Teen Body Image/Obesity/Boy's Eating Disorders/Sexy Tots

WELCOME to July, 2008 - 'NEWS OF HOPE'

WELCOME TO JULY NEWS OF HOPE!
Summer is a time for bathing suits, shorts, and baring our bodies to the sun and scrutiny!

Living in California my entire life, I'm well acquainted with "getting the body ready for the bikini" mentality! Southern Californians live for "fun in the sun" - whether it's a trip to the beach, a day at Disneyland or snow-skiing in the local mountains. It's a great place to live (despite sometimes intense overcrowding!). It also comes with a tremendous amount of "body image" issues for many - both male and female.

However, with today's media, it's now obvious that "body image" issues are EVERYWHERE. Females have been seriously sexualized in the last 20 years to the point that tots can be seductively dressed and teen girls think nothing of baring mid-driffs and cleavage and dressing in alluring clothes that make me wonder how boys learn a thing in class today and give me no wonder as to why we have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates of any industialized nation!

And boys aren't safe either! Every where you look, the wash-board male belly and buff body is glamorized. The stuff of Chippendale dancers is everyday chic today. And boys feel that pressure as well.

I was very honored to speak at a Body Image Conference for girls, grades 6 thru 12, at Crow's Neck Environmental Education and Conference Center in Tishomingo, Mississippi in June. It was a wonderful gift of self-awareness and self-esteem to girls at so many levels.

The pictures below make it clear that the girls (and I) were having a great time!

This newsletter is chock full of thought-provoking, informative material to help you guide youth through the jungle of body misinformation, self-criticism and self-esteem.

CONTENTS for July Newsletter:
• Childhood Obesity: How America's Children Packed on the Pounds

• Helping Your Overweight Child
How Can I Help My Overweight Child?

• Body Image: Men and Boys Lack Treatment Options

• Young Girls and Body Image: When Mothers Stop Being Role Models

• BodyWorks: A Toolkit for Healthy Girls and Strong Women

See more info on Teen Eating Issues in a past newsletter

Childhood Obesity: How America's Children Packed on the Pounds
According to Jeffrey Kluger in his Time Magazine article, How America’s Children Packed on the Pounds, June 12, 2008, “The problem is, all those calories come at a price. Humans, like most animals, are hardwired not just to eat but to gorge, since living in the wild means never knowing when the next famine is going to strike. Best to load up on calories while you can—even if that famine never comes.” “We’re not only programmed to eat a lot,” says Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger: An Unnatural History, “but to prefer foods that are high in calories.” “What’s more,” Kluger continues, “the better we got at producing food, the easier it became. If you’re a settler, you eat a lot of buffalo in part because you need a lot of buffalo—at least after burning so many calories hunting and killing it. But what happens when eating requires no sweat and equity at all, when the grocery store is always nearby and always full?”

As we all know, what has happened is the fattening of America, including our kids.

Kluger says that in 1900 the average weight of a college-age male in the U.S. was 133 lb. (60 kg); the average woman was 122 lb. (55 kg). By 2000, men had plumped up to 166 lb. (75 kg) and women to 144 lb. (65 kg) and he asserts that our eating habits are clearly responsible for this large weight gain. Yet, as he says, “Over the past 20 years in particular, we’ve stuffed ourselves like pâté geese.”

In 1985 there were only eight states in which more than 10% of the adult population was obese — though the data collection then was admittedly spottier than it is now. By 2006, there were no states left in which the obesity rates were that low, and in 23 states over 25% of the population are not obese and about two-thirds of all Americans weigh more than they should.

We all believed that the quick metabolism and prodigious growth spurts of childhood would accommodate excessive calorie intake. Sadly, as Kluger states, “Even the most active kids could not hold out forever against the storm of food coming at them every day. In 1971 only 4% to 6-to-11-year-old-kids were obese; by 2004, the figure had leaped to 18.8%. In the same period, the number rose from 6.1% to 17.4% in the 12-to-19-year-old group, and from 5% to 13.9% among kids ages just 2 to 5.

If we all include all overweight children Kluger says that 32% of all American children are obese—we are heading into a health crisis of huge proportion.

We’ve all been hearing that obese boys and girls are starting to develop the illnesses associated with people in their 40s and beyond: heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, gallstones, joint breakdown and even brain damage as fluid accumulation inside the skull leads to headaches, poor performance in school, vision problems and possibly lower IQs.

Kluger’s facts are scary:
“A staggering 90% of overweight kids already have at least one avoidable risk factor for heart disease, such as high cholesterol or hypertension. Type 2 diabetes is now being diagnosed in teens as young as 15. Health experts warn that the current generation of children may be the first in American history to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents'. "The more overweight you are, the worse all of these things will be for you," says acting U.S. Surgeon General Steven Galson.

“The more overweight you are, the worse all of these things will be for you,” says acting U.S Surgeon General Steven Galson. And, warns Randy Seeley, associate director of the Obesity Research Center at the University of Cincinnati Medical School, the worse they are likely to stay: “When you’re talking about morbidly obese kids, zero percent will grow up to be normal-weight adults.”

Kluger argues that it's hardly a secret how American children have arrived at this sickly pass. “In the era of the 64-oz. soda, the 1,200-calorie burger and the 700-calorie Frappuccino, food companies now produce enough each day for every American to consume a belt-popping 3,800 calories per day, never mind that even an adult needs only 2,350 to survive. Not only are adults and kids alike consuming far more calories than they can possibly use, but they're also doing less and less with them. The transformation of American homes into high-def, Web-enabled, TiVo-equipped entertainment centers means that children who come home after a largely sedentary day at a school desk spend an average of three more sedentary hours in front of some kind of screen. Schools have contributed, with shrinking budgets causing more and more of them to slash physical-education programs. In 1991, only 42% of high school students participated in daily phys ed — already a troublingly low figure. Today that number is 25% or less.”

According to an article by Elizabeth Cooney in the Boston Globe, June 19, 2008, only 15 percent of children consume the ideal servings of fruit and vegetables and three servings of dairy each day. Less than half get the recommended 60 minutes of physical activity per day and 10 percent say they do no form of exercise, according to Massachusetts state surveys.

Despite these statistics, there are flickers of hope. In May, epidemiologists were thrilled when the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study of 8,165 children, which showed that for the first time in decades, the increase in U.S. childhood obesity had leveled off. In Massachusetts, Restaurants were asked to offer half-portions and drivers crossing into bike paths were pulled over by police. Schoolchildren squeezed oranges and shucked corn to learn about fresh versus processed food.

"Whether this is meaningful data, we don't know yet," says Seeley. "But anyone who wants to stick a flag in this and declare victory is just crazy."

"If we got this way over the last 30 years," says Galson, "it's not going to take us centuries to get back. We could reverse things at the same speed or even faster." Kluger writes, “Americans will continue to love good food; the trick will be to learn to love good health even more.”

From

"How America's Children Packed on the Pounds" by Jeffrey Kluger in TIME Magazine, June 12, 2008

"Top Health Official Pledges Action on Childhood Obesity" and Elizabeth Cooney in the Boston Globe, June 19, 2008
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How Can I Help My Overweight Child?
From the Weight Control Information Network

Involve the whole family in building healthy eating and physical activity habits. This benefits everyone and does not single out the child who is overweight.

Do not put your child on a weight-loss diet unless your health care provider tells you to. If children do not eat enough, they may not grow and learn as well as they should.

BE SUPPORTIVE
-Tell your child that he or she is loved, special, and important. Children’s feelings about themselves are often based on how they think their parents feel about them.

-Accept your child at any weight. Children are more likely to accept and feel good about themselves when their parents accept them.

-Listen to your child’s concerns about his or her weight. Overweight children probably know better than anyone else that they have a weight problem. They need support, understanding, and encouragement from parents.

ENCOURAGE HEALTHY EATING HABITS
-Make sure your child eats breakfast every day.

-Offer your child water or low-fat milk more often than fruit juice.

-Plan healthy meals and eat together as a family

-Try not to use food as a reward when encouraging kids to eat.

ENCOURAGE DAILY PHYSICAL ACTIVITY
-Set a good example. If your child sees that you are physically active and that you have fun doing it, he or she is more likely to be active throughout life.

-Encourage your child to join a sports team or class, such as soccer, dance, basketball, or gymnastics at school or at your local community or recreation center.

-Be active together as a family. Assign active chores such as making the beds, washing the car, or vacuuming. Plan active outings such as a trip to the zoo, a family bike ride, or a walk through a local park.

DISCOURAGE INACTIVE PASTIMES
-Set limits on the amount of time your family spends watching TV, playing video games, and being on the computer.

-Encourage your child to get up and move during commercials and discourage snacking when the TV is on.

BE A POSITIVE ROLE MODEL
-Children are good learners and they often mimic what they see. Choose healthy foods and active pastimes for yourself. Your children will learn to follow healthy habits that last a lifetime.

Find Additional Tips and Resources Here

Body Image: Men and Boys Lack Treatment Options
A report in The American Journal of Psychiatry, the first general-population study on men with eating disorders, found that 2% of men have anorexia or bulimia, compared with 4.8% of women.

"Despite the eating disorders that exist among men, most campus efforts to reduce eating disorders have been aimed at women: Body-image workshops are advertised "for women only," and advertisements for lectures on body image feature an array of female silhouettes," says Kimberly Shearer Palmer of the USA TODAY, May 10, 2001.

According to Palmer, this focusing of campus resources on one gender carries over to other social issues, such as domestic violence and sexual assault. Harassment codes often make it easier to find fault with men than with women. Violence-awareness posters assume women to be the victims.

Eating disorders and sexual violence undoubtedly affect the genders differently, as the statistics show: Not only are women more than twice as likely to develop anorexia or bulimia, but 85% of domestic-violence victims are women. Yet this focus on women as victims to the exclusion of men has a negative effect in that men may not be getting the help they need.

Palmer cites statistics from the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey to prove her point. The survey reports that the number of female victims declined between 1993 and 1996, whereas the number of male victims did not change. Similarly, Dr. Katherine Halmi, professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical College, reports a significant increase in the past decade of men being admitted to her eating-disorder program.

In an article by Elizabeth Bernstein of the Wall Street Journal April 17, 2007, even amid a growing understanding of the incidence of eating disorders in men and boys, experts say there is a dearth of treatment options for male patients. Only a handful of residential treatment centers have programs that focus on men and boys. Many centers are reluctant to treat men at all. And there has been virtually no research done on males with anorexia or bulimia.

Because these conditions are still considered female problems, even the criteria for identifying eating