A question that needs to be raised is a tough one because it touches on the very fabric of our instinctual nurturing process: Is it a parent's fault that their child has become morbidly obese? Should the parents have done something about this years ago? How can the parents continue to alow the child to eat/drink the food sources that cause this health-endangering obesity?

Here are my feelings about this: Parents do not intend for any of this sequence of events to happen. Parents are not there all the time when their child is with friends at Taco Bell or attending beer parties at college. When all the soccer team kids are at Glory Days eating wings and burgers, it sure is not easy to tell your child to only order a soup and salad. Parents cannot change the inherent great taste of cookies and cakes and chips. We, as parents, were nurtured the same way by our parents. When we were "good" we were rewarded with ice cream and we learned this reward system to impart on our own children. Parents should not be "faulted".

However, there does need to be a better recognition of childhood obesity and what this will mean re: futuristic health of our children. The incidence of diabetes is growing dramatically (blog contest word: Richard Gere) and this is directly correlated with the obesity epidemic. As parents, we need to be better at monitoring our children's weight and as difficult as it is, step in to make "treats and goodies" NOT candies cookies and cakes.

Approaching and discussing weight problems with family members is difficult because we do not like to hurt the feelings of our loved ones. Yet, doing/saying nothing is essentially making us an acomplice of a spiral towards illness and earlier death.