What is Childhood Obesity?

As defined by Wikipedia.org, "Childhood obesity is a condition where excess body fat negatively affects a child's health or wellbeing. As methods to determine body fat directly are difficult, the diagnosis of obesity is often based on BMI. Due to the rising prevalence of obesity in children and its many adverse health effects it is being recognized as a serious public health concern. The term overweight rather than obese is often used in children as it is less stigmatizing."

Childhood Obesity, as defined by the Mayo Clinic , is a "serious medical condition." Note that even the Mayo Clinic does not call obesity a "disease." You need to understand that it is not caused by unknown forces or bacteria, and the effects can therefore be stopped and reversed.

If you want to know about the Effects of Childhood Obesity, Click Here.

Basically, the medical world uses a BMI (Body Mass Index) calculator, which compares a person's height to their weight, then categorizes them into seven different categories as follows:
- Severely Underweight
- Underweight
- Normal
- Overweight
- Obese Class 1
- Obese Class 2
- Obese Class 3

What does this all mean and how is it calculated? Click here to learn more about the BMI Calculator.

For now, we just want you to have an understanding of what obesity is.

For instance, if your child looks like this...

...then you have a serious problem.

Click here to understand more about child obesity

We will go into much more detail about what is this "epidemic," how you can avoid the dangers of having an obese child, and what measures you can take to reverse the process if your child is already overweight or worse.

We know there are many causes of obesity such as energy imbalance where kids are not able to consume the energy they get from food they eat. Instead they spend less energy in physical activity, thereby converting all the junk food they eat into fat.

The habit of eating junk food, which is one large source of fat which accumulates in body, has increased over the years, also contributing to our expanding waist lines.

Heredity takes some share of obesity in children, but only a small percentage. Along with all other reasons causing obesity in children, genetic factors play an important role; children with obese parents are at high-risk end. However, don't just say that because you are overweight, your parents, their parents, and so on were overweight that this must be why your child is overweight. Don't just write it off and throw your hands up, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

The current statistics for childhood obesity are alarming and very confounding. You really need to understand the brevity of this situation. So please, click here to see how bad this epidemic really is

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