Underage & Overweight: America's Childhood Obesity Crisis -- What Every Family Needs to Know

This book addresses the issue of our overly-busy lives. Our children are as stressed and over-booked as we are. Their eating choices and patterns coupled with their lifestyle choices are the reason for obesity and eating disorders in children. I love that this book teaches us how to normalize eating and activity choices. Our children are not in touch with their internal hunger & satiety signals because of the overly processed foods we are letting them use to fuel their bodies. We parents have become too busy to schedule family dinners and bike rides with our kids. We are tossing food over the back seat to our kids as we are driving them to their next scheduled event. We have become afraid of unsafe communities and therefore are keeping our kids inside more often, where they are sitting in front of screens. The message in this book is that we need to stop placing all of the blame on the school lunches or fast food marketing and take control of the lifestyle choices we are helping our children make. We need to help our kids get back to normalized eating and playing just because it feels good. Jill Fleming, MS, RD Professional Speaker & Author of Thin People Don't Clean Their Plates: Simple Lifestyle Choices for Permanent Weight Loss (The Thin People Series)

Now in a revised and updated edition, Underage And Overweight is a valuable and insightful book by childhood obesity expert Frances M. Berg. Written for parents, teachers, and healthcare providers, Underage And Overweight presents practical guideposts for a healthy lifestyle that will help every child and, even more importantly, do no harm. Above all, Underage And Overweight produces a wealth of information stressing that diets don't work - efforts to artificially force rapid weight loss, such as extremely low-calorie diets, "fat camps", and appetite suppressing drugs will not keep off the weight long term because the body is resilient about defending its fat and its "setpoint" of weight. Worse, low-calorie diets, pills and extreme solutions such as liposuction or stomach stapling can have long- term health risks or even cause death. So what does work? Underage And Overweight offers a wealth of practical tips, tricks and techniques to improve lifestyle habits, offer a balance of greater activity and exercise, improve nutrition, and deal with the psychological issues of being large size at a young age. In the case of young overweight children, an ideal solution is often to help the child maintain his or her weight at the current amount as he or she grows older, allowing the child to "grow into" the weight. An active lifestyle can avert "setpoint creep" upward as children and adults age. Above all it is crucial to love and accept children, as negative emotions will only compound physiological problems, and children are far too hard on themselves and each other as it is. Underage And Overweight is a serious analysis of a problem with no quick or easy solutions, yet it is packed cover to cover with practical advice for fostering healthy attitudes for long-term improvement - from the importance of learning table manners to encouraging regular walking to meal planning based on sound nutritional principles and much more. Highly recommended, and a valuable resource of vital information for adults struggling with obesity as surely as children.

He learnt from experimenting on his own life that moderation is the key to a balanced diet. No given diet is absolutely harmful but diets with very high carbohydrate and fat content should be restricted to minimum. In the end the total amount of calories taken in should be carefully watched. If a high calorie meal is consumed then one should compensatorily restrict calories at other meals. In the end to protect future generations there needs to be some control both at the consumer level as well as availability.

I found 'Underage and Overweight' to be an excellent, relevant resource in the very critical issue of weight and children in our society. Of special note is the 'what works; what doesn't' section. Many of our students are still adolescents and have for most of their lives suffered from weight issues whether they are 'overweight' or not. Their well-meaning parents have often been part of the problem, trying to protect their child from becoming 'overweight,' which is so apparent in the scantily clad tropics of the Hawaiian Islands. Having a resource that gives such a broad overview of the issues is invaluable. Anne Caprio Shovic, Ph.D., R.D., Associate Professor, Dietetics Program Director, Human Nutrition, University of Hawaii at Manoa