by Carol Wise

Created on: May 10, 2009   Last Updated: May 12, 2009

I won't give you a bunch of statistics and numbers that will mean very little to you. I have lots of thoughts on obesity, since I have been overweight and later obese for most of my 52 years. As a child my size was a major issue for most of the adults in my world. Unwittingly they did lots of damage to my self esteem. I am sure they only wanted me to be healthy and happy but it became very obvious that I did not measure up to what they wanted. I was cajoled, forced and encouraged to go on a wide variety of diets. Yes I lost weight but I also gained it back and much more. Climbing ever higher through the years.

Unfortunately, my weight was a symptom and while the adults thought they knew what the problem was, they were way off on much of it. Yes I had been traumatized by my mother's death when I was three, but I doubt many, if any considered how responsible I felt for her death or how abandoned I felt when my father had other family members stepping in to help the young widower. Even more abandonment issues followed when he quickly remarried and his new wife had no desire to be my mother. In my eyes, I was always shoved to the side. I didn't feel loved and that was all I wanted. I ached inside, coupled with the actual hunger I felt from the diets my stepmother put me on, I began to develop a serious emotional attachment to food. As a child, since the extra food I was able to obtain helped with some of the pain, I felt, I figured, I just needed more food to get rid of the additional ache, I felt. I tell you this, because this sudden panic, the media has brought on about the growing epidemic of obesity among our children is likely only to compound the problem, as parents rush to find a solution rather then cure it.

If your child is overweight or obese you must be very, very careful how you deal with it or you will destroy their self esteem and create emotional issues with food where none originally existed. Once these things are in place it only grows worse and you may not be able to control your child's weight despite your efforts. As young as four, I was eating dog food to get food. At five or six I was eating out of garbage cans on the way to school or peeling candy off the floor of the theater near my bus stop. Later I went on to steal other kids lunches and graduated to shoplifting. All the while hating myself, what I was doing and the weight, that I carried. All I wanted was to be loved. All to often these days we have throw away kids, although many

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next Page >>