No one, not one person, would blame the little boy. One twinkie per day will not maintain 150 pounds of excess weight on an ambulatory growing child, and this exaggeration is laughable. Since being in foster care: “He was taken from his home on October 19 and since then has lost some weight.” Both Saint Cad and **Indygrrl ** have related personal trials and success with managing a minor’s health issues. If one respect’s Oprah’s opinions, then food addiction is akin to drug addiction, and if one would prevent an 8 year old from obtaining drugs or alcohol, then one could also prevent an 8 year old from obtaining the massive quantities of calories necessary to maintain such a BMI.
Wrong. He has to eat less than he has been eating. Period.
Unless he’s not human that would mean eating less than other children. Again, he’s 8. If the most highly paid entertainer in the world struggles with her weight what makes you think an 8 year old will fair better considering he is too young to grasp the health issues? He’s just doing it because his parents tell him too.
And he lost weight while under his parent’s care.
K, according to your math, if one twinkie per day is sufficient to maintain his enormous weight, then one less twinkie should have the opposite effect, right? He is an ambulatory, growing 8 year old boy who is attending public school, which requires a certain amount of mobility and activity. He needs to consume fewer calories than he has been eating in order to lose weight.
I’m sorry, but I fail to see how the most highly paid entertainer’s personal anecdotes about her weight problems count as a valid cite.
And…exactly. His parents were in charge of his health, and they Failed.
Magiver, please make up your mind. If it’s just one extra Twinkie a day that’s keeping this kid overweight, then we should be able to subtract that piddly amount and see weight loss. Unless the laws of thermodynamics do not work in this kid’s household.
And if it’s not one extra Twinkie a day, but a whole box of Twinkies a day (as I suspect), then someone besides some clueless kids are enabling him. In this case, the mother is responsible.
You can’t it both ways.
A weight calculator says he needs 2121 calories to maintain his weight. That’s a freaking ton of food. An average kid that age would need around 1385 calories. Hell, as a full grown adult, I need 1,600 calories. I don’t think I could shove down 2121 calories even if I tried- that’s like eating two huge steak Chipotle burritos every single day. the thought of it makes me sick. The “extra” he’s eating is about an extra steak burrito a day. A Chipotle burrito as a meal makes an average person feel bloated and overfull. I can’t imagine wedging an extra one- above and beyond normal meals- into my diet every single day.
If this kid is maintaining this weight, he is eating A LOT of food. A twinkie has 150 calories. For the “a few twinkies” theory to work, he’d have to be eating five twinkies more worth of food than an average weight peer, every single day without stop, just to maintain his current weight. Rational people recognize that eating an extra five twinkies worth of food on a daily basis is not “a little” bit of overeating. It’s a dangerous, unhealthy thing to be doing, and it’s a dangerous, unhealthy thing to let your child do.
It is totally possible to limit access to food at home. It is possible to put locks on fridges and pantries. You can make it so that all food is behind a lock and key. Not convenient, no, but possible. And possibly a requirement for the health of this child. The hole in the system is the school breakfast/lunch program. Hopefully they can get CPS workers to make the school understand not to overfeed this kid, but in my experience, the school will not respond to a parent saying “don’t give my kid extra food.” My son currently gets breakfast at school most days (usually a muffin or cinnamon bun or other form of, really, CAKE) and we’ve flat out told the school we won’t pay for it. But they give it to him anyway and have been for over a year, without being paid for it. If they will give him the food for free how are we possibly to get them to not give it to him at all? They claim this mantra “we will not turn away a hungry child”… nevermind that said child ate a healthy breakfast at home, or if he didn’t, it’s because he was too lazy to get it, not because it wasn’t available. He’ll spend time to make a latte at home but not to pour a bowl of healthy cereal or cook a couple of eggs. (Not always–sometimes he does fix his own breakfast.)
So I think that dedicated effort at home (locks!Yes, a pain, but obviously necessary!) as well as having CPS intervene at the school to make sure he’s not being overfed by the cafeteria there is what is necessary. This kid’s caloric intake needs to be drastically lowered. At home if there are locks on the food, then siblings can’t sneak things either, right?
I also think that there needs to be some family counselling that includes the siblings so that they realize what a severe health risk this kid is facing. Maybe if they understood better what their “sneaking” is doing, they’d stop doing it (if they’re getting the food somewhere other than home). I don’t think most siblings would sabotage a brother’s health if they understood how severe the health issues were. I doubt they “get it” at this point.
There needs to be a lot of counseling all around, it seems, for the kid himself, for the family, and for the parents. And possibly for members of the school staff as well.
For now I think a well trained foster home is probably the best solution, until the family can be properly “trained” if you will to be able to deal with this kid and his issues. I don’t know if the foster family he is in is “well trained” or not, but if not, hopefully he will be moved to one that is.
Not to equate a human child with a kitten, so please don’t misunderstand this comparison, but I know a couple of women (partners) who foster kittens regularly for a local rescue. The one woman is a nurse at the hospital my husband works at. She’s also quite well versed in cat care. There are lots of foster homes this rescue uses for healthy litters, but when they have a litter that is too young, or that has health issues (a litter or just one kitten) they send them to my friends’ house because they know how to cope with special needs kittens. In the same way, I am sure there are some foster homes that are better suited to special needs children (in this case food restriction and exercise). Hopefully he’s been placed in such a home, or will be soon.
I do not think the kid’s family is ready to take care of him at this point in time. I would hope that they’d be getting the necessary training and counseling during the time the kid is in foster care to prepare them to be ready for the child to be returned home–which is eventually the best case scenario, if the family can be made to work in the best interests of the kid.
Sorry that was so long. I didn’t realize it until I was done.
I’m kinda not buying it that the school is feeding him so much extra, or that classmates are giving him the food.
What I have seen on the boards here is that if you engage the school on health issues they are pretty responsive, and hell, the kid is 8 - keeping him supervised during mealtimes is pretty trivial.
No, for the kid to maintain the weight he has to eat and burn the same amount of calories. The calorie count is meaningless by itself.
When I was a teenager I ate at least 2 bowls of cereal in the morning (500 calories) For lunch it was sandwich (255) chips (450), milk (120) , fruit (100) and a cookie (100). After school I’d drink at least one 16 oz coke (190), 1 large bag of chips (450) and a bowl of ice cream (500). For dinner it would have been the standard meat and potatoes fair with dessert so lets call that another 750. Snacks at night would have been another 500 calories.
this would have been a low calorie day for me at 3915 calories. If I was outside playing I would have consumed as many soda’s as needed for thirst. there wasn’t an ounce of fat on me as a teenager.
If children love anything its doing the exact opposite of what they’re told to do. Did you never trade stuff with the other kids or your lunch at school?
I brought it up just because it’s another point in the chain where he could be getting food, and at least in my experience, parental input is ignored, and food is given anyway. Very unhealthy food at that, especially for breakfast (cinammon rolls, sticky buns, giant muffins, etc.) I doubt that is his main source of excess calories, just that it is one more place to look in the “where are this kid’s calories coming from” hunt.
That sounds pretty standard for me also - I do remember one christmas where I ate a full evening meal (3 sausages, two eggs, salad, fries) every day for lunch alone, as well as snacks, dinner and sodas during the day.
Sure. Let’s say I trade my 50 calorie apple for a 150 calorie twinkie. 100 extra calories does not make a 200 pound kid.
So if he eats one less twinkie per day and continues the same school day activities, he will gradually lose weight, right?* Ideally* he should both cut back calories and exercise in order to lose weight quickly and improve his cardio-vascular health, but the simple act of skipping some empty calories will result in weight loss.
Period. I suspect you will refute this, as popular weight loss myths attempt to convince folks that radical, Herculean changes in lifestyle are necessary to fight obesity, but this simply is not true of ambulatory folks.
Gradually being key, here. I think it would be too gradual to really help the kid much.
Agreed, but Magiver’s false claims are a disservice to everyone who has successfully lost weight by curbing calorie intake. I’m just using the same one twinkie per day hyperbole introduced upthread. There is no chance that this kid is maintaining that excess weight on one extra snack per day, he is eating a massive quantity of food to maintain such bulk.
Before even answering your point you understand that the thread is about breaking up a family don’t you?
But to your math. you’re trying to subtract the unnecessary calories of the apple in order to mitigate the idea that it doesn’t take much to increase one’s weight. It’s still 250 calories regardless. And again, the calorie count is meaningless as I’ve pointed out above. It’s the calories burned compared the calories taken in. It doesn’t matter if it’s an extra 250 calories or 2000 calories. Since the child lost 10 lbs and then gained it back over the course of a year then the differential between the amount consumed and burned is going to be small.
Put another way, focusing on the exact number of 250 calories for the sake of argument does not make or break an argument. It’s an arbitrary number assigned to a small amount of excess calories consumed on a daily basis. If a lb of fat equals 3500 calories then that comes out to 14 snacks of 250 calories. If he gained 10 lbs that’s 140 days worth of a single 250 calorie snack per day consumed above what he is burning.
This child was take away from his family over this. Do we really want to go down this road? At what point in society are you willing to stop and say to yourself WTH?
No, maintaining a weight does not require large amounts of calories. It only requires taking in the number of calories needed to cover calories burned. GAINING weight requires more calories.
Yes. Let us not forget this thread is about the consequences of parental neglect of a child’s medical needs. This only seems to be lost on you.