Overweight Child

Hi--I'm new to the group. Here's some background and some questions...

My new stepdaughter is 13 and weighs in at about 145 at 5'3". She
doesn't care about her weight, and refuses to join Weight Watchers (I'm
on it and have about 5lbs to lose at this point.) She sneaks food
constantly, and when she's at her mother's house, she eats the same
fattening junk her obese mother eats.

We'll be getting her to do more physical activity, but that has been a
challenge since all she wants to do is sit around & watch TV (or read,
thankfully!) Now, exercise will take priority over any other
activities outside of school--even if she has to give up some of the
extracurricular activities she's used to doing.

My quandary: How do I get this kid to care about the way she looks and
DO something about losing weight? (We were considering making her go
to WW, but that will be a waste if she's not following it and
sneaking food.) I believe that if we don't put her on some sort of
program, she will continue to gain.

I realize that much of her eating is emotional, and we're working on
that issue. At this point, I'm interested in crisis management,
since I believe her current trend is of crisis proportions. I was an
overweight kid, and I know how miserable that was, in addition to how
it lays the groundwork to a lifetime of weight management issues.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Well...I was also an overweight child...I started in the mid fifties as
"husky"...My parents tried everything imaginable to help...Always loving but
my weight was my constant companion...Although I was overweight I never
reached the weights or girth I see on many children today...My brother has a
morbidly obese son(god I hate That term) and their approach has been to do
nothing...He will grow out of it they say...Well to be honest,...I don't
believe their is much that anyone can do to change someone unless they want
to do it...No one loses weight or quits smoking unless they have decided for
whatever reason to change...But I do believe that parents need to try and
continue to do whatever it takes to keep the ideas about change active...I
have asked myself many times if there was anything that made a
difference?...I think the only thing they accomplished was to make me aware
of my size and to at least dress without covering everything in untucked
clothing to not show my size and in addition kept me from becoming even
bigger...I still fight my weight and for the first time I'm on
weigh****chers...I guess I have no answers...One would think that in 50
years we would have this one licked...I see these fat camps spouting up and
maybe with group support with other children there is hope...I think I would
have tried that...Sorry to ramble...GG
"Lisa M" wrote in message
ups.com...
Hi--I'm new to the group. Here's some background and some questions...

My new stepdaughter is 13 and weighs in at about 145 at 5'3". She
doesn't care about her weight, and refuses to join Weight Watchers (I'm
on it and have about 5lbs to lose at this point.) She sneaks food
constantly, and when she's at her mother's house, she eats the same
fattening junk her obese mother eats.

We'll be getting her to do more physical activity, but that has been a
challenge since all she wants to do is sit around & watch TV (or read,
thankfully!) Now, exercise will take priority over any other
activities outside of school--even if she has to give up some of the
extracurricular activities she's used to doing.

My quandary: How do I get this kid to care about the way she looks and
DO something about losing weight? (We were considering making her go
to WW, but that will be a waste if she's not following it and
sneaking food.) I believe that if we don't put her on some sort of
program, she will continue to gain.

I realize that much of her eating is emotional, and we're working on
that issue. At this point, I'm interested in crisis management,
since I believe her current trend is of crisis proportions. I was an
overweight kid, and I know how miserable that was, in addition to how
it lays the groundwork to a lifetime of weight management issues.

Any advice would be appreciated!

If it were me, I'd find a Certified Eating Disorder Counselor and make
sure this person has an M.S.W. C.E.D.C. and nip it in the bud
immediately. She may be doing other behaviors of purging, etc. which
you do not know about. If I could make one suggestion, stop calling
her mother obese or using negative terms to describe how she eats.
Regardless, that is her mother and coming from a broken home I can
tell you that a step parent who is in any way disrespectful to the
other absent parent is one of the most cutting and haunting things I
recall as a child.

On 30 Dec 2005 07:20:52 -0800, "Lisa M" wrote:

Hi--I'm new to the group. Here's some background and some questions...

My new stepdaughter is 13 and weighs in at about 145 at 5'3". She
doesn't care about her weight, and refuses to join Weight Watchers (I'm
on it and have about 5lbs to lose at this point.) She sneaks food
constantly, and when she's at her mother's house, she eats the same
fattening junk her obese mother eats.

We'll be getting her to do more physical activity, but that has been a
challenge since all she wants to do is sit around & watch TV (or read,
thankfully!) Now, exercise will take priority over any other
activities outside of school--even if she has to give up some of the
extracurricular activities she's used to doing.

My quandary: How do I get this kid to care about the way she looks and
DO something about losing weight? (We were considering making her go
to WW, but that will be a waste if she's not following it and
sneaking food.) I believe that if we don't put her on some sort of
program, she will continue to gain.

I realize that much of her eating is emotional, and we're working on
that issue. At this point, I'm interested in crisis management,
since I believe her current trend is of crisis proportions. I was an
overweight kid, and I know how miserable that was, in addition to how
it lays the groundwork to a lifetime of weight management issues.

Any advice would be appreciated!

In article . com, "Lisa
M" wrote:

My quandary: How do I get this kid to care about the way she looks and
DO something about losing weight? (We were considering making her go
to WW, but that will be a waste if she's not following it and
sneaking food.) I believe that if we don't put her on some sort of
program, she will continue to gain.

I realize that much of her eating is emotional, and we're working on
that issue. At this point, I'm interested in crisis management,
since I believe her current trend is of crisis proportions. I was an
overweight kid, and I know how miserable that was, in addition to how
it lays the groundwork to a lifetime of weight management issues.

Any advice would be appreciated!

If she doesn't *want* to, there's nothing you can do. Really. I speak
from personal experience. My mother, when I was a kid (starting about age
8 and lasting until about age 16), kept putting me on whatever fad diet
was going around the office that week, because she said I needed to lose a
few pounds so that when I went to the doctor, he wouldn't say I was
overweight. Now, I'll grant that *is* a stupid reason, but my thought was
'that's stupid, I don't think there's anything wrong with myself, I like
the way I am'. So, every diet she'd put me on, I'd throw the healthy food
out the window (literally: I chipped the paint off a window that'd been
painted over so I could dump the nasty food out there) and sneak other
food. The harder she tried to make me diet, the worse the food I'd sneak
would be for me. Early on, when it was just slimfast stuff, I might sneak
peanut butter. When she got hardcore with those diets where you have a
cleansing week, eating nothing but prune juice and iceberg lettuce
(seriously), I'd start sneaking cake icing, large chunks of chocolate,
even going so far as to make up boxes of brownie mix and eat those raw.
The more the diet sucked, and the less it was like the way I wanted to
eat, the more drastically I countered it, and the harder I rebelled
against any form of exercise. Come to think of it, I stopped playing in
the yard about the time she started enforcing things on me. I did *not*
want to be on those diets.

My stepmother's approach was better (interesting note he another poster
said not to disparage the child's biological mother, but this may or may
not matter: disparaging mine actually knocked a bit of sense into me).
She said look, this fad diet stuff is stupid, but so is overeating just to
make up for it. She told me quite openly that whenever I was over at her
house, she'd make healthy, delicious food (which she did), and she'd let
me have as much of it as I wanted (she'd rather see me gorge myself on
spinach lasagna than chocolate bars). She told me that my mother's way of
eating was extremely unhealthy, especially for a girl my age, but that she
wasn't going to force things on me. And being treated like an adult and
left to my own choices made a world of difference to me. I still ate more
than I should, but I was eating healthier stuff, and I never felt the urge
to sneak food at her house.

A lot of the binging/purging people do, the emotional eating, is a control
issue. They can't control the world around them, so they control the
food. Giving the girl some control will go a fair ways to getting her to
eat better. This isn't to say it'll stop the emotional binging entirely,
of course; it's just the gateway to it. Before she can counter the
emotional eating (note I keep saying 'she': she's the only one who can do
it, not you, or her mother, or her father, or anybody else; *her*), she'll
have to sit down and realize *why* she's doing it, and she'll have to feel
in control of her own life and her own choices before she can do that.

So. Give the girl control, give her some choices, treat her like an
adult. Don't force anything on her. Once she gets used to the idea that
she affects her own life, she'll be more open to suggestions of exercise
and healthy eating. Just don't start big or you'll scare her off. And
then down the road, perhaps you or someone else can have a talk with her
about why she eats when she's upset/angry/depressed/whatever, and how the
food doesn't actually fix the problem, it's just a distraction. If she
likes reading, books can be a *much* more satisfying distraction than
food.

You can't just turn her around and all of a sudden she's eating healthy
and caring about it. It'll take a while, and she may gain more weight in
that time. The good news is, she's young and her metabolism can be easily
roused, so she'll have an easier time losing it than I'm having, at 28.
Hard as it is, you have to let her make her own choices, even if you see
her driving herself into the ground. You can't do it for her, much as you
might want to. The best thing to do is give her the tools she needs, and
let her make the decision herself. Once she does that (and she will,
eventually), all the walls will fall away. Until then.. you just wait,
and make sure she knows you're always there, willing to provide good food
and sensible advice.

Good luck.
-Tay

On Fri, 30 Dec 2005 13:21:38 -0600, (Tayra)
wrote:


If she doesn't *want* to, there's nothing you can do. Really. I speak
from personal experience. My mother, when I was a kid (starting about age
8 and lasting until about age 16), kept putting me on whatever fad diet
was going around the office that week, because she said I needed to lose a
few pounds so that when I went to the doctor, he wouldn't say I was
overweight. Now, I'll grant that *is* a stupid reason, but my thought was
'that's stupid, I don't think there's anything wrong with myself, I like
the way I am'. So, every diet she'd put me on, I'd throw the healthy food
out the window (literally: I chipped the paint off a window that'd been
painted over so I could dump the nasty food out there) and sneak other
food. The harder she tried to make me diet, the worse the food I'd sneak
would be for me. Early on, when it was just slimfast stuff, I might sneak
peanut butter. When she got hardcore with those diets where you have a
cleansing week, eating nothing but prune juice and iceberg lettuce
(seriously), I'd start sneaking cake icing, large chunks of chocolate,
even going so far as to make up boxes of brownie mix and eat those raw.
The more the diet sucked, and the less it was like the way I wanted to
eat, the more drastically I countered it, and the harder I rebelled
against any form of exercise. Come to think of it, I stopped playing in
the yard about the time she started enforcing things on me. I did *not*
want to be on those diets.

My stepmother's approach was better (interesting note he another poster
said not to disparage the child's biological mother, but this may or may
not matter: disparaging mine actually knocked a bit of sense into me).
She said look, this fad diet stuff is stupid, but so is overeating just to
make up for it. She told me quite openly that whenever I was over at her
house, she'd make healthy, delicious food (which she did), and she'd let
me have as much of it as I wanted (she'd rather see me gorge myself on
spinach lasagna than chocolate bars). She told me that my mother's way of
eating was extremely unhealthy, especially for a girl my age, but that she
wasn't going to force things on me. And being treated like an adult and
left to my own choices made a world of difference to me. I still ate more
than I should, but I was eating healthier stuff, and I never felt the urge
to sneak food at her house.

A lot of the binging/purging people do, the emotional eating, is a control
issue. They can't control the world around them, so they control the
food. Giving the girl some control will go a fair ways to getting her to
eat better. This isn't to say it'll stop the emotional binging entirely,
of course; it's just the gateway to it. Before she can counter the
emotional eating (note I keep saying 'she': she's the only one who can do
it, not you, or her mother, or her father, or anybody else; *her*), she'll
have to sit down and realize *why* she's doing it, and she'll have to feel
in control of her own life and her own choices before she can do that.

So. Give the girl control, give her some choices, treat her like an
adult. Don't force anything on her. Once she gets used to the idea that
she affects her own life, she'll be more open to suggestions of exercise
and healthy eating. Just don't start big or you'll scare her off. And
then down the road, perhaps you or someone else can have a talk with her
about why she eats when she's upset/angry/depressed/whatever, and how the
food doesn't actually fix the problem, it's just a distraction. If she
likes reading, books can be a *much* more satisfying distraction than
food.

You can't just turn her around and all of a sudden she's eating healthy
and caring about it. It'll take a while, and she may gain more weight in
that time. The good news is, she's young and her metabolism can be easily
roused, so she'll have an easier time losing it than I'm having, at 28.
Hard as it is, you have to let her make her own choices, even if you see
her driving herself into the ground. You can't do it for her, much as you
might want to. The best thing to do is give her the tools she needs, and
let her make the decision herself. Once she does that (and she will,
eventually), all the walls will fall away. Until then.. you just wait,
and make sure she knows you're always there, willing to provide good food
and sensible advice.

Good luck.
-Tay

I am not sure I am reading your tag correctly, but does your tag mean
you were at one time 415 pounds? If so, and if you are only 28, how
can you think this is not serious illness which is in dire need of
medical care. If this child is emotional eating, she needs a
certified therapist because it is an eating disorder, not just a kid
who is rebelling.

I'm not saying you are wrong, but that I find your response
interesting.


On Fri, 30 Dec 2005 13:21:38 -0600, (Tayra)
wrote:

If she doesn't *want* to, there's nothing you can do. Really. I speak
from personal experience. My mother, when I was a kid (starting about age
8 and lasting until about age 16), kept putting me on whatever fad diet
was going around the office that week, because she said I needed to lose a
few pounds so that when I went to the doctor, he wouldn't say I was
overweight. Now, I'll grant that *is* a stupid reason, but my thought was
'that's stupid, I don't think there's anything wrong with myself, I like
the way I am'. So, every diet she'd put me on, I'd throw the healthy food
out the window (literally: I chipped the paint off a window that'd been
painted over so I could dump the nasty food out there) and sneak other
food. The harder she tried to make me diet, the worse the food I'd sneak
would be for me. Early on, when it was just slimfast stuff, I might sneak
peanut butter. When she got hardcore with those diets where you have a
cleansing week, eating nothing but prune juice and iceberg lettuce
(seriously), I'd start sneaking cake icing, large chunks of chocolate,
even going so far as to make up boxes of brownie mix and eat those raw.
The more the diet sucked, and the less it was like the way I wanted to
eat, the more drastically I countered it, and the harder I rebelled
against any form of exercise. Come to think of it, I stopped playing in
the yard about the time she started enforcing things on me. I did *not*
want to be on those diets.

My stepmother's approach was better (interesting note he another poster
said not to disparage the child's biological mother, but this may or may
not matter: disparaging mine actually knocked a bit of sense into me).
She said look, this fad diet stuff is stupid, but so is overeating just to
make up for it. She told me quite openly that whenever I was over at her
house, she'd make healthy, delicious food (which she did), and she'd let
me have as much of it as I wanted (she'd rather see me gorge myself on
spinach lasagna than chocolate bars). She told me that my mother's way of
eating was extremely unhealthy, especially for a girl my age, but that she
wasn't going to force things on me. And being treated like an adult and
left to my own choices made a world of difference to me. I still ate more
than I should, but I was eating healthier stuff, and I never felt the urge
to sneak food at her house.

A lot of the binging/purging people do, the emotional eating, is a control
issue. They can't control the world around them, so they control the
food. Giving the girl some control will go a fair ways to getting her to
eat better. This isn't to say it'll stop the emotional binging entirely,
of course; it's just the gateway to it. Before she can counter the
emotional eating (note I keep saying 'she': she's the only one who can do
it, not you, or her mother, or her father, or anybody else; *her*), she'll
have to sit down and realize *why* she's doing it, and she'll have to feel
in control of her own life and her own choices before she can do that.

So. Give the girl control, give her some choices, treat her like an
adult. Don't force anything on her. Once she gets used to the idea that
she affects her own life, she'll be more open to suggestions of exercise
and healthy eating. Just don't start big or you'll scare her off. And
then down the road, perhaps you or someone else can have a talk with her
about why she eats when she's upset/angry/depressed/whatever, and how the
food doesn't actually fix the problem, it's just a distraction. If she
likes reading, books can be a *much* more satisfying distraction than
food.

You can't just turn her around and all of a sudden she's eating healthy
and caring about it. It'll take a while, and she may gain more weight in
that time. The good news is, she's young and her metabolism can be easily
roused, so she'll have an easier time losing it than I'm having, at 28.
Hard as it is, you have to let her make her own choices, even if you see
her driving herself into the ground. You can't do it for her, much as you
might want to. The best thing to do is give her the tools she needs, and
let her make the decision herself. Once she does that (and she will,
eventually), all the walls will fall away. Until then.. you just wait,
and make sure she knows you're always there, willing to provide good food
and sensible advice.

Good luck.
-Tay

My quandary: How do I get this kid to care about the way she looks and
DO something about losing weight?

Okay. I am an R.N., now at goal weight, after having spent most of my life
"morbidly obese" and I too hate that term. I know quite a bit about eating
disorders and other emotional issues. YOU cannot get her to care about how
she looks. YOU CAN LOVE Her just like she is, and tell her that. If you
can't do that, you are out of luck if you want to have any positive effect
on this child.

I agree with much of what Tayra said about rebellion. I also agree that she
could use professional help, but frankly she is not that overweight YET. If
you focus on it and try to force her to lose I can almost guarantee that you
will have the opposite effect and she will gain.

Children her age do not belong on any sort of weight loss diet. She needs to
have more activity, and things done as a family, and a healthy diet designed
for someone her age who is a normal weight. If she eats that she will
eventually BE a normal weight. activity... (does her father like
softball? Is he a normal weight? Can you walk together as a family? Buy one
of those mats with video and nasty loud music to dance to in the living
room?)
--
Lesanne

In article , Jangchub
wrote:

I am not sure I am reading your tag correctly, but does your tag mean
you were at one time 415 pounds?

Yep. 28, I started out at 415 at the tag-end of this past February.
Altho I was 27 then, of course.

can you think this is not serious illness which is in dire need of
medical care.

Well, I'm not sure why me having weighed 415lbs has anything to do with
whether or not I'd see overeating as a mental illness, because I'm one of
the most mentally healthy people I know, but.. She's seeking to control
her own life. That in itself is not an illness. The problem she has is
that she just doesn't know how to do it. She's not actively doing
something to make herself ill, to the extent it'd be considered an actual
psychological illness: she's not forcing herself to throw up (we're
assuming on all these, of course, just based on the OP's observations) and
therefore damaging her digestive system, her teeth, and robbing herself of
vital nutrients. She's not taking laxatives and/or starving herself.
She's not doing long-lasting and serious physical harm to herself by her
actions (as in, she's not inducing reduced immune response or osteoporosis
or organ failure). She's just eating too much of the wrong things, and
that alone is not recognized as a psychological illness (unless it's to
the extreme where she cannot control her eating; it seems she can, because
she *chooses* when to sneak food, so this does not apply). Too many
people do that for it to be considered abnormal.

If this child is emotional eating, she needs a
certified therapist because it is an eating disorder, not just a kid
who is rebelling.

If she needs a therapist because she's eating emotionally, then 99% of
people need a therapist. Emotional eating is just as common as
nail-biting. Which I'll agree isn't good for people either, but nobody
considers it a medical condition until you get so bad you're chewing your
fingers into bloody stumps. I bet if you did a survey, 9 out of 10 people
in this newsgroup would say they eat for emotional reasons. They've
realized why they do it, and they've learned to control it, but they did
it, and may still be prone to relapses. I am the one and only single
person in my 30-40-person WW meetings who *doesn't* do it, and I'm an
extreme rarity. Nobody in the meetings I've been to can understand how I
don't feel better stuffing myself when I'm depressed (I can't, being
depressed makes me nauseous; nobody else has that problem), it's that
common a problem.

Also, the rebelling is not the emotional eating; the rebelling is the
sneaking food. Emotional eating is, as I said, a fairly common thing, and
probably totally unrelated to the food-sneaking. Heck, my younger sister
eats emotionally, and she's 6' tall and 140lbs. She also refuses to eat
the vast majority of fruits and vegetables. I kinda hate her sometimes.
But the only food she'd ever sneak would be cupfuls of sugar and fistfuls
of butter, which she only ever did in my presence to gross me out.
Otherwise, mom let her eat whatever she wanted to (within normal parental
restrictions), and she turned out just fine.

There's a good rebuttal question for you: is a female age 25, 6' tall,
140lbs who eats emotionally and unhealthily and yet is doing quite well
both physically and nutritionally according to her physician in just as
much need of a shrink as the 13yr-old 145lb 5'3" stepdaughter? If the
answer is no, then your premise is in trouble.

-Tay

"Tayra" wrote in message
...
In article , Jangchub
wrote:

I am not sure I am reading your tag correctly, but does your tag mean
you were at one time 415 pounds?

Yep. 28, I started out at 415 at the tag-end of this past February.
Altho I was 27 then, of course.

can you think this is not serious illness which is in dire need of
medical care.

Well, I'm not sure why me having weighed 415lbs has anything to do with
whether or not I'd see overeating as a mental illness, because I'm one of
the most mentally healthy people I know, but.. She's seeking to control
her own life. That in itself is not an illness. The problem she has is
that she just doesn't know how to do it. She's not actively doing
something to make herself ill, to the extent it'd be considered an actual
psychological illness: she's not forcing herself to throw up (we're
assuming on all these, of course, just based on the OP's observations) and
therefore damaging her digestive system, her teeth, and robbing herself of
vital nutrients. She's not taking laxatives and/or starving herself.
She's not doing long-lasting and serious physical harm to herself by her
actions (as in, she's not inducing reduced immune response or osteoporosis
or organ failure). She's just eating too much of the wrong things, and
that alone is not recognized as a psychological illness (unless it's to
the extreme where she cannot control her eating; it seems she can, because
she *chooses* when to sneak food, so this does not apply). Too many
people do that for it to be considered abnormal.

Actually Binge Eating Disorder is considered a psychological disorder and
doesn't require that one can't choose when to eat. Sometimes the urge to
eat is there and the situation doesn't permit it so it just gets worse and
worse until the person does whatever necessary to get into a situation that
they *can* binge.

That said there really isn't a way to know if that is the case with this
child. I know my eating disorder started around age 11 even though it
didn't become full blown until my mid to late teens. Eating disorders are
difficult to identify from the outside.
--
the volleyballchick

http://tinyurl.com/7ozvj This school is near where I live and the rate
of success has been quite good. Chilhood obesity is an extremely
serious health problem and it needs to be addressed as soon as possible.
Work with your pediatrician or family doctor to help this child. Those
here who are or have been morbidly obese will agree that they wish
someone had helped them with their eating disorders/weight problems when
they were younger. It is never too early to start.

I tutored a high school boy for three years and during the last two
years he lost close to thirty pounds making better food choices, playing
basketball and getting other forms of exercise. His mother and aunt
were supportive of his weight loss and I stopped bringing sweets for
after school, switching instead to fruit. He was a happy high school
graduate.

Audrey