Chattanooga pediatrician Dr. Joani Jack has long struggled to maintain a healthy weight. When her daughter started slipping into the same mold, she took action.
“We started making changes in our diet. But she was rebellious, resentful,” Dr. Jack said.
Then Dr. Jack discovered a book, “Thin Within” (www.thinwithin.com), by Christian nurse Judy Halliday. Billed as a “Biblical approach to lasting weight loss,” the book was a revelation, Dr. Jack said.
Rather than feed her hungry soul with food, Dr. Jack learned to satisfy her faith needs with spiritual food and physical hunger with physical food.
“She talked about relearning our cues of hunger and fullness, and it really made sense to me,” Dr. Jack said.
Early this year, Dr. Jack and Ms. Halliday released their first co-authored book “Raising Fit Kids in a Fat World” (Regal/Gospel Light Books, 2007, $20). “Fit Kids” extends the “Thin Within” program to children and their parents.
Chattanooga physicians, like their counterparts around the nation, are seeing more overweight children in their offices every year, Dr. Jack said.
Only three areas have more overweight children ages 10 to 17 per capita than Tennessee, according to statistics. Twenty percent of Tennessee children are overweight. Washington, D.C. has the highest proportion of overweight kids. West Virginia is second. Kentucky is third.
The childhood obesity rate more than tripled from 1980 to 2004, federal data show. Obesity in childhood can lead to diabetes, heart disease and stroke in later years, federal data show.
So doctors feel concerned.
Yet doctors sometimes find it difficult to spend time explaining weight-loss programs to parents, Dr. Jack said. Children — and sometimes their parents — resist efforts to change diet habits.
“Often they’re in denial. If I tell them their child is overweight, they aren’t aware of it,” Dr. Jack added.
“Fit Kids” contains diet and food choice information, as well as ideas for boosting family activity levels.
Bible verses, prayers and reminders to talk and walk with God liberally dot the text. A prayer and a Bible verse close each chapter.
Underpinning the book’s technical program are exercises teaching children (and parents) to identify “heart hunger” and “stomach hunger.”
Too often in America, people use food to try to soothe heart hunger, Dr. Jack said.
“People are eating when they’re not hungry. If we have a bad day, we eat a banana split, or take the kids out for pizza. (In our book) we tried to get honest and say, ‘how will you meet those needs that will really fix them — and that’s God,” she said.
Food feeds stomach hunger. Friendship, music, prayer and God fill heart hunger, Dr. Jack said.
The book proposes teaching children (and parents) three “senses:” Science sense, common sense and God’s sense.
Science sense refers to accurate medical facts, common sense to overcoming difficulties faced in real-world parenting and God’s sense to maintaining spiritual focus, according to the author.
“I started those principles at home and (five years later) my daughter is a tall, slim beautiful little girl. She picked it up right away. For my husband and I, it was much harder. But we had a lifetime of eating for emotional reasons,” Dr. Jack said.
