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Underage & Overweight  America's childhood obesity crisis — What every family needs to know Includes a 7 Point Plan for Raising Healthy Weight Children   UNDERAGE AND OVERWEIGHT:   America's Childhood Obesity Crisis – What Every Family Needs     to Know   by Frances M. Berg   Hatherleigh Press   ISBN 1-57826-120-1   $24.95 hardcover, 456 pages

The statistics are alarming: Over the past three decades obesity has tripled for children and teenagers, increasing to the point where 15 percent are overweight and another 15 percent are at risk. Youth obesity, now skyrocketing out of control, is associated with increases in high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes; and obese youth are more likely to become obese adults.

How did we get to this point? What does it mean for parents? And most important, where do we go from here?

The answers are in this new book: Underage and Overweight: America’s Childhood Obesity Crisis--What Every Family Needs to Know. In it, author Frances M. Berg, long-time editor of Healthy Weight Journal, offers clear, insightful, and research-backed advice for parents and caregivers. This comprehensive book offers a new philosophy of health at any size for parents, teachers, policy makers.

"It’s time to take a new approach to wellness and wholeness," says Berg. "Time to focus on promoting healthy, confident, diet-free lifestyles for our children, on preventing weight and eating problems, instead of causing them," she says.

Studies and statistics prove that diets and food restriction don’t work; instead, they can lead to eating disorders, malnutrition, and increased weight gain in the long run. Hard-hitting but compassionate, this important book lays bare the weaknesses of current health care for large children. Parents may be appalled to find how weak is the science on which much of obesity treatment is based.

Chaotic eating has become the norm for children and teens of all sizes as they diet, fast, binge, skip meals, undereat and overeat. Their efforts to lose weight can be extremely dangerous and result in lasting injury and even death. One-fourth of all teenage girls are severely undernourished, and many girls as well as increasing numbers of boys suffer eating disorders. Underage and Overweight identifies the cultural, social, physiological, emotional and spiritual issues facing kids today and how these issues collide.

To normalize eating, parents are advised to end their own dieting and help children rediscover their internal cues of hunger and satiety. A 7-step plan for raising healthy-weight children, ideal for parents and caregivers, is included. By changing the way our families think about food and physical activity, we encourage children and teens to learn healthy habits that should dramatically reduce the rates of overweight and obesity in American youth.

Underage and Overweight encourages families to promote a healthier lifestyle in which all children receive consistent messages to eat well, live actively, and feel good about themselves and others. It clears up the confusion parents often feel, offers sound and simple guidelines, and makes mealtimes easier and more pleasant for everyone. It stresses the importance of communication, sharing feelings, and mutual support within the family.

Underage and Overweight is invaluable in bringing together weight and eating research, and making it easily accessible to those who work with children. The book contains many charts, graphs, lists, short items, and an appendix providing a wealth of resources, all essential to professionals. Whether used by a health care provider, workshop leader, counselor, educator, coach, parent, author, or marketer, these references will be valuable time after time.

A helpful and insightful guide to healthy living for the whole family, Underage and Overweight provides solutions for parents who are concerned about overweight or obesity in their children--or who simply want to learn how to help their children lead healthier, more active lives.

How to order:

America’s Childhood Obesity Crisis
One can hardly pick up a newspaper or turn on the television without hearing the disturbing news that overweight is on the rise--for children as well as adults. It's front page news, the topic of television documentaries and talk show interviews with alarmed heart specialists.
    And it’s true. The prevalence of overweight has increased sharply since the early 1980s. Solid evidence for the increase comes from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Studies (NHANES), the nation’s most comprehensive look at our health and nutrition. In this series of multiyear studies, beginning in the mid 1960s, large, representative samples of Americans were interviewed, weighed, measured, and clinically tested in mobile clinical centers. Our newest statistics, based on the 1999-2000 NHANES, provide the following findings for childhood overweight (that is, children whose weight falls at or above the 95th percentile):
* 15 percent of children age six to 19 are overweight.
* 10 percent of children age two to five are overweight.
    What alarms public health officials is that overweight rates for children have been steadily increasing since the 1960s and 1970s, when they had remained fairly stable, at about 5 to 6 percent. . . .

    Though statistics on the prevalence of overweight in children are staggering, it is important to consider them in their proper context--not all kids are gaining weight. However, there are more overweight children now than there were in the past.
    A few decades ago there was perhaps one large child in a class of twenty students--now there are two or three. In areas with low income or high minority populations as many as half of the students may be overweight.
    Nonetheless, if you go to a school and look around you’ll see that most children and teenagers are quite slender. They are representative of that other 85 percent of children, whose body types range from tall and rail thin to short with soft curves, and everything in between. In this 85 percent you will see the signs of children moving through natural stages of puberty, rapid growth, and emerging maturity. It is important to remember that the weights of children, other than the 15 percent who are overweight, have remained steady over the past three decades.
    Yet if we use current adult rates of overweight to project the future for our typical class of twenty, six students will become obese and six will become overweight as they reach adulthood. And as percentages of childhood overweight continue to rise, so do risks for a new generation of adults susceptible to weight-related health conditions.
    A similar pattern of increasing weight for children can be seen worldwide. . . .

    So why did it happen? Why this big increase in weight from 5 percent of children in the 1960s to 15 percent in 2003? Is it our sedentary lifestyle? Do kids just eat too much or eat too much of the wrong foods? Has restrictive dieting backfired? Is overweight related to genetic vulnerability? Infection? Or is due to our biggest population increases occurring in the very groups most vulnerable to obesity?
    Fifteen years ago obesity researchers examined their data on child and adult weight gains, and shook their heads, "We haven’t seen anything yet," they said, "just wait until these kids grow up."
    The time to wait and see is over. The time to act is now. . . .

Wellness and Wholeness
It’s time to take a new approach to wellness and wholeness. Time to focus on promoting healthy, happy lifestyles for our children, on preventing weight and eating problems, instead of causing them. This is an urgent challenge for America and countries around the world. The traditional ways of dealing with weight through food restriction and the dieting mentality have not worked, and are causing grave harm.
    The new approach asks: How can we help the child shift to healthier habits that last a lifetime? How can we prevent weight and eating problems? How can we help each child be healthier at the size he or she is now?
    A healthy body is only part of good health. The World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Wellness involves guiding the child toward making healthy choices in all these areas.
    By choosing a wellness lifestyle, we can prevent much disease and disability, and can cope better with inescapable experiences of illness, disability or trauma. The wellness approach to life combines sound physical, mental and emotional health in a positive relationship with family and community.
    Wellness is free, or costs very little, and is enjoyable from the first moment. It improves the quality of life, the richness of life, the simple joy of living well. The journey of wellness begins in infancy. It’s a journey that parents can enjoy in the moment and look forward to with pleasure. The wellness approach takes a positive view, avoiding a focus on the negative:
* Wellness is not about perfection
* Wellness is not about numbers
* Wellness is not about fearing disease
* Wellness is not about criticism, blame, or shame.
    It’s helpful to think of wellness as a wheel, to visualize how the six dimensions of wellness complement and interact with each other. When one aspect is strong, it strengthens and positively affects the others. Yet all are needed, and a balance of growth in each dimension helps the wheel roll along smoothly. . . .

    Many things of importance are going on in your child’s life. Weight is only one part and must not be allowed to distort the many other aspects of your child’s health and well being. Think about the big picture. Think about wellness. Help your child grow and blossom in all six dimensions of wellness--physical, intellectual, emotional, social, occupational, and spiritual. . . .

Health at Any Size
In the Health at Any Size approach, also known as Health at Every Size, people are free to take pleasure in food again. They rediscover normalized eating--tuning in to hunger and satiety cues, eating to meet energy and nutrient needs, and trusting their bodies to make up for times of eating too much or too little. They rediscover the joys of living actively, happily discarding the miserly goals of exercise for calorie burn.
    For people schooled in weight-centered, control thinking, Health at Any Size is a 180-degree shift that profoundly changes not just their thinking, but their knowledge and behavior as well. They become advocates for a lifestyle free of dieting.
   Health at Any Size affirms the truth that beauty, health and strength come in all sizes. That health is not defined by body weight, but by physical, mental and social well-being. The Health at Any Size approach asks: How can this child be healthier at the weight he or she is now? How can we help this child gradually shift to healthier habits that improve health and weight, and last a lifetime? How can we prevent weight and eating problems for this child and every child?
    Health at Any Size rejects the false notion that thin children are healthy and large children unhealthy. Rather, it accepts the truth that large children and thin children are a normal part of the human spectrum, and all deserve respect and consideration. It celebrates diversity as a positive characteristic of the human race. It reassures parents that, of course, children can be healthy at their natural size and weight. That children are healthiest at the weight that develops from a healthy lifestyle. Restrictive thinking is left behind.
    Health at Any Size helps people recognize that we don’t know how to make large kids thin, but we do know what doesn’t work. It helps health professionals recognize that much harm has been done in attempts to help large kids lose weight, and that failed experimental methods perpetrated on children need to stop. . . . 

Seven Steps to Healthier Weight
Healthy Weight Kids is a seven-step program for helping children and teens develop and adopt a healthy, confident, diet-free lifestyle in which sound habits come so naturally, they need not think about them. It works for youth of all sizes and ages. With this plan young people on the wrong track can change direction, rediscover active living and normalized eating, and build a strong foundation for a positive health journey through life. As a parent, you can help free them to live in normal, healthy ways, restore life’s balance in body, mind and spirit and move on to what’s really important in their lives.
    The focus is on four major areas of life: living actively, eating well, feeling good about ourselves, and feeling good about others. The goal is for lasting change that makes a real difference, not quick results.
    So relax and enjoy the journey with your child.

456 pages
6 x 9		Healthy Weight Network
		402 South 14th Street Hettinger, ND  58639
$24.95, hardcover		701-567-2646; fax 701-567-2602
		[email protected]

To read excerpts from the 21 chapters, click here
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For information on FREE Raising Healthy Weight Children magnet, click here
 

New Book Listing Information
Title:	underage & overweight  America's childhood obesity crisis —    What every family needs to know
Author:	Frances M. Berg, MS, LN
Publisher:	Hatherleigh Press Long Island City, NY
ISBN/Cost:	Hardcover 1-57826-120-1 $24.95
Size/Pages:	6 x 9,     456 pages
Publication Date:	January 2004
Bibliography/Index:	Included
Illustrations:	Charts, graphs
Target Audience:	Parents, teachers, health professionals
Distributed by:	Available at bookstores everywhere and online from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. Distributed by W.W. Norton, 500 5th Ave., New York, NY 10110. (Orders 1-800-233-4830; Customer service 1-800-233-4830; Fax orders 1-800-458-6515).
Description:
A helpful and insightful guide to healthy living, Underage and Overweight provides solutions for parents who are concerned about overweight or obesity in their children – or who simply want to learn how to help their children lead healthier, more active lives. Basically, the book accomplishes two major goals: 1) it’s a guide to healthy living for the whole family, including a 7-step plan for raising healthy weight kids; and 2) it brings together the research on related topics and provides this research in a way that is easy to understand and explain.