Let's fail again

This article in the Atlantic Post talks about criticism of the Let's Move campaign. The same criticism I have been repeating religiously in this blog.

...many experts wonder, is the Let’s Move campaign damaging the self-esteem of the very children it’s trying to help?

I believe that when you attempt to make fat kids thin you will instead find an increase in eating disorders and low self-esteem. Don't believe me? A study in Journal of Clinical Nursing of 16,000 students found that about 16% of children 10-12 were vomiting to lose weight (and it is affecting both genders as boys actually had a higher rate). We learned from Arkansas' attempts at making fat kids thin that this sort of thing is a waste of time and money. Instead, we should use money from these programs to make sure all schools can afford to have gym every day and that the cafeteria serves healthy edible food (the cafeteria in my high school served unhealthy and inedible food.)

And speaking of making fat people thin - Bariatric surgery doesn't help obese live longer, study says. (I will ignore the fact that they use "obese" as a noun.) Essentially this article is reporting about a study in JAMA where older men who had WLS did not live longer. The study was of 850 veterans, and compare to a WLS group to a non-WLS group. The WLS group did not live any longer. This was after 6 years. And WLS is also causing bulimia among some patients.

Meanwhile According to researchers from the Weight Management Services Program at the UMDNJ-School of Osteopathic Medicine study found that about 30% of fat patients they saw were considered healthy.  I have to wonder if the 70% who were considered unhealthy had a history of dieting.

I find all of this a mess: eating disorders, death, metabolically unhealthy. Why do we have to pressure fat people to be thin instead of being healthy?

Comments

[Erin S.]

I grew up in fairly prosperous school districts, where we could afford gym every day and the school cafeteria was good... even the supposedly unhealthy options like pizza and burgers were the healthiest possible examples of those items by the standard of the times (whole wheat wasn't a buzz word yet, so the buns and crust were still plain white bread). Actual recognizable vegetables on the pizza, and the burgers came with lettuce and tomato. We even had an enormous salad bar quite on par with what one would expect to see in those salad bar restaurants as far as options and variety of veggies goes.

And yet, there were still fat kids. Including at least one that I can say with certainty didn't play video games and watch tv all day, but instead was usually out biking, swimming, climbing things, etc. And I was still fat.

So even if we got them to admit that these programs of eliminating fat kids don't work, we still need to convince them that any program to eliminate inactive kids as a back door to weight loss won't work either.

Even with all the cards stacked in favor of health and thinness, some kids are still going to be fat, and some kids (both fat and thin) still won't be perfectly healthy no matter how much you try to blame them for it.