I am on a crusade to eradicate childhood obesity and diabetes. For me, it's more than my profession, it's my personal mission.
As you've undoubtedly learned, Type 2 diabetes is a condition that is caused by a lack of physical activity, overweight and unhealthy eating. Previously, it was called Adult Onset Diabetes because it usually occurred in people over 40. The age of onset has been decreasing steadily over the last 30 years. Now we have children as young at eight years old being diagnosed with this deadly condition. Sadly, these kids will have a shortened the lifespan -- by eight to 12 years!
How did we get so out of control? Of course this is a multi-factorial problem with the loss of in-school physical education, after-school sports, 'latch key' children going to empty homes staying indoors playing video games, watching TV and surfing the Internet. Of course when both parents are working outside of the home, the usual complaint is that there is no time to prepare healthy meals, our children are 'picky' and don't want to eat veggies, and it costs too much to eat healthy anyway.
Clearly this is a challenge to address during a recession, but since the family is the cornerstone for health and wellbeing I feel that the family at home is the place that healing our children should start.
My personal decree: "Parents, take back the health of your family!"
Here are my top five strategies I use when doing family health makeovers as part of my medial practice and television appearances.
1. Take Back The Kitchen
Parents have given away control of the kitchen to their kids, to food manufacturers, to fast food restaurants and to their work schedules. Parents need to take back the kitchen and eliminate disease-causing, fat stimulating foods.
I am forcefully giving parents permission to say 'No!' again.
Say No! to processed foods, No! to high-fat fast foods, No! to eating in front of the TV.
Yes, kids are going to resist in the beginning, but kids do better when they have structure, boundaries and discipline. Over time, they and you will be glad that you took your rightful place as parent.
If you want your kids to be happy, healthy and successful in life, nourish them well. This means educating yourself about what types of foods you should always have on hand. Learn how to prepare your kids' favorites in healthier ways.
Encourage your children to be a part of the process. Allow them to shop with you, read the labels, find new recipes together and cook together. It's time to give up excuses and the unrealistic expectation that schools, governments or cellophane wrappers are going to solve our kids' health problems. We can do it!
2. Institute A Mealtime Routine
Parents need to consistently control what and when their kids are eating. Kids usually come home, sit in front of the TV and snack. By the time the family could come together for dinner, many kids are so full of junk food that they have no appetite for 'real' food. Later at night when the hunger returns, many kids are in the habit of late night eating that sets them up for a lifetime of weight challenges.
Children can learn to eat better when they are fed consistently, just like when they were babies! By providing healthy, easy options for meals and snacks throughout the day you ensure that their blood sugar level stays steady, producing better moods, concentration and energy.
Another culprit in the childhood obesity battle is the fact that many kids don't eat together at a table or as a family. Bringing order to mealtime madness helps to build intellectual skills that will translate to better academic achievement at school and in life.
Create a clean place for your child to eat. That means no junk stacked on the dinner table. Insist that the family come together to eat most nights of the week -- or at least once per week! This allows parents to communicate directly with their children, to find out what's going on in their heads and hearts. Not only does eating together as a family help with maintaining a healthy weight, it promotes greater self-awareness and self-mastery.
3. Stock Up On Healthy Snack Items
You don't have to be rich to have a well-stocked pantry. Parents need to be sure to have Mother Nature's original 'fast foods' on hand at all times. Unsalted nuts, fresh or frozen fruit, yogurt, cottage cheese, granola, carrots, etc.
Make sure that your kids always have something healthy on hand for eating before doing their homework, or when they head out the door to play, and before sports or other activities.
If the junk food is no longer there then they will eat the healthy stuff. Unless they are dealing with a serious medical condition like anorexia, no child will starve themselves.
4. Insist On Physical Activity
Help to create opportunities for your child to have at least 30 minutes of physical activity each day. It is best for kids to do it with the entire family, but even for those parents working two jobs, they must insist that their kids walk around the house, the neighborhood, jump rope or whatever. Get your kids off of the couch, and onto the playground, into art classes, team sports or any activity that interests them!
A couple of years ago a study found that kids who watch television for four hours or more per day are more likely to display aggressive or delinquent behaviors. Now we see that TV watching is also linked to obesity. Parents must exercise the authority to lead and discipline their children. Turn off the TV, computer and game console -- and get active with your kids!
5. Get A Medical Evaluation
You must determine whether your child is healthy or not and whether s/he is in need of more than just basic nutrition. Since high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes are on the rise among children under the age of 12, we must not bury our heads in the sand and call our children 'chubby' while dismissing the excess weight as a sign of a serious medical condition.
It is important for your child to develop a relationship with healthcare providers in a consistent, non-threatening and supportive way. The more that children recognize what is healthy and what is sick, the more responsibility they will take in maintaining their wellbeing.
Dr. Pennington is the author of The PENNINGTON PLAN: 5 Simple Steps for Achieving Vibrant Health, Emotional Wellbeing and Spiritual Growth and The Pennington Plan for Weight Success. She is the past President of the International Association of Eating Disorders Professionals, Editor in Chief for www.DiabetesProof.org, a national lifestyle campaign to prevent and manage type 2 diabetes. She is also President of Pennington Empowerment Media where she oversees The Pennington Plan for Success Series: Childhood Obesity & Diabetes Prevention Program. This proprietary Program has been used in the Boys and Girls Club of Los Angeles, on national television and in her Healthy Kids FitChallenge. Dr. Pennington has been featured on Oprah, Dr. Oz, Extra, CNN and she's the past Medical Director and Spokesperson for Discovery Health Channel and Discovery Health Online.
Follow Andrea Pennington, M.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrAndrea
The idea is that the lack of at least one year of breast feeding for infants is causing both overweight and underweight problems across the world.
Weaning sets up a food in and waste out pattern - probably in the ENS, Enteric Nervous System, that subconsciously programs us for our lives. If there is not enough breast milk before that weaning period - the infant will be 'hungry' from then on. He will move toward food and become overweight. The overriding emotion is Anger.
If the weaning is too soon such that the child's digestion system can't handle the new non-breast milk, solids, then the child will always be 'too full' (of food he can't yet digest) from then on. He will move away from food and become underweight. The overriding emotion is Fear.
This should be easy to test. Those with weight problems should be infants that were NOT breast fed for one year.
"Before 1900, most mothers breastfed their infants. Breastfeeding rates declined sharply worldwide after 1920, when evaporated cow's milk and infant formula became widely available. " - faqs.org
The species that best adapts to their daily two part environment day/night, will be selected for.
CHART - Daily biological chart
http://tinyurl.com/4b7mxuu
My suggestion is that there is an overall CATABOLIC /ANABOLIC daily cycle.
Wake = catabolic, deconstructive phase of rising temperature. Day
Sleep = anabolic, constructive phase of lowering temperature. Night
Day: When awake we eat, and break down food for energy. Body temperature is low when we wake, and continues rising till the sun goes down. Catabolic / Deconstructive phase.
Night" When we go to sleep, we first stop eating, stop bringing in more food, and then begin processing the food, and using it to grow and replenish the body. Body temperature drops throughout the night - sleeping phase continues till about two hours before waking. Then the body prepares waste out - we awake, excrete out waste, and temperature begins to increase again for a new daily cycle.
Further I suggest that there is a weaning/ breast feeding pattern set up in childhood.
When there is not enough breast feeding, the child will have a compensation temperature pattern -
overweight has a too high temperature . This is connected to repressed anger issues..
underweight has a too low temperature. This is connected to repressed fear issues.
When this repressed infant trauma is triggered, we have major health and psychological problems. Resolve repressed trauma and we end the problems.
1) Legislate labeling of food products in stores.
2) Provide struggling parents with aftercare support so that their kids are healthily engaged in activity and supervised eating after school.
3) Eliminate junk food advertising during childrens' programming on TV and internet.
4) Step up the diagnosis and treatment of celiac disease: a huge cause of malnutrition and overweight kids and adults.
5) Doctors need to refer to mental health professionals for treatment of family dysfunction including child neglect and abuse. Insurers need to pay for this treatment.
I hear ya. And in my practice I DO look for signs of stress, abuse and other 'disconnects' in the parent-child relationship.
However, the stress on the HPA axis is only ONE part of the obesity pie. As for pie in the sky, well, if parents spent more time with their children, had more realistic expectations of what parenting is all about and SOUGHT HELP when frustrated, you and I would both be satisfied to see LESS ABUSE and subsequently less disordered eating, obesity, diabetes...and the list goes on!
Thanks for your comment!
Commercial yogurts and granola are horrible snack choices. They are pure sugar, most of which is HFCS.
Feed them grain-fed meat, full-fat dairy, green veggies and don't buy anything in a package, bag or box. Seriously. Those packaged foods and carbs are poison . Read my post and learn from my mistake.
I made a horrible mistake of believing the "low-fat fallacy" when I was raising my children. They had family history of obesity, heart disease, and so-called "Type II Diabetes" on both sides and I was determined to avoid those fates for myself and kids. They were fed a grain-based, low fat diet. I bought low-fat everything, believing I was doing the right thing. How stupid could I have been. When I finally realized that what I was doing wasn't working and read the science of nutrition, it was too late to retrieve my childrens' childhoods that were nearly destroyed by my mistake. My daughter was morbidly obese and my son was extremely ADHD and put on horrible drugs. Happily, they have changed their diets and are now restricting carbohydrates. My daughter lost half her body weight, but will always have the scars, physically (skin reduction surgery is something no one talks about when people are encouraged to lose large amounts of wait) and emotionally. My son has improved his concentration and has been a successful college student after barely graduating from high school due to "self-medication" with marijuana. He is a "health-food" cook and doesn't touch sugar, caffeine, or refined carbs. Please save your kids...low-carb, not low-fat.
Gary Taubes is my current hero, and I also thank Drs. Phinney, Vernon, Wortman, Westman, and Volek. Maybe, just maybe, the medical establishment will "get it." Think of the lives that will be saved and the end to the twin epidemics of obesity and "diabetes." (I put it quotation marks because Type II would not exist if everyone adopted a diet that restricted carbohydrate to the amount his/her metabolic type can handle."
My daughter developed an eating disorder and it is hard to say what her actual food intake was during her pre-teen and teen years when she was so seriously overweight. We only had low-fat foods in the house, which means they were full of carbohydrate. As I have studied the science of insulin, I suspect that I was starving my daughter because, with insulin-resistance, you can't utilize glucose as fuel and it gets stored as body fat. High insulin levels prevent release of fat stores, and the person can't use the fat as fuel.At the same time, the individual is constantly ravenous because s/he is literally being starved even while consuming adequate "calories." Then it becomes a vicious cycle because a person who is constantly famished will begin to eat too much. It is not about calories. Many obese people don't consume more calories than the average slim person. The issue is eating the wrong kind of calories. People who are overweight by definition have some degree of insulin-resistance and must eat fat and protein which don't require insulin to be metabolized and used as fuel. Read Gary Taubes.
When your project is ready, let me know! I'd love to share the song (if it's good! lol ) with my audience at blogtalkradio (dot) com / DrAndrea where I host a show called Empowered for Life!
Thanks for your comment!
Thanks for your comment and thanks for showing us your site! I already found some new snack ideas for me and the little one!
Keep up the good work!