*shrug* pretty hard to stop eating when you are surrounded by food and are HUNGRY.
Anything but CHANGE THE BEHAVIOR.
There is NO SELF CONTOL being taught.
Most likely the parents are MIA.
BTW, where is the kid getting the money to eat like a glutton? Parents? Hmmmm?
She was eating for “comfort”. It was a habit, not because her stomach was “empty”. The surgery is not necessary (but can “force” reduced eating).
There are other ways to impose dieting.
And it wasn’t just how much she ate but what she ate so much of.
“Food was my best friend..It was always there for me”.
So sad.Having to surgically alter bodies that haven’t even finished growing yet,because of something totally preventable.
Yup ...
Excerpt:
“Food was my best friend,” she said. “It was always there for me.” Somehow, her classmate’s taunt, back in 2003, wounded her in a way the usual fat jokes never had. She fled to the bathroom and wept, vowing to lose weight. Her salvation did not arrive until more than a year later when, at age 14, doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital performed a gastric bypass that left her stomach the size of an egg. On the day of surgery, she weighed 404 pounds.
Goodness. Gastric bypass is a life changing procedure (outside of the weight loss) as I understand it; special meds and strange eating procedures. Parents send your kids outside to play instead of in front of the tv/computer and give them water to drink rather than sugary drinks. Obesity problem solved and no EXPENSIVE surgery.
Behavior is one of the keys, Gastric Bypass is a tool, not a cure all, for those who have the capability of losing the weight but have problems keeping it off, then Bypass may be a good option.
If someone has been struggling with their weight for more than a decade and they are putting real effort into losing the weight then Bypass is a good option, for children, not so much unless the case is extreme. Also bypass affects how certain vitamins are absorbed and could lead to dangerous deficiencies in growing bodies.
I know someone who lost 100+ lbs and to do so she had to micro-manage everything she ate and everything she did in her life. She was walking 3+ miles a day and consuming only good food and only 1,600-1,800 calories per day and was still 100+ lbs overweight after losing 100lbs. She would sometimes cry herself to sleep at night due to hunger pains. After a years of having to literally torture herself to get any sort of result she was close to giving up. She was a good candidate for gastric bypass.
So rather than have her and her parents sit with dieticians and psychologists who can teach her to read and separate hunger signals from her emotions, the elective was invasive surgery to manipulate the stomach so nausea and vomiting are reactions to normal eating?
Care for the child....tell him/her what is right or wrong...the parents wants and desires no longer matter...they have kids and the kids COME FIRST.
I guess teaching self-discipline is out of the question?
All that money Michelle Ma-Bell is spending to fight childhood obesity could pay for a lot of gastric bypass operations for the most extreme cases of childhood obesity which in turn would save a lot more lives that her silly feel good waste of money. Just Sayin....
Yikes how can a female ever eat that much at once? Why not just cut down to one of each and then to 1/2 of each to lose weight, or better yet learn to pack your own lunch?
No matter what the comments on this thread say, we do not know for sure what made her eat that much. Because of some neural quirk she may have felt starved all the time.
We don’t really know. We can speculate. We can blame her for having no self control but our guesses are based on *our* experiences not on hers.
OTOH I hate to see tax money spent on this while cutting Medicare for the elderly.
Start having real gym class in school and recess periods, stop feeding the kids McDonalds on a daily basis, and take away the video games and computer when needed, and this would not be a problem.
When children’s weight reaches levels that are causing serious health problems, they should be taken away from their parents. We have no trouble doing this with parents who are slowly starving their children to death, so there shouldn’t be any problem doing it with parents who are slowly stuffing their children to death. Of course, if this was a clear and strictly enforced policy, nearly all parents would see to it that their children never got so fat in the first place. The rest would be completely dysfunctional parents (nearly all on welfare of one sort or another) who shouldn’t be allowed to have custody of their children for a whole laundry list of reasons. The idea of performing drastic and risky surgery on a child to deal with an obesity problem, without first trying the simple measure of removing them from the people who are giving them access to all this excess food, is patently insane. It makes no more sense than performing surgery to install a feeding tube with an automated food pump into a child whose parents have been starving him/her, and sending the artificially remodelled child right back to the parents.