Chinese "Web Addicts" Get Boot Camp, Therapy 279
itwbennett writes "A large number of Chinese parents are finding their teenagers to be exhibiting such psychological symptoms as depression, antisocial behavior, and slipping grades. The cause: Internet addiction. World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike rank beside Chinese role-playing games as those that hook the most patients, says Tao Ran, the founder of a youth rehabilitation center on a Beijing army base. Online chat programs more often hook girls, who make up a handful of Tao's current 70 patients. The teens are subjected to a 'strict regimen of military drills, martial arts training, lectures and sessions with psychiatrists.' And, most importantly: no Internet."
Re:Your Rights Online (Score:5, Informative)
Americans send their fat kids to boot camp. I really wouldn't be suspicious.
Re:Your Rights Online (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Your Rights Online (Score:3, Informative)
Untrue? Thousands of people were evicted without compensation to make space for Olympic venues. And how about Tiananmen Square?
Do you think there might be some form of sample bias there?
Re:Mod up (Score:3, Informative)
Recognise the problem - that people who are overweight are NEVER doing it deliberately. They're doing it because in this day and age where 'being hungry' is practically impossible, their self regulatory mechanism doesn't work as well.
So they _have_ to pay attention - every day - to how much they're consuming, how much they're using - you say it's easy to find a BMR? Sure, if you know that's specifically what you need to be looking at - oh, and if you accept that you are 'average' in that sense, which
And at the same time you'll find a hell of a lot of utter tripe, crap and hogwash about 'diet programs' from assholes who declare it 'easy - just eat less pie, fatty'. Or maybe tell you about the 12 week cabbage soup program or something. And the whole thing is utter lies, because a diet is _never_ a short term thing - it's what you eat every day for the rest of your life.
People who are overweight are people who, for whatever reason, have trouble self regulating their calorific intake. There is a lot of 'facts' published about this, that, and the other, and there is a lot of noise in the signal, simply because
It's a prejudice, much like any other. People don't have to 'justify' why they're diabetic. People shouldn't have to 'justify' why they are overweight. It's a metabolic problem, it's one that is actually relatively straightforward to fix, but it requires a lifetime commitment - both to understanding what's necessary, and then actually implementing it. Lets lose the bullshit, and accept that our society is broken, and get on with fixing it.
Re:Mod up (Score:3, Informative)
Often the simple solutions don't work, either, which is why people need to be better educated about how the whole system works.
Most people that are obese (or even just overweight) will try, before anything else, to reduce their intake. For many (if not most) people, while this might have an initial effect of dropping a couple of pounds, it usually has the reverse effect in the long term of causing the body to store more fat, thinking that the food has gone away.
People need to spread the same food out a bit more and eat more times during the day, and they need to change the types of foods they eat so they are taking in a healthier diet. Usually this can all be done without reducing the amount of food a person is eating, and they will lose weight, because the body feels that food is more plentiful (since they're eating say 5-7 times a day instead of 3), and the food is better for them, making them feel better and possibly increasing their activity level.
Some of the heaviest people I've known in my life eat one or two meals a day. My father lost 50+ pounds by going from eating dinner and possibly a snack before dinner to eating 5 times a day (in fact eating more food, but also healthier food), and eventually increasing his activity level and taking daily walks (which of course increased in distance as he lost more weight).
The main point with dieting is finding a program based on resetting your system to process food properly and training yourself for the long term to eat right, with a clear path from weight loss to weight maintenance. If a diet doesn't include a method to stop losing weight (without regaining), then it's not a real solution. There are also a number of misconceptions about any popular diet plan, and people can easily go down the wrong path by following those misconceptions. The most obvious and popular of these is the Atkins plan, which most people use as an excuse to go out and eat fatty meats all day every day for a month or two and watch the weight 'miraculously' disappear, only to find that they can't keep the weight off when they quit, and it doesn't work as well when they do it again. The actual plan, on the other hand, includes a lot of vegetables and pushes towards adding carbs back into the diet slowly, monitoring the effect the carbs have on your weight, and coming to a level of carb intake that makes sense for your activity levels (and can be maintained, healthily, throughout your life).
Re:Your Rights Online (Score:2, Informative)
These programs aren't the brutal prison scenes many may imagine.
In the end, even if a kid doesn't lose one pound at fat (boot)camp, hopefully he can come away with the discipline to "just say no" to that Krispy Kreme.