It's no secret that I am big. Long before there was a beer blog or even beer there were the husky jeans. Husky was a brand of gasoline in a distant part of the land, a form of high fiber bread in the local Nova Scotian market, a type of dog and my style of jeans. Despite being clearly hyperactive in the flickery old 8 mm films, I also have a gut. A beer gut? Maybe a cookie gut. Probably a milk bottle gut, too. It came and went and while I was aware of it and, despite what the ads said, it bugged me a bit as a kid it didn't rule my world. I sure as hell didn't need it being made the cornerstone of my self-esteem and added to my teen and pre-teen angst like this:
Dr. Gable says this finding is especially intriguing because it suggests that a general reliance upon BMI classifications is flawed. She says parents and doctors might tend to overlook weight gain in children until their BMI hits the 95th percentile, which is the widespread classification for childhood overweight or obesity. “It's kind of sounding the alarms for the medical community in terms of the consequences [emerging] before the children cross that traditional threshold,” she says. “This suggests to me that you don't want to wait until they're overweight … to start talking to parents and getting involved.”
Excellent.Let's ride the kids when there isn't yet any problem. Let's also not take into account people come in all sizes or that, like me, you can have good check-ups and not be gaunt. Maybe let's look at why people have self-esteem issues generally. Self-esteem is about knowing your place in the world. So what if you are ten and school sucks? Community sucks? Home life sucks? You feel things suck. Could it be that adding being judged on appearances might be loading on the lowering of esteem in a kid's mind? Maybe having a cabal of medical professionals not leading that judging would help, too.
Comments
Renee - July 16, 2009 10:24 AM
I don't know, there are two issues - one is looking fat. The other is being healthy. I'm a big girl, too, but I was turning heads at 5'4" and 160lbs (haven't been there in awhile, unfortunately :) - so yeah, you can indeed look great and be overweight.
But the other thing is health. Parents are in the position to control almost all the food intake a kid has (sure I used to trade my tuna sandwich for peanut-butter crackers every day at lunch, but still...) When I was growing up my mom cooked everything with oil, made lots of high-fat stuff, and I didn't learn that good food could be healthy until I was 25. I didn't know that I didn't have to clean my plate, or how to alternately gracefully ignore "Is that all you're eating?" comments; I was castigated for "snacking" between meals, because apparently a handful of carrot sticks will being western civilization to an end and cause dinner to explode in a smoking ruin three hours later.* Consequently, I've struggled with my weight all my life, because of the habits that I gained around food as a kid, which I'm still trying to break. And that was before fast food became a real weekly staple in most family's lives, and there were still only two flavours of chips: plain, and ruffled. It's probably worse these days in terms of what kids are exposed to.
Because it's not just about overeating with kids: it's about control, and it's about "doing what's best," and it's about whining and tantrums and tummy aches and parties - our lives revolve around food. Some study or other a few years ago found that kids who were routinely denied snacks grew up to be bingers and were, on average, heavier than those who were allowed to eat moderate portions of whatever (within reason obviously.) The snackers learned how to moderate their intake and didn't treat food as a scare resource. Having an unhealthy relationship with food, not knowing about nutrition, not understanding your own body signals, etc is something that parents can help with - they are in a position to set the example, and that's really where it starts.
* Last month, we had a fight about whether or not soup was a meal, because she was insulted that people didn't want to eat more than that for lunch one day.
Alan - July 16, 2009 12:37 PM
I agree with most of that but note that you really have not focused in the second and third paragraphs on the effects of snacking just the habit of snacking.
If you are fit and snack and appear big... why do we care? One only has "an unhealthy relationship with food" if you are, you know, unhealthy.
Just to be clear, having an obsessive eating habit may itself be bad from a psychological point of view even if it is not that back metabolically.