The Obesity Game

`This board game is for teachers, health and mental health professionals to use with overweight six- to 16-year-olds. It aims to identify and change eating and exercise patterns by helping young people understand and talk about their feelings, and educate them about food and dieting. It also addresses issues of denial and shame. The game is suitable for children with learning disabilities or developmental delay.' - Children NowThe Obesity Game is a therapeutic board game for overweight children and adolescents, devised to identify and change behavioural eating and exercise patterns and to facilitate the understanding and disclosure of the complex feelings these children experience.The game educates participants about food facts, metabolism and dieting and addresses challenging emotional issues related to denial and shame. It encourages emotional expression and the exploration of belief systems, cognitive processes, behavioural responses, relationships and fantasies. Based on an integrative psychotherapy model, it incorporates psycho-education and systemic, cognitive-behavioural and humanistic orientations.The game should be facilitated by a health or mental health professional (who may participate as a co-player) and is intended to be used with groups, although it may also be used with individuals. It can be tailored to the pace of the treatment process. The recommended age range for participants is 6 to 16 years, but the game can be adapted for working with older adolescents or adults.

Dr Isabelle C. Streng trained in the Netherlands at Leiden University and in the UK. After practising for many years in Peterborough and Cambridge, she now works in Paediatric Oncology as a Chartered Clinical Psychologist at the Erasmus Medical Centre, Sophia Children's Hospital in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Dr A.M. Stradmeijer trained and completed her PhD in the Netherlands at the Free University Amsterdam. She has worked with different groups of chronically ill patients at several University hospitals in the Netherlands and in Belgium. She now works as a Medical Psychologist at a general hospital in Leiden in Paediatrics and Gynaecology.