Zeitschrift für Adipositas- und Gewichtsverlusttherapie

Abstrakt

Weight reduction in children, why it always fails?

Shokery Awadalla

Failure in weight reduction programs is frequent in obese children. Although it seems easy to eat better and exercise more, weight reduction is a difficult task. To clarify the principal causes of this failure we include 200 families with one or more obese children. 235 children, 122 boys and 113 girls with body mass index > percentile 95 were included. Age was 11± 0.9 years.  Genetic and hormonal causes were excluded. All the families were instructed about nutritional and exercise recommendations. Children were evaluated every 2 months for 6 months. Questionnaire about the adherence to the recommendation were realized on each visit. The first 2 month 80 boys (65 %) and 90 girls (79 %) loosed weight. The second 2 month this number were reduced to 60 boys (49 %) and 72 girls (63 %). The third 2 months 45 boys (36 %) and 60 girls (53 %) loosed weight. All the rest augmented their weight. Always more girls loosed weight than boys (p < 0.05). Analyzing the data of the questionnaire; father ´s lake of time was the main reason to abandon physical excursive (55 %). the second cause was no cooperation of the grandparents offering unhealthy food, as they see the children healthy and not obese (32%).Other causes (18 %) were children´s refusal to eat the offered healthy food or to make physical exercise, fractures or sickness during the observation period. Conclusions: failure to lose weight or incidence in obesity in the majority of cases is responsibility of parents and grandparents. Education programs should address them about the adult risk their children can have.