Danish Takeover

Jens Christian Holm, a Danish doctor (usually is) has "cracked" fat children via the innovation of treating eating as if palliating an eating disorder-along with exercise bulimia. This has been hailed as the second coming of defeating the "epidemic" of fat children. The good doctor claims out of 1,900, he's helped 70%, not to be fat, over 4 years, by tackling "all aspects of the children's lives."

This means diddly squat. The medical profession does not exist to take over anyone's life- neither child nor man. That kind of passive dependence is what is really tapping out health budgets, that and the profiteering of big pharma.

Even if you wished doctors to be a doctors puppet, you'd at least be expected to screen out those bent on indulging their doolally compulsion to force all fat people into proto-anorexia at any price.

The whole thing raises such a continuous string of alarm bells, it becomes like a police vehicle testing site.

In general, obese children are neglected. They are often lonely and many of them don't participate in activities with their peers. They lack self-confidence.

So bring them out of their shell. Liberate them from the social and mental constraints that are undermining their instinct to move freely in tune with their soon-to-be fully restored expressed will....?

With this scheme there is a real hope they can lose weight and have a good quality of life.

That'll be a no then. Instead, lock them into that neglect, isolation and loneliness, insist they try to dig their way out, every. single. day. It's all about you.

Obesity is an illness that is very hard for children to fight on their own, he says.

But they are totally on their own. As usual, children are being taught their neglect and abandonment is how they (not others) are cared for. The only "togetherness" here exists to facilitate the implementation of 'lifestyle' disorders, not to invoke a sense (re) connection with self or others. Any sense of isolation is intact.

Their entire life needs to be changed, because they tend to be lonely, tend to be ashamed of themselves so they need to do this, and to interact with other children in their daily lives.

No actually its you that wants to do this. Teaching them to be at ease in their own skin and challenging unprovoked ill-feeling directed toward them-situating it firmly where it is-within that person relates more to their needs.

Feeling freer to move and nourish yourself well is rooted in the default embrace of themselves as whole beings. Moving according to our own dictates, requires being in touch with and read their own feelings and moods better than before. This is more about knowing your place-contained within this kind of mindset.

Outrun your inner feelings, don't deal with and/or dismantle them. Separate physical from spiritual holding the pursuit of the physical as solution to the spiritual. This could be a chance to renew ones idea of self turning it back into a positive self-sustaining nourishing one.

Then there's the entrenchment or creation of over-responsibility, that can do a lot of damage to a person's ability to assert themselves and avoid getting into the kind of abusive relationships modelled here.

This clear signalling of the emotional basis of starvation disorders, linking the solution to personal problems to exercise bulimia and control of food. There's even the symbolic identification of fatness =problems. I think this was missed because every single case study used in this is male;

Mike Nelausen, 14, has become a standard bearer for the Holbaek project. He used to weigh 85kg (13st 5lbs), but having embraced Dr Holm's evangelism, he has slimmed down by 23kg (3st 8lbs), and is no longer the target of playground bullies.

This taking over of a child's life starts in hospital with a battery of tests-from body scans to having their blood examined. During this 24 hour period they ".....answer a detailed questionnaire about their eating habits and behaviour patterns."

Behaviour patterns?

Along with having the food they eat dictated-i.e. bland, tasteless pap, and how they eat it, wait 20 minutes for more of it. No thanks. Their daily "screen time" is rationed to no more than 2 hours [Oh, really?], plus they have to go to bed at a set time.

Teaching a child to respect their own natural rhythms including the importance of rest, is fine. And even encouraging them to depart from the screen on occasion if its become a substitute for other activities they might enjoy. But this context of everything for weight loss is a diversion from the idea of balance.

Adults who "feel sad" get pills or talking therapies. I'm not recommending the former, just saying this at least fits around the demands of their responsibilities. How does this approach set a child up for the demands of adulthood?

It neither makes them more resilient nor gives them a convenient sticking plaster. There's something truly ominous about this doctor's lack of any sense of overreach and what it says about the state of that profession is increasingly going.

The sex divide of FA is down to the relative lack of boys involvement dieting, compared with girls. Here is potential changing of that waiting to happen. I know the burnout waiting for these children after a decade or two of being pressed into running/cycling miles every day merely for acceptance rather than internal desire. That's what these people can never seem to grasp, there's a difference. 

Insisting children do overly rigourous phys ed, in all weathers, created generations of people of all sizes who were implacably hostile to P.E. That precipitated and enabled its decline, amidst a purported crusade against fattening that traded on activity as an obstacle to that. 

To explain a bit more why this approach is by its nature invasive, expensive and ill conceived and disorder generating, let's take a real genuine, actual disease.

Imagine dealing with HIV/AIDS, by seeking to prevent sexual intercourse- vaginal, anal, oral. Note intercourse, not SEX. Everyone can still get their jollies, just not via penis in vag, anus, mouth.

Conception would be through IVF. Anyone wishing to have a child, would get a referral from their GP.

Hugely invasive by nature because, wrong target.

Intercourse is rarely a necessity, less so than responding to hunger. Yet even if invasively policed and punitively strictured, running counter to a certain strength of desire is a foolhardy waste of effort, even with the threat of death. Trying to divert attention from this, by talking nonsensically about "addiction" is like saying human beings struggle against bondage is addiction.

No, it's instinct. Attempting to constrain too strong an impulse will simply result the re-routing of its expression, often into pathological tics. Establishing safer sex as a practice has been the preferred approach.

The invasiveness of the calories in/out approach is inherent in its targeting of hunger and appetite and is an obvious sign of its dysfunction and how it produces more.

Singapore already tried a similarly invasive, energy wasting school based slimming campaign called "Trim and Fit." This reckless programme singled out plump and fat children for special attention. Giving them lunch tickets with designated calorie limits in addition to extra phys ed during what should have been their free time.

Slim children got to wear wristbands with "I am Fit and Trim" on them, for just being. Fatter children were easily identified and discrimination, bullying an teasing became open and endemic.

Parents eventually stopped this mess 15 years later when the psychological and physiological burden on their children became too high. It too was "effective," if you ignore the extent and variety of distress it  produced.

Calorie restriction dieting is inherently disordered, so's exercise for the purpose of wasting energy. I'll repeat for the slow-witted, that is not CORRELATION that's CAUSE. Dieting is capable of causing every know eating disorder via its assault on and denial of hunger-though that doesn't mean all instances of ED have been caused by it. Which disorder is provoked depends mainly on individual tendency.  

When some of the children who went through trim and fit were caught up with in their late teens. Many of them were fat and levels of depression where higher than normal. Which despite propaganda is not the norm for fatter people. Testament to how damaging this way of life can get.

What's saddest of all is the betrayal of trust. Isolation and loneliness in a child could be an opportunity to empower. Ultimately, its one way you can teach a person not to be slayed by various slings and arrows;

As she scrapes and shreds carrots for a low calorie dish with minced beef, his mother Karina breaks down and weeps. "It was extremely hard to see him like that. We tried everything but he just kept on gaining weight. So when it finally started to work, we were really happy.

We will all have to learn how to overcome challenges, to recover, why shirk an opportunity to really teach a child this?