Kids.
I’ve been hearing all the noise about how obese kids are becoming. So, I started paying attention. None of my three grandkids are fat, but I see a lot of kids going to school and the like. It does seem that there are a lot more fatties than there used to be.
That’s bad. We gotta do something, I think.
I have type II diabetes. It sucks.
Peace,
mangeorge
Yes, they’re fat. I had a student in my classroom recently—a second grader—who was so fat, she couldn’t sit with her legs crossed. No one remarked on it, because so many other kids in the class were closing in on the same weight. Yup. Fat.
I was made fun of for being fat many times when I was a kid. I was not, for the most part not really more than a bit stocky. My thighs were bigger than most, but I did not even have a muffin top, no fat rolls, no creases at the wrists. I see many children nowadays who are far bigger than I was. I did not get fat until I dieted at a doctor’s urging. Nearly starving myself lead me to getting truly obese. I don’t mind being fat now, but I would like my children not to be fat.
So, I am doing what I can. I am doing my best to eat sensibly and gain the recommended amount of weight and no more during pregnancy, and to have my babies come out the recommended weight. I am breast feeding my children on demand. I nursed my daughter until she was two and a half. She started solids at 7 months. She never ate baby food. We just mashed up vegetables, meat, and fruit for her.
Generally, we are eating a bit of an old fashioned diet. No sweating over too much fat, plenty of real food. No juice boxes, not much juice for that matter, in general few convenience foods. We use butter and whole milk. We have fresh vegetables and fruit and cook foods we like to eat, many of the recipes are old ones, not revised with the new nutrition fads. We have sweets, in moderation, and honestly, I worry more about what the sweets do to my daughters teeth that if they will make her fat. I don’t let my husband hassle her about not cleaning her plate, nor do we fuss at her when she eats a lot. The big thing that we do different from other families I talk to is that we all sit down to meals together. I don’t see many people doing that nowadays; everyone seems too busy.
So far, my daughter is not fat at all. I don’t know if it is what we are doing or if it is her genes. We will see. Already she is thinner than many of her peers.
It makes sense though, a lot of older people are fat.
Personally, I do not see very many fat kids at all. I know a couple of pudgy ones, but that’s out of a lot of kids (and I know quite well that one of them has just inherited her dad’s football-player physique–she’s a pretty active kid). So I don’t know if I just live in a part of the country where kids are active and thin, or what–but I do not see many fat kids. My own kid can only be described as coltish–she’s all skinny arm and leg.
Maybe they should put that ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ game in schools. And the fat kids that can’t dance? Render them into oil to burn and power the game.
I also took a lot of shit for being fat when I was a kid. That wasn’t long ago at all, but here and now a kid that size would be average at worst.
At my work, we sell a couple of drinks that should count as full meals. The worst one has about half of a healthy daily intake of calories in one 20-oz cup. I’m 30+ pounds over my ideal weight, and even I consider them to be special-occasions-only. But I’ve seen huge big mamas come in with their huge kids and buy them the most calorie-packed ice cream shake with extra caramel and chocolate sauce regularly. Hearing mom say “He likes lots of caramel!” as an order specification is chilling.
I guess adulthood starts to set in earlier than it used to, with its attendant sexual desire, peer pressure, social responsibility and (in this case) the liberty to do whatever the hell you want.
RandMcnally has a point, BTW–childhood obesity seems to be advancing at about the same rate as adult obesity. (Though I’m not familiar with the science of it.)
No cites or anything, but I for one think of Chico as a place where active lifestyles are more common all over the age spectrum. I dated a girl here in San Diego who was pretty but chunky enough that she didn’t get a whole lot of male attention. After a semester at Chico State she was a stone cold fox.
When the fair was in town last year, we took the kids. Sure, it’s crappy, but all their friends go, so we take them to hang out with their friends. While we were walking around, we saw this family of HUGE individuals.
Having been morbidly obese, I can tell you the mother was (at minimum) tipping the scales at 300lbs (she was maybe 5’4") and the father was well over 400 (and none too tall himself). They had two children in tow. The older girl was possibly 7 or 8, and I would have placed her weight at around 90 lbs – not humungous, but getting there. The youngest was still normal, just had healthy round cheeks.
They were all eating grease-on-a-stick and drinking out of gallon-sized cups of soda. The youngest one started to run to see one of the midway games, and we heard the mother yell to her, “stop running, or you might spill yer drink! Besides, who wants to run anydamnways?” Yeh, kids learn from their parents how to be fat.
No, I’m older (62) and fat. But most of my comtemporaries are slimmer than I am.
The fat/normal ratio goes up as your sample gets younger. A lot of 20’s to 40’s are fat. An awful (scary) lot of school age hids are really obese.
We need to quit accepting it, I think.
But we need to be careful to not encourage kids to be scrawny, like those models. Anorexia and bulemia are also real problems.
We need to learn what food is actually for, and live that way. And we need to get our asses out and move around, instead of lounging and sitting in front of the tv and the computer. Active kids, and adults, don’t eat so much.
I’m with Bill Clinton on the health issue.
I see kids of all sizes. But working in retail, a bookstore, I’ve noticed that many of the fatter kids are accompanied by larger adults. Just today there was an enormous woman in a motorized scooter with 2 very heavy children and another larger woman. The spent most of their time in the cooking section.
I try not to judge what people read or buy…I really don’t care. Todya, I couldn’t help but notice the correlation.
ETA: Dance Dance Revolution KICKS ASS!
Once the kids had gone to bed, I polled my SIL about this; she is a teacher and has worked around Sacramento for several years now. She says she doesn’t know very many fat kids either. (Her kid is teeny, FTR.) Sure, there are a few, but in a given class of 20, she’ll see 1 or 2, not more. I would have expected her numbers to be higher, frankly.
I think I’l start counting kids I see in groups. I won’t count pudgies as fat.
Of course I’ll be discreet.
I can remember only a few fat kids in my jr.high school. That was in the late 50’s.
One of the schools in Fresno, Ca, is going to be the pilot program to do just that. Our Education director and school site RN went to the seminar in SF about 6 weeks ago to train for the data collection part of the study. If they can see good results, we’ll all train and get DDR in our schools.
…and my dance will be like sunshine on a cloudy day.
And we really could use this, because I have a 80 lb 4 year old and one school site and a 65 pound 3 year old at another. His mother wants to know why he’s being singled out. Because the other 3 year olds weigh 35 lbs?
That’s the biggest shocker to me. I mean, I didn’t realize until I was 14 or so that food was actually for sustenance, not enjoyment. And I found out within the last few months that when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you gain a whole new perspective on gluttony.
When I lived an upper-middle-class life at home, I just took it for granted that I would always have more food than I could possibly want, and the only things that could limit me was convenience and my own appetite. Right now I’m pretty secure in my ability to feed myself three solid meals a day, but it truly saddens me when I see morbidly obese people at work buy a sandwich, a little apple tart and a calorie-bomb coffee shake and devour them on the premises while the woman who lost her home to a fire is withering away on the sidewalk. I try to get her a sandwich and some coffee every now and then, but I have customers who could stand to buy her a meal and go without eating for a couple of hours. I just wish I could tell them that.
Interesting. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever met a fat Northern Californian. This matter surely requires further investigation.
When I was a patrol leader in Boy Scouts, I remember a couple of the adult leaders telling me at one summer camp that the big boy’s parents had asked us to gently steer him towards the salad bar at chow time. I remember thinking (and saying to the adult leaders) at the time: Can’t his parents teach him to eat healthily at home? I now realize that it may have been more complicated than all that, but still I wonder.
No, I think it was more simple than that - they were likely making such changes at home under great protest and knew that once he was out of their supervision, he’d be hogging at the sloppy joe trough and undoing their work.
I only guess that because they asked the camp, not the other way 'round.
Fair enough, but OTOH:
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A lot of parents think of the local Boy Scout troop as a free version of a military school; that is, as a place they can send their rowdy sons to get “straightened out” without them having to do much of anything. This kid was probably not an example of that, but I saw some glaring examples of it in my time and the sentiment was widely-held enough that that was the first thing to come to mind ATM.
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You yourself have spoken of the need to covertly provide a safe place for the kiddies to work their rebellious streak out. “I can eat whatever I want on special occasions”–like being away from his parents and out of state–seems like a healthy attitude to me, but then again I don’t know a whole lot about parenting.
Nitpick for clarity’s sake: The camp itself is a completely separate entity from the dozen or so Boy Scout troops camping there at the time. The parents didn’t ask the camp to force healthy alternatives on their son (or the camp told them they couldn’t do that–also a possibility, since it would’ve been a logistical nightmare for the camp itself to do that). They asked the troop leaders–a loosely-defined group of some of the other boys’ fathers–to gently nudge their son salad-ways.
Fair enough right back atcha! 
Oh, sure, use my own wisdom against me! No, I do see what you’re saying. My thoughts on this kid that I don’t know are that if he was obese already, he probably needed more guidance on dietary choices at least for a bit until he developed a taste for healthy options. The problem with the “special occasion” exemption" for some of us, me included, is that there’s always something special, even if it’s because I’m depressed there’s nothing special going on today - so I’ll have that cookie to cheer myself up! It’s sick, pathological thinking and it’s the thinking of an addict, absolutely. How can you (often) tell a food addict? We’re fat, that’s how. You don’t want to encourage addictive behavior, but on the other hand, at some point even an addict is responsible for his actions. Make it a kid who hasn’t had a fair shot at *not *being an addict, and I agree it’s a hard line to parent, and you as a patrol leader weren’t the parent, so it wasn’t your job. But I can imagine where they might have been coming from.
Or, of course, they could have been assholes abdicating their parental responsibility and asking other people to raise their kid. That’s totally possible too!
Oh, I forgot what I meant to say in the first place: there are two kinds of overweight children, and it’s nearly impossible to tell which is in front of you at a casual glance. True, the overweight family and guzzling of sweets is a sign, but nearly all kids pork out to some degree before a growth spurt, beginning around 9 for boys. I watched in amazement as all my son’s friends became little heifers, and then suddenly shot up 3-4 inches apiece. Then, lo and behold, he did the same thing! Then the little buggers did the same around 12, and they’re starting to do it again, the ones who are 15 or so (I hope this is the last time, or we’re about to be overrun by giants). The girl’s timetable is a little different, and I haven’t paid as close attention to it, but they also grow sideways before growing up, I’ve noticed.
This is not to minimize the problem that is childhood obesity. It exists, no doubt. But A. It’s possible to be a fat parent and have a slim kid (both mine are) and B. Not all fat kids are part of the childhood obesity problem - sometimes you’re seeing them at an unfortunate temporary shape.
My daughter is in first grade and has 22 kids in her class. Two are “heavy” - a third is “oh my God.” There are 100 first graders in her school - two tipping the scales at “oh my God” and half a dozen that are “defininately chunky.”
My son’s class seems to be thinner - there are a few chunky kids and one really heavy one.
1 or 2 in a class of twenty is 5-10% of the population. That’s a pretty significant number. If she is talking one or two in a grade level of 100, that’s pretty good.
Last week I saw two young women (seperate occations) - both really pretty women, both between 17- 22 (I’d say), and both in the “oh, honey - getting to middle age is hard enough on your body without having bad joints before you are 40” range.