The Missing Ingredient

One more meeting about childhood obesity. We all get together and discuss once again: the causes, the challenges, the implications of childhood obesity... Today we talk about obesity and its comorbidities (diseases). Pretty scary talk for all the providers involved.

We see it day in and day out. We fear it day in and day out, but the worst part is that we can't figure out an efficacious way to convince parents. Some providers say it's all about portions, others say it's all about the processed foods we are eating, others say it's the school lunch..... What we all agree upon is that if we cooked from scratch and controlled portions, it would be the key to the epidemic.

We all get stuck with the same obstacle; it doesn't matter which approach is used to counsel families. How do we motivate parents to make changes? It's not a disease that will show itself right now. Like one of my colleagues said, parents have other immediate problems to attend to so they can't see such a distant future. Telling them that 10 years from now something bad is going to happen is not convincing enough. So we, the doctors, attend one more workshop for motivational interview and we try some more of the same things.

But it is only too little that can be changed. How can you be creative if the formula is so simple: what you eat minus how much you move = you. If you eat more and move less = you obese. So we are stuck, unless you as a parent want to change and help your family.

For lack of a better solution, we providers do the same thing, over and over again in the hope that one day, parents will come to this visit motivated to change. Then we can partner with them in their journey for a healthier life.

My goal as a pediatrician is to remind parents of their power to prevent and control childhood obesity. Parents have the power to change their home environment and influence changes in their schools and communities.