Eating Disorders and Childhood Obesity |
Pushing overweight children too much to lose some weight can leave them from one step to eating disorders.
Dr. Melissa Spann, Psychotherapist and Executive Director with Oliver-Pyatt Centers, explains how adults can help those children to get in shape and be healthy.
Transcript
There is a push we all know this regarding childhood obesity we have children now who are more diabetic than ever it’s really sad yeah and there’s obviously an awareness too to help these children to get in shape to be healthy how do you balance both because there’s we want to help these children but are we pushing them way too much we’re then it’s becoming to the other side extreme how do you balance those two because we have like this two eating disorder the problem and then we have an obesity problem we’ve got a problem we’re not meeting in the middle here yes and there’s a there’s a lot of debate in the field about where the obesity folks and the eating disorder folks need to put forth some effort to meet together there are there a large portion of people who are clinically obese do not have eating disorders however within the binge eating disorder population two thirds of people with binge eating disorders are clinically obese and so we need to do when we’re talking about obesity is to look and see who within that population is struggling with eating disorder types of behaviors and overall what we’re talking about is someone’s relationship to food and so their relationship to food is going to mimic their relationship to self and through eating disorder recovery we’re trying to heal both of those things you