Fat kids again part 7 billion.

First off, Happy 5th Anniversary to this blog. I've been blogging a lot longer than I have ever done a diet. So kudos to me :-)

I'm really tired of the stupidity of "Let's Move."  Not only might it take food from the hungry, it most likely won't work and be a colossal waste of time and money.  Even the creator of the Zone diet thinks it will fail. Granted not for the same reasons I do.  Sure kids need their vegetables and play but the better idea would be to use the money to make sure all schools have gym classes and healthy and tasty lunches.  

Oh, and guess what, if you are fat, and your parents are fat, they are to blame. They were bad parents. I don't care if you're on the honor roll. Your parents made you fat. Therefore, they are unfit parents, you need to be put in a foster home with some thin folks. It doesn't matter if it isn't a loving home and your uprooted. As long as your thin! 

And the way to remedy this it to join a gym. Not just any gym but Anytime fitness.  Yes, pay your hard earned money to not be an embarrassment to your child!

Or how about the opposite? Hate your fat child instead! A new study in the journal Obesity reveals that parents offen are harder on fatter children. This study showed that parents would more likely to help a thinner child buy a car than a fatter one.

I doubt Michelle Obama is reading this. But Let's Move will cause eating disorders and heap undeserved shame on both parents and children.  And fatness will not be cured. There have been fat people since the dawn of time or at least as 25,000 years. We are not going anywhere and some of us are tired of being ostresized.

Comments

[living400lbs]

Congratulations on 5 years!

[Kirsten]

It's a shame but it's true. I see and hear it all the time, parents, mothers in particular having hateful hurtful things to say to and about their fat kids.

I'm sorry, but my opinion is that my mother, and grandmother, were responsible for making me fat in the first place, and had the gall to be embarassed by my fatness. The same to my sister. Mind you, obesity didn't necessarily run in the family--mom was positively scrawny until she had me, and then my sister. She never lost the so called baby weight, and has had the nerve to blame us ever since! Not my fault she ate like a condemned prisoner being executed at dawn every single day she gestated!

When you gorge on endless bags of black jelly beans, regular Coke, and Frisch's hot fudge cake while pregnant, don't be surprised that you gain 60lbs (with me, that she never lost) and then 43lbs (with my sister, that she also never lost) and then proceed to deliver babies that each weighed nearly 10 pounds.

When you have an endless supply of junk food ion the house that you willingly ply your child with, don't be surprised when she is fat. When everything you put in front of her comes from a bag, a box, or a can, you expect her to get fat, because it's all fake, processed, and laden with fat, artificial colors and preservatives. 1970's food--woohoo!!

Certainly don't get annoyed when you have to shop for her in the 'Pretty Plus' section of Sears.

Don't hold your 9 year old daughter accountable for her weight loss when you stick her on Weight Watchers in 1981, a concept she can not grasp, nor wants to follow. And especially don't expect said 9 year old girl to be able to stick to a diet that is quite frankly starvation-level restrictive with sickening products (much much better now days of course), if you and the rest of the family are allowed to eat whatever you want whenever you want. Do you know how hard it is for a 10 year old to be made to eat salad with no dressing and a dried out baked chicken breast while the rest of you have fucking McDonald's??? And you wonder why she ate whatever she could at her friends houses instead of "sticking to her diet" like she was meant to.

By all means, do stop to consider that maybe it's not only your 10 year old daughter who is just a weak-willed fat ass, when your second daughter also balloons up at the age of 5 to weigh almost twice as much as your older daughter. When both your kids look like Weebles and you and your husband and brothers and sisters and your parents and their parents didn't.......well I think you can blame your feeding habits.

By all no means, degrade both your daughters for being fat, when you're the one who essentially caused it, and be sure to put them down when they both repeatedly fail fail fail every diet they try because they have such fucked up relationships with food, and disordered eating, and emotional hang ups over body image and self worth. Give yourself a big pat on the back for creating yet another messed young woman in an already messed up world.

God....I could go on for days over this. It makes me so angry when kids are vilified for turning out the way their parents build them.

[Kem]

There have always been fat people, yes. Yet there are more fat people now than ever in the history of mankind. Why?

[Cottonball McFluffy]

I've been reading the official White House release on Let's Move (on here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/first-lady-michelle-obama-launches-lets-move-americas-move-raise-a-healthier-genera ) and it does seem like they do indeed put an emphasis on offering better food in schools and activity alternatives that would attract all kids with different interrests. Must admit that I haven't read it ALL the way through yet, because it's rather long and i'm kinda in a rush today. Bookmarked for later. :)
Admittedly, I don't like the way the first instalment of it sounds. There's more than a hint of witch hunt in measuring BMIs from young children (or even "training health professionals to monitor" it) given that BMI is a flawed tool in itself. And while it's condescending to sit parents down to teach them "how to eat right and make sensible food choices for their children", the truth is that there are a whole host of people who consider a bowl of mac and cheese nutritionally sound even thought it basically provides a child with no vitamins or minerals. So I'm honestly on the fence about it all. The intentions are good.. but the road to hell was paved with those kinds of intentions, wasn't it? I'd be far happier if the campaing was to raise the overall health of the nation. The techniques would be largely the same (making sure healthy food options are available for everyone andnot just the well off) and there would be less guilting or blaming people for something. In an unrelated interview I listened to recently the person being interviewed remarked that he and his wife were at some point so poor they started gaining weight. That's sort of the long and short of it if you want to find nutritional reasons. When you're really poor, you can't afford to eat healthy. Not eating healthy will lead to all kinds of health issues since, in word, you are not eating healthy. Calories be damned. They're a pretty pointless invention anyway.

Anyhow, on the subject of parents with overweight kids: I'm an overweight kid of relatively normal-weight parents. Do parents treat you differently than they would a "normal" range kid? Sure, because there's this crazy stereotype instilled in our collective heads that overweight means lazy. Weight is something YOU must have done wrong. A lot of the resentment from parents is also frustration they're projecting. As a parent it's your responcibility to provide guidance and a healthy environment for your child and if your child turns out to be something that's not considerend healthy, you as a parent must have done something wrong. How do you deal with that inside your head? How do you deal with your kid being "abnormal" size when you haven't even dealt with your own body image issues? I can assure that a lot of mums have those. Poor body image, dieting obsession and fat-phobia aren't exactly this generation's burdens, they just weren't that openly discussed in the decades before.
I think as a collective, we've had generations of unhappiness and emotional issues building up and getting passed along among us and all that unhappiness has to be purged at some point.