Growing up with obesity can present many problems, and yet more and more kids have to live their lives trying to cope with the situation of being overweight. More needs to be done to address this growing problem. I’m not talking about celebrities, weight loss gurus, or health institutions who constantly tell people about losing weight.

I am talking about better health education about weight loss being provided to schools and colleges. I am talking about free health programs into which kids and teenagers can enrol, which should be provided by education institutes funded by governments.

Of course this will cost money, but in the long run it will be a bargain. Especially when you consider the cost of treating people who are overweight, and this cost will rise immensely over the next 20 or 30 years. This is not to mention the cost of welfare for people who may not be able to work due to illness which stem from being overweight.

Most people will be aware of the health problems which are linked with growing up with obesity. High blood pressure, type2 diabetes, heart problems, respiratory problems, bone disease, renal health problems, and shorter life spans. Do we really want a future like this for our kids? Does anybody want to stand at the grave of their child whose life has been cut short because of weight related ill health?

Growing up with obesity will not only affect you physically, the psychological damage can also be very painful and long lasting, leaving you low on self confidence and with poor self esteem. It’s easy to say that people have a choice. But the problem of obesity is not so simply brushed away.

Many people who have problems losing weight do so because deep down they don’t believe that they can, so nearly all attempts will result in failure. On the top of this, each failure will further strengthen the belief that they can’t lose weight, and therefore making any future attempts even ore difficult. It can become futile and vicious road which often leads to depression and that can lead to more emotional eating.

The solution is to find where this negative self defeating belief originates from. You need to find the source of the problem before you can find a solution. Now if you spent most of your life growing up with obesity, the chances are that you may have suffered from name calling, bullying, and even receiving negative comments from friends and family.

All these bad experiences would have registered in your mind, and if you experience something often enough it becomes real to you. So you may have deep seated beliefs that you are fat, overweight, no good at exercise, and so on. On the top of this because of all your negative experiences you will place no great value on yourself as a person.

This is not a nice place to be at for anyone, and yet so many people who have grown up with obesity can relate to this situation. You may also start to suffer from paranoia. When you hear someone laughing it may enter your mind they are laughing at you. When you hear people whispering, that also may make you think that they are talking about you.

Each time you try to lose weight you fail again and again. There is a reason why this happens and it isn’t because you are not using the right diet or the right weight loss method. It is because your body and mind are at odds.

You are trying to change your physical behaviours through diet and exercise, while your mind is focused on failure, because of your previous experiences. Now read this carefully “your body will follow whatever is going on inside your mind”. If you don’t believe you can succeed at something, then the one thing that you can be assured of is failure.

You need to change the way you think, you need to focus on what you want, and not what you have had, or have now. This is not some claptrap about thinking positive and the universe will provide. This is a psychological solution that will work. Remember all the negative messages you received while you were growing up with obesity?  Well they are the messages that have put you in the situation today.

Clearly if you give your mind different message on a regular basis then your situation will eventually change to suit the new messages you are inputting. Now obviously you will not initially believe these new messages but that is irrelevant because it doesn’t matter to your body, at some point your body will follow what is going on inside your mind.

Let me give you an example to prove this method. You must have had a dream at some point, where you dreamt you were falling. When you landed you woke in bed with a bump. Now your body reacted to what was going on in your mind. Your body didn’t care that it where tucked up in your bed safe and warm. As far as your body was concerned you were falling and reacted in the way that it did.

It wasn’t real but your body didn’t know or it didn’t care, it just reacted. So if you think that you can’t lose weight and can’t exercise, or will fail, your attempts at exercising and dieting will fail, because you are saying one thing to yourself and trying to do something different physically.

When your start thinking that you can lose weight, you can exercise, you can reach your goals, and then your body will start to follow those thoughts. Once this happens your body will physically change as long as you keep eating healthily and exercising. When this starts to take place, then it all becomes real and you start believing that you can achieve your goals because you are actually doing it.

Growing up with obesity can inflict damage both physically and psychologically, but the key point is that you have to change the way that you think before you can succeed at weight loss and change your body.

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