Children

Children are the most important thing in our lives. As parents you want to protect them, safeguard them, impart them with tools to grow and become happy, independent, healthy and active adults. Children develop habits from a young age and these habits will accompany them throughout their lives, hence the importance of teaching them to eat properly from childhood, as well as the importance of working out and maintaining a healthy body. Parents of children who are overweight must be even more sensitive and aware so that they can provide their kids with tools for weight loss, set boundaries and get them to choose healthy and nutritious foods over fattening foods with a lower nutritional value, without depriving or frustrating them.

Excess weight among children is an acute problem. From a health point of view, excess weight at a young age constitutes an increased risk to become adults who suffer from overweight and who are at risk of contracting diseases such as diabetes, high cholesterol and triglycerides, and high blood pressure at a very young age. Socially speaking, overweight children often feel rejected, isolated, and that they don't fit in. Emotionally speaking, having to cope with the shame of being overweight, peer and family pressure to lose weight and the related difficulties may cause emotional stress in children.

Many families also cope with a complicated and delicate situation in which the parents themselves suffer from obesity, or suffered as children from overweight, and they are particularly sensitive to their children's obesity. As parents, you want to prevent your children from experiencing the difficulty and the pain that you experienced, however you fear that you do not possess the adequate tools to assist your child in developing healthy nutritional habits and a healthy lifestyle, nor the proper skills to support your child should he/she need to lose weight, and prevent the development of eating disorders (which for the most part emerge during adolescence, however they may develop at younger ages as well).

ISIS - The Interdisciplinary Center for Weight Management, Nutrition and Wellness is launching a special program for parents of overweight children. We believe that it is important to develop healthy life habits from an early age, but we also believe that children have to remain children and that the responsibility for young children's healthy eating habits, weight loss and a healthy lifestyle- is that of the parents. We have constructed a unique program specially for you which will help you develop healthy family eating habits, will provide you with tools to support your children and face the challenges that they contend with, and will provide you with a supportive, warm and homey atmosphere, where you can express your fears and difficulties, receive professional counseling and close, attentive and personal accompaniment.