Shifting to a new paradigm:
A health centered approach
to weight and eating

     As these eating and weight problems claim more and more children, it's time for a new approach. What we've been doing is not working well. Our children are afraid to eat. More are eating abnormally. More live with eating disorders. More struggle with overweight. More children and teens are contemplating suicide. More fail to thrive because of the social shame they endure for being fat. 

     While these problems are especially acute for American children, they are shared throughout the world. 

     It's time to throw out the old model. The traditional ways of dealing with weight and eating must be replaced by a new paradigm that helps children and does not harm them. 

     What we need to do is this: Consider the four eating and weight problems together as interrelated issues. We need to understand how they affect each other, and we need to be wary of the harm so easily done to vulnerable youth. Overweight, eating disorders, dysfunctional eating and size prejudice aren't separate issues, they're all part of the same problem and they're all influenced by our unnatural obsession with thinness. 

     In the new paradigm, we can deal with these issues in healthy ways. 

     The goal of the new approach is the health and well-being of all children of all sizes, including their intellectual, physical, emotional, social and spiritual development. 

     To achieve this goal, a unified health approach is needed, as shown in the diagram in  Afraid to Eat (page 181). All children need to receive consistent messages which encourage normal eating, active living, self respect and an appreciation of size diversity. If they get these messages from national health policy, health care providers, teachers, their family and the media, then the four weight and eating problems can be prevented or diminished. 

     This new paradigm is about wellness and wholeness for every individual, and being healthy at the weight we are. It's about eating in normal, healthy ways, living actively, preventing problems, self acceptance, self respect and appreciation of diversity in others. 

     This is an approach that does no harm. Rather, the united effort acts on and responds to negative aspects of culture in positive and effective ways. It keeps a healthy perspective while challenging the detrimental effects of traditional tUnified health approach,Overweight,exaggerated,hinking and health politics aimed at size alone. 

     We can help young people develop self respect, assertiveness and healthy coping skills. We can help them find their unique potential as lovable, capable, valuable individuals, so they will take pride in themselves and their bodies at whatever size they are. 

     This paradigm shifts the focus away from thinness to being healthy and active at our natural or normal weight. This is within everyone's reach. 
     There's much evidence that keeping a stable weight through adult life is healthy for persons of all sizes, much healthier than yo-yoing weight up and down, and that large people can be very healthy, of course. The risks of overweight have been greatly exaggerated (and the risks of underweight minimized). 

     Research suggests that fitness and activity may be more important than weight in determining good health and longevity. Steven Blair and his colleagues at the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas studied 25,389 men for more than eight years and found disease and death rates were related to health behaviors, not fatness. At any weight, fit men outlived those with lower levels of fitness, and the fit obese men lived just as long as the fit lean men. Other studies suggest the same for women.1

     The unified health approach grows out of the nondiet movement, led by people who advocate normal eating, active lifestyles, and stable weight, and reject the traditional thinking that everyone should be thin and that large people should always be trying to lose weight. 

     The new health paradigm unites the work of visionary people from many fields: nutrition, eating disorders, medicine, exercise science, obesity, psychology, size acceptance and others. It is research based and practical. 

     Taking a broader view and recognizing reality is especially important for those who set national health policy. They need to drop the fiction that weight loss treatment programs are working. They must add eating disorders to the health agenda in Healthy People 2010. Only then, when all the issues are allowed on the table, can a comprehensive policy be developed which makes sense and which health professionals will support. 

     Changing national policy in the U.S., which I fully expect to follow the recognition of eating disorders, will bring about a major improvement, since it sets the agenda for what happens throughout the country. National policy also greatly influences how the media reports health issues. 

     Leaders in the new programs recognize that parents are confused and shaken by today's conflicting health messages and need to trust in themselves again. New programs appreciate local culture and values. Parents are assured they can trust their family traditions, that traditional foods and ways of celebrating with food are valuable to pass down through the generations, shaped and expressed in different ways as they may be, yet honoring the past. They learn to trust their own judgment and feel confident that they and their children can make good decisions. 

     The message is "trust yourself." Trust and empower the child. Support the child in solving his or her own problems, even when that child marches to a different drummer. 

Reprinted from "Afraid to Eat: Children and Teens in Weight Crisis," by Frances M. Berg. Second edition (chapter 9, pages 179-185). Copyright 1997. All rights reserved. Publisher's written permission required for reproduction. Published by Healthy Weight Network, Healthy Weight Journal, 402 South 14th Street, Hettinger, ND 58639 (701-567-2646; fax 701-567-2602).