childhood obesity

jennlin · January 2012

what do you guys think of this?

http://www.hlntv.com/article/2012/01/04/are-georgia-anti-obesity-ads-too-harsh?hpt=hp_c2

i think it's very sad, and i don't think it will work.

merrileekate · January 2012

Is that poor girl ever going to come back from being the "fat poster child"?

I think childhood obesity is a big problem, and I think parents need to be aware of what their kids are eating and how what they eat affects their health. It shouldn't be sugar coated to parents. Kids pick up on what their parents are doing, so if the parents are role models for a healthy lifestyle, the kids are more likely to follow suit. The excuse of "what kid doesn't like junk food" is bs IMO. Of course kids will like junk food, that doesn't mean they need to have it constantly.

That said, kids will also pick up on "hey, I look like that fat kid in the poster. Guess this is just who I am". And that is really sad.

sarack · January 2012

Childhood obesity makes me sick.

I have been fat my entire life.. and really the reason is because my parents, mostly my mother, offered shiitty food for me to eat.

Also, H's cousin is a big guy. He and his SO have a 3 year old that currently weighs 60lbs. My 5 year old nephew weighs 42. The parents are have recently lost a lot of weight.. we went out to lunch, they ate salad and gave the kid fried food, chocolate milk, and icecream. It made me really sad that they have enough time to worry about the food they are eating but shove the easiest thing in his face. It broke my heart.

I know there could be worse things, but I don't want my children to start life being fat. That is why H and I have been changing our lifestyle for the past year or so. We work out, eat right, and find it important to be active.

I don't think this will help. What will help is if parents start to pay a little more attention to the foods and diets they are offering their children.

sarack · January 2012

also, staying active and being involved in sports or other activities was NEVER offered or encouraged to me when i was little. this is important to start young with your children. yes, it is easy to have your kid just watch tv but they would feel so much better running outside!

merrileekate · January 2012

Sarack, you are really inspiring. It's so cool to see you say no, just because this is how life has been, doesn't mean it needs to be this way going forward. You're going to be a great role model for your kids. Heck, you're a good role model for the rest of us!

jennlin · January 2012

MerrileeKate:
Sarack, you are really inspiring. It's so cool to see you say no, just because this is how life has been, doesn't mean it needs to be this way going forward. You're going to be a great role model for your kids. Heck, you're a good role model for the rest of us!

agreed!!

sarack · January 2012

thank you ladies. childhood obesity is seriously one of the scariest things that i feel i could pass on to or inflict on my children. i just don't wanna do it.

therickson · January 2012

MerrileeKate:
Sarack, you are really inspiring. It's so cool to see you say no, just because this is how life has been, doesn't mean it needs to be this way going forward. You're going to be a great role model for your kids. Heck, you're a good role model for the rest of us!

You really are awesome!

karimychel · January 2012

I don't like those ads. It's hard for me to look at them - my little brother has always been obese. And his obesity isn't necessarily due to what my parents fed him, because there are 3 of us and we all ate the same thing, and he was way more active than I was as a kid.

A lot of times children have underlying factors that only the family and doctors know and the outside world doesn't. My little brother was pumped full of meds to keep him alive more than once and a lot of the side effects to them included gaining weight. I love him dearly, no matter what his weight is.

It irks me to no end that every time someone sees a heavy child they automatically think the kid is eating McDonalads for every meal and that they have horrible parents.

therickson · January 2012

LegalBritt:
My parent's never sugar coated it for me. They told me from a very young age that I was bigger than all the other kids and that I needed to watch my weight. All it did was create a really bad relationship with food. My parent's were/are super healthy. We never ever ever had junk food in the house. We rarely ate out...maybe pizza once every two months. We took our lunches to school which consisted of a sandwich on multigrain bread with sprouts (so all the kids made fun of my grass sammie) and some fruit juice and a box of raisins or something like that. My Mom also tought areobics and has always been really physically fit. I don't know how I ended up with a weight problem with such healthy roll models but I found letters about me when I was 2 and 5 and she commented in both about how I had such a big apetite, that I was insatiable, that I was the biggest and tallest in my classes, etc. I was literally born loving food...not even junk food. I love healthy foods but I have always just eaten way too much of it. I used to hoard food and binge eat when nobody was looking because I was so ashamed of eating in front of people b/c my parent's tormented me about my weight.

I don't know what the answer is but I don't want my kids to be fat like me and I also don't want their weight and food choices to always be a topic of conversation. I just hope they get DH's metabolism.

I know how you feel. My parents were really tough on me when I was a. "tween" due to being a little bit bigger, all it did was give me an eating disorder by 15 (Eating disorders do not help your metabolism by the way.) i usually eat pretty well, a lot of salads, fruits, and small portions. I have a bad relationship with food in that I will often not eat and my body ends up in "starvation mode". I think I have just convinced myself I don't need it!

merrileekate · January 2012

LegalBritt and Therickson - that just sucks. I am so sorry. While I think parents should take responsibility for their kids' eating habits and activity levels, taking it to the extreme of being critical is SO wrong. I never struggled with my weight until I was an adult and dealing with hormone imbalances, but when I was a young teen, my mom would say things like "don't wear that, or you'll look like a stuffed sausage". Now that I am a little heavier, every.single.time she sees me she makes some comment about my weight. I try to let it go and remind myself that I am eating just as healthfully as she is (most of the time) and I lift heavy weights and run half marathons. I'm doing what I can. But it still sucks hearing it from my mom.

merrileekate · January 2012

karimychel:

I don't like those ads. It's hard for me to look at them - my little brother has always been obese. And his obesity isn't necessarily due to what my parents fed him, because there are 3 of us and we all ate the same thing, and he was way more active than I was as a kid.

A lot of times children have underlying factors that only the family and doctors know and the outside world doesn't. My little brother was pumped full of meds to keep him alive more than once and a lot of the side effects to them included gaining weight. I love him dearly, no matter what his weight is.

It irks me to no end that every time someone sees a heavy child they automatically think the kid is eating McDonalads for every meal and that they have horrible parents.

Sadly, there are a lot of people like your brother, who've struggled with health issues at an earlier age than anyone EVER should. Knowing this, I don't want to make blanket judgments when I see a heavy kid. I hope I didn't come across this way earlier. Your brother is lucky to have a family that accepts him unconditionally regardless of the weight - critical parents/siblings would be a horrible situation for him.

What gets me are parents like the one described in this article, who will just give their kids junk "because s/he wants it" and then are shocked that their child's diabetes could be linked to what they eat. But whether the obesity is linked to the family's poor eating and exercise habits or the child's health problems, they shouldn't be labelled the "fat kid" like in these ads. It's not the kid's fault.

jennlin · January 2012

MerrileeKate:
LegalBritt and Therickson - that just sucks. I am so sorry. While I think parents should take responsibility for their kids' eating habits and activity levels, taking it to the extreme of being critical is SO wrong. I never struggled with my weight until I was an adult and dealing with hormone imbalances, but when I was a young teen, my mom would say things like "don't wear that, or you'll look like a stuffed sausage". Now that I am a little heavier, every.single.time she sees me she makes some comment about my weight. I try to let it go and remind myself that I am eating just as healthfully as she is (most of the time) and I lift heavy weights and run half marathons. I'm doing what I can. But it still sucks hearing it from my mom.

my mom makes the same "stuffed sausage" comment about me "currently" (currently being before KTFU). it's hard to ignore, and like therickson, i had various eating disorders as a teenager and young adult. i've gone up and down in weight throughout my "developing" years..anywhere from "slightly underweight" to "very overweight"...

sarack · January 2012

That is funny.. because I think that when people see me, even at this age, they think, how that girl probably just stuffs herself all the time. I hate to eat anything bad in public for fear people think these things about me.. BUT, on the otherhand, I realize, even big people need to eat.

I still don't think these ads will work, I just think doctors should intervene earlier so if the problem can be resolved at an early age.

jennlin · January 2012

LegalBritt:
I always got "You have such a beautiful face. If only you would lose some weight you would be such a stunner."

THIS!!!! OMG! when i was in my late teens, i did beauty pageants, and my uncle was friends with somebody who oversaw one of the competitions.....and the lady asked my uncle "what happened to your niece? she looks so pretty in the picture, you didn't mention she was heavy". this was hard to hear when you are 18....or any age, really.

dreamwinds · January 2012

LegalBritt:

I am so so ashamed of my body when I gain weight...like right now. I can't even enoy being pregnant because I want to cry and my face turns beet red when I see myself in the mirror or in photographs. It's awful. I wish I could be like other larger girls who just seem to be so confident but I can't because my family ingrained in me from a very young age that fat people disgusting. It's not bad enough where I would ever have an eating disorder but it still tortures my mind all of the time.

If we have a girl I'm going to read a lot about the right way to approach this topic so I don't scar my daughter. I hope we have sons. It seems like boys who are a little over weight aren't as effected as girls.

It's interesting reading all these cause I've seen a lot of your wedding photos and think you all are stunning, regardless of weight so when legalbritt said she can't look at herself in photos or the mirror it really jives.

Some days, I look in the mirror and I can live with what I see and other days I just feel so fat and bloated I want to just crawl back into bed and cry.

But because when I see your photos, I think you all look great, it's weird that you feel the same way I do.

I'm the tubbiest in my family and the shortest. My entire family can eat whatever they want, whenever they want, and not gain weight. If I eat like they do, I gain weight. It's maddening. (Of course, I married a guy who, no matter how much he eats will always weigh less than me :P)

I hope our kids get his metabolism cause struggling with eating and weight is no fun.

amandasw · January 2012

sarack:

I still don't think these ads will work, I just think doctors should intervene earlier so if the problem can be resolved at an early age.

I think the problem is that people don't really listen to Dr.s (countless times my H has been with family Drs and every year they tell the patient "stop X and do Y" and every year the patient comes back and says "I don't feel good"... rinse, repeat) and so people are trying to figure out if there is some sort of ad campaign that can change the way people think. I don't think this one is really going to be particularly effective, but I do like the one with the mom saying "all kids like junk food" etc. I'm sure there are parents with that mentality who need a wake-up call.

jennuinne · January 2012

I feel Legalbrit & Sarack. My parents divorced when I was 5 and my parents had two different ways of dealing with this. Growing up I was never "fat," but I wasn't skinny either. I always thought of myself as fat or chubby, but in reality I was in a totally normal range until probably the end of high school. In law school is when I really gained an unhealthy amount of weight. But, I think I've always had an issue with food and body image, in large part from my parents.

Dad:

My dad's side of the family mostly all have weight issues and my dad would make hamberhelper and other cheap, bad food and junk food was normal. Although, he did encourage sports and activities. He would say to exercise because I needed to watch my weight, but not in a mean way.

Mom:

My mom has always been very thin. However, she was and is always on a diet and complaining about how "fat" she is. During my life she's been between a size 2 and 8, maybe 105-130 pounds. She thought she was being "helpful" and still does. She made mostly healthy food, but would always say things like you have such a pretty face, you just need to lose a few pounds. She would comment on my weight and hers constantly, offer fad diets, etc. One thing I remember is that she told me that fat cells only are created during certain times in your life, like puberty and pregnancy, so (when I was 11ish) she would say I still have time to get things under control. So, when I started my period I was scared to tell her b/c "it was too late." She doesn't know this and would be horrified to know, but I definitely do not repeat these mistakes w/ my kids. I want to focus on healthy eating and exercwant ise to be "healthy" not skinny and show by my example -- meaning be healthy and NOT obsess about weight and call myself fat all the time.

jennuinne · January 2012

LegalBritt:
jennuinne:

One thing I remember is that she told me that fat cells only are created during certain times in your life, like puberty and pregnancy, so (when I was 11ish) she would say I still have time to get things under control. So, when I started my period I was scared to tell her b/c "it was too late."

OMG my Mom told me this all the time! I didn't know about pregnancy though. Frack. Now I'm freaking out. More fat cells!

Sorry. : )

PurposelyVague · January 2012

I hope that the ads help and I have no problem with them airing. I think that increasingly childhood obesity is becoming an accepted norm because it is so prevalent, especially in some parts of the country.

I realize that some children may have a predisposition to being overweight, however the rate at which the numbers of children with this problem and other weight related health issues is increasing is frightening, and I do think heavily related to societal behaviors. Kids these days are eating worse and exercising less. School lunches aren't even nutritious. Even foods that some parents may think are okay, if prepackaged could be loaded with preservatives and artificial ingredients that we don't totally know the effects of, because they have only been around for 50 years or less.

I hope that by publicly acknowledging the problem, it will be the first step that some ppl need to start on the road to healthier living.

MiniSteph · January 2012

I agree with Jenn, it makes me sad. Though I do think it will work, but only a little. Not enough to really keep it going.

cheryl2006 · January 2012

It's such a touchy subject, but in general I think most people have learned to think of an overweight body as being the norm. I know when I see someone who is probably 20 pounds overweight I don't think they are overweight because I'm comparing to them 50 + pounds overweight. I am sympathetic for the families in the ads. I admire them for acknowledging there is a problem and trying to encourage other people to change their perspective. It's difficult to see such blunt ads, but I do hope it helps people.

I just checked out the website and think it's user friendly. It's very simple and has straight forward tips for parents. It would be nice if some of the ads included some of the tips and not just the statistics. I believe most people will shut down and ignore the ads as a defense mechanism.

I've never been a healthy weight as an adult (or even as a child). At my highest adult weight I was at least 55 pounds overweight. Now I'm about 30 pounds overweight. Honestly, I sort of preferred being 55 pounds overweight from a public perspective because at least it was obvious I was fat. Now I just look either pregnant or at the point where people would think I'm letting go of myself. I've slowly lost 25 pounds over the last 2 years and been really proud of myself for not getting too caught up in my body image. But now I realize that I'm in this odd in between weight/body and I need to lose at least another 10-15 before I start to feel a bit better.

I was also always larger as a child. I strongly believe it had to do with what I ate. I was never good at portion control. In fact, I know my parents hid food from me sometimes and I think that negatively impacted me for years. It made me eat more of what they didn't hide from me. I did play sports, but my parents didn't participate in any physical activities as a hobby, so I watched them exercise only when they wanted to lose weight. I think I learned some bad habits from them and I'm starting to overcome those habits. Also I'm trying to learn to stop blaming how I was raised as the cause of what I do now.

childhood obesity

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