Children and adolescents are often involved in sports in which weight loss or weight gain is perceived as an advantage. This policy statement describes unhealthy weight-control practices that may be harmful to the health and/or performance of athletes. Healthy methods of weight loss and weight gain are discussed, and physicians are given resources and recommendations that can be used to counsel athletes, parents, coaches, and school administrators in discouraging inappropriate weight-control behaviors and encouraging healthy methods of weight gain or loss, when needed.
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For Your Benefit
Copyright © 2005 by the American Academy of Pediatrics
2005
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Comments
thank you from a school nurse
I can't tell you how much I appreciate this article. It is so wonderful to have such a paper to be able to support the "opinion" that I have tried so hard to impress on coaches for years. It has been so frustrating to be dismissed as "just a nurse, what does she know" when I have tried to intervene when students are being harmed (in my opinion) by unsafe practices that have been used by coaches for years. Parents have cooperated with coaches because "they know what they are doing". I have tried and tried to impress upon parents that these practices are unsafe and I have cracked numerous of my nursing text books and chemistry texts and A & P texts to try to prove my point-maybe this excellent paper will help. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You don't know how difficult a job it is to try to be a respoonsible R.N. at a school where coaches and P.E. teachers "know better". I see them do so many of these terrible practices with students year in and year out, against my advice. Thank you again. Nancy, R.N.
Conflict of Interest:
None declared