Childhood Obesity and Emotions

Childhood obesity is not as simple as watching your food or trying to lose weight. As you can see from our previous article on childhood obesity there is a whole lot going on. Human beings are very complex creatures.
We experience, feel and make judgments in such a multitude of ways. Children are even more sensitive in many ways than the average adult. Along with the sensitivity a child has very limited coping skills and cognitive understanding about what's going on in our world. This makes it easy for a child to misunderstand, misperceive and make up stories about what has occurred in their life. This lack of clarity can lead to personally perceived emotional traumas. These emotional traumas may have no basis in reality, but are very real to the child. When the child realizes that eating can satisfy the need for pleasure to compensate or numb them to avoid the negative feelings that are being created within them, this is often the beginning of the eating disorders or childhood obesity.

Many adults do not believe in this idea or concept and often chalk the eating obsessions and changes up to commonplace “growing up”. Introducing this idea may be a challenge for many adults because in growing up this was not understood and rarely if ever discussed by anyone in society. We hope that you can open your awareness to see how this is a possibility that may be adding to your child's food or obesity issues.

Five things you can do to assist in avoiding childhood obesity:
1.    Be aware of any change in eating habits at any age. It could be the eating habits of an infant, a toddler, a six year old, pre-teen, teenager or young adult.
2.    Be aware of your child's mental and emotional state as well as their abilities to cope with their life. Do not be fooled by appearances of these abilities. “Normal” appearances may just be a façade.
3.    When your child's eating habits change or become excessive in any way do not brush it off as normal. Assist them in managing their eating style in spite of any whining or complaining. Most importantly, explain to them what you are doing.
4.    When assisting your child do not cave in to any anger, temper tantrums, whining or crying. They will quite often use this and many other techniques to continue their eating patterns.
5.    Assist your child in dealing with emotional traumas (perceived or real), difficulties and mental understandings of what is going on in their life. Contrary to popular belief, a child is never too young to receive this type of assistance!

What are emotional issues or traumas? From our vantage point emotional issues have very little to do with emotions such as anger, sadness or anxiety themselves. Emotional issues are the root cause of the emotions. 

For a very simple explanation of emotional issues we would say they are:

A judgment made from a perception of an event, followed by an internalized meaning by the individual about themselves. Followed by a belief, attitude or judgment held by that individual about themselves and events. This judgment then determines the way an individual feels about them self, when like or similar circumstances occur or are observed.

Watch for our next article in this series on childhood obesity and food issues.
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