They are fat, aren't they?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Well, it seemed to me that my SIL was mostly talking about pudgy kids, not “oh my golly” kids–she said that one or two in a class would be not-rail-thin. (And I agree with WhyNot–most kids gain weight before a big growth spurt.) Of course, we get plenty of fat people up here in Northern CA–I am one of them–but they are for the most part older teens and adults, not kids, and I don’t see nearly as many frighteningly obese people as I know exist in other parts of the country.

So, now that fetus has brought up the fact that he didn’t know about nutrition and food, let’s talk about what we do to help our kids grow up healthy. Parental Dopers, what do you do? Non-parental Dopers, what would you do?

22

Here at work (public library) I see a decent number of fat kids, but what I really see is fat teenagers. Tons of them, no pun intended. Especially girls, although I might just notice them more, being female myself.

23

Your HMO, if you have insurance, is a good place to start. It’s in their best interest for you to stay healthy.
Kaiser has a good program for nutrition guidance. Online tools and classes are available. They also have clinics. They do not advocate “skinnyness”, which is good.
An obvious truth: It’s damn hard to lose weight and keep it off.
oldlib

24

There’s a good bit of diversity on fat kids vs. skinny kids in this part of south Florida, and it’s not even divided into socioeconomic groups, which tends to be common in other areas. There’s a pretty heavy divide between the socioeconomic groups: rich people are REALLY rich, middle class people are steadily “in the middle,” and lower/working class people are working the dead-end service jobs that will never pay them a living wage. All of these groups have their share of fat kids, but the working class and middle class have the most fat people; it seems like the really rich people either have personal trainers and cooks or just resort to liposuction-based weight loss before it gets bad.

In kids, there aren’t as many “chunky” kids as there are “fat” kids and “skinny” kids. Girls tend to either be rail-thin or “overstuffed sausage” fat; boys who are overweight tend to be chunky. It often seems to reflect parental size, but there are plenty of anomalies in the “wealthy” category; lizard women moms with overstuffed sausage daughters.

There are a lot more fat kids these days then when I was the “fat kid.” I was never more than a “baby fat” size, though. Some of these kids are walking around with a big belly that one would normally see on skinny pregnant women or men with big beer guts. It’s really astonishing at times, but they’re not the norm around here.

25

This is definitely true. I spent early childhood tiny and skinny, but at age 9 I grew sideways for about two years. Then I grew far taller. Then I grew sideways again for a bit, and then I grew like 6 inches in a year. I was never fat, but I wasn’t always skinny. I knew quite a few other people who followed the same pattern.

That said, the fattest kids I see (walking around town, at the mall, at the grocery store, etc.) are always with very overweight parents, and they’re nearly always consuming something unhealthy and full of empty calories. I know it’s a stereotype, which I try not to employ, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a really really heavy kid who wasn’t accompanied by a really really heavy parent and a large bag of chips or a vat of soda.

26

I’m in college outside of Atlanta, and there are a whole lot of students here who are at that so-fat-they-walk-funny size. The ones who sort of rotate side to side and totter back and forth because they just don’t have a lot of leg movement. Being an artist, I am pretty good at eyeballing relative proportions, and I have spotted more than a few who I would say were pretty close dimension wise front-to-back and/or side-to-side as they were top-to-bottom of their torso (counting that as shoulders to crotch). It’s sad to see people that heavy so young :frowning:

I get really angry when I see little kids that are outright fat though. Yes, I realize that there are rare health issues that will cause obesity no matter what, but most of these kids don’t have those. I see these young boys with rolls of belly fat hanging over their shorts, big jiggly love handles, faces so round their double chin and cheeks threaten to push the rest of their face in. Rolls of fat at the back of the neck. Creases at the wrists. To me, it’s pretty hard to draw a line between child abuse and making your kid obese. Before a certain age, it’s pretty simple to control what foods your kid has access to, and in what quantities. Given how hard it is to lose weight, and given the statistics of how many fat adolescents remain fat for the rest of their lives… how is it not child abuse?

[I have been obese as an adult, if that matters. I’m not now, but I was for a number of years.]

27

We aren’t great parents. I wish I could say my kids had never seen white bread, only got candy at Halloween, and that we went bikeriding every weekend…but we aren’t that kind of family.

We do encourage the kids to be active - my daughter in particular has couch potato tendancies. Not as much as we should - but we do.

We limit candy and pop - they generally get one sweet a day - if they drink pop (half can, usually) they don’t get any candy or cookies. If they get candy or cookies, no pop. They can snack on fruit pretty much anytime, and we eat a lot of popcorn.

We present them with a fairly wide range of foods at dinnertime - including fruits and vegetables and whole grains (which usually aren’t popular), in addition to meals we are pretty sure they will eat. My son is pretty good and will eat nearly anything put in front of him - my daughter has a definate preference for eating “kid food” - much of which I wish were better for her.

We eat mostly organic meats/fruits/vegetables.

28

I think–and hope–this is what’s going on with my son. He’s ten and still has the baby fat look he’s had all his life. On the other hand, he doesn’t overeat, gets healthy stuff, and rides his bike every day.

29

for some kids…I grew straight up, rail thin and was always “underweight” until college when I actually filled out and hit my proper weight band. I was small chested until then as well.

30

When my daughter was in elementary school, she went to the only public elementary school I’ve ever seen in my life that had no fat kids. One big reason? They had the single most active and healthy PE program I’ve ever seen. Every child had to work up to running a mile twice a week (health permitting, obviously), and every activity they did was designed to get and keep the kids moving. It really worked, too; the kids were all slim and healthy and very, very active.

I was a skinny kid, and my kids were both skinny. My son got a bit chunky in his late teenage years due to too much soda and not enough exercise, but then he went in the Air Force and that problem disappeared. :smiley: My daughter has watched her weight carefully and maintains a very healthy weight; I don’t worry about her at all.

It also helped with my son that he went to an elementary school for a couple of years that had the most international mixture of kids I’ve ever seen, and they’d regularly have international dinners for holidays; so he saw kids eating all kinds of foods – sushi, anyone? – that most American kids would turn their noses up at, including lots of healthy vegetables and fruits. By the time he became a teenager, he was incredibly adventurous and would eat with gusto at any ethnic restaurant we went to, and in the D.C. area there are a lot of ethnic restaurants.

Giving kids a variety of foods and a variety of seasonings young really does pay off, IMO. And keeping them active is 90% of the battle. Fat children, in my experience, almost invariably have fat parents, eat too many fattening foods and get too little exercise. Obviously there are health reasons that cause obesity for a few kids, but the vast majority, I believe, can be chalked up to too much food/too little exercise.

31

Dung Beetle, I had a brother like that; even though he was the most active of any of us, he was also a little pudgy throughout childhood. He did eventually grow out of it, and became a nice-looking older teenager. (Then he developed Crohn’s disease and got way too thin, but that’s another story.)

Well, here’s what we do. We have two little kids right now. Luckily, they aren’t very picky, and will happily eat fruits and veggies, so I try to mostly give out fruit as snacks. I think the poop issues my youngest had really forced me to pay attention and do lots of fruit! I also can’t rely on packaged snacks because of the other kid’s allergies, so the bright side of all that bother and worry is that I pay more attention to what they eat and use more whole foods and fewer processed items.

I am grateful to my mom that she never brought up dieting or said she was fat, or said I was fat, or anything like that. I try to do the same with my kids, and never talk about my weight in front of them. When we go to the gym, I try to “casually” mention that I feel better when I exercise and I like to be strong (true statements!). And we like to talk about nutrition around the dinner table. The 6-yo gets a little soda every once in a while, but mostly lemonade. The younger one dislikes carbonation and won’t drink soda, darn.

What I need to work on right now is cooking; we have so many late-afternoon activities that it’s gotten difficult to cook a good meal for dinner! I’m a pretty good cook, I just have to get the time and plan better.
I have to say, I think a major problem is that it’s so dang easy to rely on packaged, high-fat foods. We’re busy, we’re running around, we’re working a lot, and the easy option is right there, all the time–and it doesn’t even cost all that much. As a result, it takes willpower and planning and real effort to do what our forebears did as a matter of necessity–cook simple and nutritious meals ourselves. If they had been surrounded by convenience foods and desk jobs, they would have been fat too.

32

Same here. My theory is that putting in a bit of effort early probably has more long-term impact than trying to “fix” your mistakes later. On the other hand, I’m not a food nazi - my mother was, and that totally backfired on me.

My daughter (2) gets good, whole foods that are mostly unprocessed (well, except by me, of course) for I’d say 80% of her diet. The rest is mostly Yoplait yogurt, Trader Joe’s O’s (Cheerios) Ritz crackers, Goldfish, string cheese and American cheese slices (although I do get the “premium” kind with more milk per slice.) If we’re having some prepackaged thing for dinner - say, a frozen chicken kiev - so will she, but I try to serve two veggies - one hot veg, one salad, for every dinner that contains a prepared or box food.

We use one of those tri-divided plates, put the “main” largest compartment gets the veg, and the smaller ones the meat and the starch. My hope is this will teach her what the healthy ratios are. If she (as she usually does) asks for more noodles or rice, she can have it, but I also spoon her a little more veg, even if I know she won’t eat it. I hope that in time this will teach her not to binge on the high fat high carb parts of the meal, but take balanced seconds.

She has juice no more than once a week - her doctor calls it “pop without the fizz” and attributes a great deal of childhood obesity to drinking juice. Most of the time, it’s water for her, with no more than 8 ounces of 1 or 2% milk a day (yes, she was on infant formula/whole milk until 2, in accordance with current recs.)

Deserts are mostly fruit, but if we have ice cream, she gets a taste. If my son has candy, she gets to try some. I feel that making such things totally off limits makes them more desirable.

Most of all, I don’t make meals a battleground, to avoid the emotional complications of food. I don’t cajole, or beg, or yell, or offer her food when she’s upset or angry or bored. (In fact, if she’s asking for a snack but has eaten recently, I’ll ask, “Are you bored or hungry? Sometimes they feel the same. Do you want me to read you a book?” and often after the book she’s not “hungry” anymore. Sometimes she is, so she gets the snack. She eats or she doesn’t - that’s her job. My job is to make sure that most of her choices are healthy ones so that when she does it, it’s good stuff.

My son is 14, and I did basically the same for him. While he has a definite fondness for candy and ice cream, 7 times out of 10 he chooses an apple to nosh on instead, even if candy is around. He’s a very muscley kid with very little body fat - except right before a growth spurt!

33

When I look at my old grammar school group pictures almost all the kids were thin and there might have been one or two kids in each grade that had a weight problem.

When I look at my nieces group pictures, almost all the kids are larger. There are a few on the thin size but in general all the kids are bigger. And the amount of extremely overweight kids increased.

When I was in grammar school they didn’t sell soda and french fries at school. The cafeteria ladies made the lunches and they had vegetables.

We didn’t eat at fast food restaurants because there were a lot of us and it’s expensive. My mother rarely bought a lot of junk food. She shopped once a week and if she bought soda and chips they’d be gone the first day and you weren’t getting any more that week.

If my father saw us watching TV, he’d find something for us to do. If you didn’t want to pull weeds you learned to play outside and make yourself scarce.

Kids need to knock it off with fast food and move more. And stop rewarding kids with food. I think a big contributor to kids being overweight are the beverage choices. If kids have to drink soda, get them used to diet drinks and stop with the juices. They’re just empty calories.

34

WhyNot, will you be my mommy? I need somebody to feed me like that. :wink:

35

Sometime last month my roommate and I were dropping a friend back by his house. As a qualifier (for what it’s worth), I will say that the area is certainly a more economically impoverished (ahem, poorer) part of town.

It just so happened that we were arriving right as school was getting out, so we ended up waiting behind an unloading school bus on a corner.

The first kid literally waddled off of the bus and you could see him breathing heavily once he got down the stairs. He actually stopped to catch his breath. The second child, a girl, did a similar waddle. Sad, but not a particularly big deal as there are usually a few big kids, right? Nope. One after another, child after child waddled off the bus, gasping for breath. Each kid had stomachs that hung well over their too tight pants, in shirts that were stretching to a point where they looked like they might tear at the seams.

I sort of stared in amazement for a minute and said to my friends, “Hey you guys, I know this is going to sound really bad, but–” My friends cut me off and said, “All of those kids are hugely fat?” Yeah. At least I wasn’t the only one noticing.

What was weird to me is that there’s usually one or two super lanky kids- you know, super thin, tall, etc. There was not one single kid that could be qualified as skinny or even “chunky” (you know, baby fat). Every single kid that waddled off that bus was down right obese and it was really amazing.

I find the whole thing especially odd because when I was about 8 I was made fun of for being fat. The thing was that I was bigger (build wise) than most of the kids, but I was also a national champion triathlete- I was just a muscular little kid. Even then, I was never half as big as most of these kids are. I wonder if it is easier for them though because everyone else is fat too?

Anyway, just my observation that I thought I’d add.

36

Interesting. My son did just that. I really had no idea that the growth spurt thing might be the reason for it though, and became worried when all of a sudden he was so chubby. So, I asked him (casually) if there were any sports or anything he might be interested in trying, and he chose tae kwon do. I also cut out Little Debbies and the like. He’s 10 1/2 now (and a brown belt) and the excess flab just really flew off his little body…but, he also happened to grow about four inches in the last year. I guess it probably was pre-growth spurt weight, but I’m glad we were proactive about it. At the very least, he now can hold his own when fighting with his older brother.

37

My son does that growth spurt thing already. He’s almost 3, and I can tell when he is pudging out a little that another growth spurt will soon follow. He goes from being rounded all over to being able to see his ribs.

I try to keep balanced foods in the house and offer up varieties at mealtime. I don’t buy things like ice cream or chips or cookies as staples. If they show up they are a once in a while treat that he is allowed to share. He has always been given the same foods we eat (sometimes with slight modifications, but not much) and so I never bought him different kiddy foods. Once in a while we will have something like the whole wheat Kraft dinner with hot dogs, but that is a rare convenience food for all of us, not a weekly dinner. We eat a lot of chicken and fish, and only have red meat a few times a month. He has never been a picky eater, so I don’t know if that is due to us not giving him different kid food, or if he is just naturally easy going that way. I suspect probably both.

He likes most veggies and all kinds of fruit, he is starting to eat salads and tomatoes are a favorite. He has never turned down whole wheat pasta or bread, I don’t think he knows the difference. He doesn’t have forbidden foods, it is just regulated in how often he gets them. If he is over at someone else’s house and grandma gives him candy and ice cream, I let it go. I figure he can indulge once in a while, as long as I know he is eating healthfully 80% of the time when he eats with us. I don’t want him to be the kid who looks enviously at other kids eating ice cream or whatever, or to eat junk whenever he can get it because he can’t have it at home.

We let him watch a little tv, approved shows. Maybe a half-hour to an hour of screen time a day, he usually is doing something else like playing with blocks at the same time. He runs around a lot and would rather be outside so he doesn’t show couch potato tendencies yet. I don’t think there is a need to go extreme with anything, I try to give him a balanced lifestyle. But obesity does not run in my family, maybe if it did I would be more careful. I was a little chubby as a child but I never got teased, and when I hit adolescence I grew out of it. Recently I noticed I was gaining a few pounds, my BMI was around 25 so I made some changes and upped my own exercise program as well and got it down to 23. But there are no forbidden foods for me, either. It’s all about moderation.

38

See? I DO know what to do, and I do it. So why am I still the fat one, dammit? I’ve been consciously eating just like her for the last - oh, since Christmas, I guess, since I had a rather embarrassing melt down in MPSIMS. I decided that since I know how to feed her, I wouldn’t eat anything myself that I wouldn’t let her eat, and I’ve really stuck to that. I’ve limited quantities and upped my activity level.

No change. Dammit.

Sorry, return to your fat kid posts while this fat grown-up (who was a shapely but thin kid and teen) goes and cries in the corner.

39

Are going by weight, or measurement? Maybe you have lost and it doesn’t show yet.
If you take in more calories than you use up, you will gain.
If you use up more calories than you take in, you will lose.
Simple as that. You have to keep track of both.
One pound of body fat equals about 3500 calories, So if you eat one quarter w/cheese a day for a week over your caloric requirement, you’ve got that pound of fat.
Sucks, doesn’t it? :wink:
Did you know a can of regular coke contains about 12 teaspoons of sugar? :eek:
I quit smoking. I know I can quit eating, and exercise more.
To all you brother and sister fatties: Being overweight can cause diabetes.
If more of us adults weren’t fat, fewer kids would be.

40

Raise your hand if you were thin as a kid but gained weight when you got older.

Regardless of how thin you were as a kid almost everyone gains weight as they get older when your metabolism slows down. One of my best friends weight 250+ now and in High School she weighed 100 lbs. If you have poor eating habits and eat and drink lots of sugar chances are you will develop a weight problem sometime in your life. Just because your kid is thin doesn’t let you off the hook.

Sure if the parents are heavy and the kids are heavy it’s probably due to a poor diet, but that doesn’t mean the skinny kid is eating any healthier. And it doesn’t mean they won’t develop weight issues.