I recently caught this story in the The Telegraph about children under 14 undergoing weight-loss surgery in the U.K.
Obesity is a family systems disorder and will grow with each successive generation unless interrupted by a comprehensive social and education intervention strategy
It’s further evidence of the co-dependent relationship between high-risk patients and the sicknesscare industry. Food addiction is a full-blown epidemic among all advanced industrial nations. It is not well understood, and rarely even mentioned among sicknesscare professionals and those in the health-promotion/disease- prevention professions.
What this article doesn't tell us is what percentage of these children come from compulsive/addictive family systems with many parents practicing food addicts themselves. Chronic obesity is a distress pattern most often “acquired" from the family of origin or acquired while in recovery from some other addictive behavior. Addicts often substitute addictive substances or behaviors pretending that they are in recovery.
Food addicts do not respond to diets, education, physical fitness campaigns, cooking classes, etc. They will, however, flirt with these programs and when they "fall off the wagon" internalize the shame as a personal character defect, shortcoming, anxiety, anger and depression.
Well-intended attempts to support food addicts by sicknesscare professionals, diet and exercise gurus, pep-talks, public health campaigns and "goals for the nation” handed down from up high rarely have any impact.
Radical attempts to control obesity will continue to increase worldwide because it is a family systems disorder and will grow with each successive generation unless interrupted by a comprehensive social and education intervention strategy and converted in to a core public school subject taught be well-trained teachers.
Denial and ignorance regarding food addiction among health promotion/disease prevention professionals is a major factor in the spread of food addiction, as well as many other compulsive/addictive disorders. The only real solution to recovery from food addiction—and the chronic and morbid obesity rates that result—is a comprehensive re-evaluation of public health strategy, and a local commitment by parents, educators and sicknesscare professionals to reevaluate the essential nature of public school health and physical education programs to include the principles of 12-step recovery programs and family systems theory.
I predict that any attempt to shift away from the status quo will be greatly resisted by those currently promoting and practicing the abysmal failures of the past. Furthermore, any real change will demand local, grassroots organization and work its way from the bottom up with special attention given to an overhaul of public school health and physical education.
Da Coach