Fat and Children

In the wake of my hopeful optimism about Huge comes a link in my e-mail that counters all of that joy.

But it wasn't some let down about Huge. Instead, it was a link to the site for the new show on the Style Network called Too Fat for Fifteen: Fighting Back, a reality show about teenagers trying to lose weight at a fat camp called Wellspring Academy (a giant, international weight loss school chain, apparently). The video posted in the blog doesn't seem to be working, but I can imagine how it's going to go based on the tagline, "Being fifteen is hard enough. It shouldn't be life and death," which is placed over the shoulder of a faceless fat girl viewed from the back. It's next to a picture put in for flare, good measure, or simplistic illustration, since there's no link or text attached, of fat kids' legs. Naturally, they have centered the darker-skinned kid who is seemingly bustin out his/her crapily made shoes. Y'all didn't know it was a shoe-bustin epidemic, did you? Fear, my friends, the busting of the shoes. Too fat for footwear????  Or maybe it's supposed to illustrate the unbearable, ankle-busting weight of obesity.  Anyway, we get the point.

The website resources include a "Teen BMI Calculator," an article entitled "Effects of Childhood Obesity," and another called, "Think YOU are ready to get fit?" The show debuts August 9th.

From a minor Google search, this seems to be based on a New Zealand documentary about a fat girl at a similar Wellspring Academy.

I am pretty sure I remember a few people being confused and thinking Huge was a reality show; and I was relieved to think/say, "No, no, no it's not that"--in the back of my mind thinking, "Who would do that?!?" Style network, my friends, and Wellspring Academy, would exploit kids in such a way...you know, for fun and profit!

Just what we need, a Biggest Loser for kids. My optimism for this week is officially blown.


PS--What are they "fighting back"? Love how they make it sound empowering.

I know many of you have been following the Fed Up With Lunch blog by anonymous teacher Mrs. Q. The original idea of the project was to eat school lunch with the kids every day and document the foods that were offered, but the site has turned into a bit of a phenomenon, and, like the Jamie Oliver business, is making people really start to think about the nature of the food we are providing to our kids. Anyway, Mrs. Q recently posted an entry about obesity that I found interesting. It sounds like she already has some fat acceptance-versed commenters, but I still think it's a good opportunity for us to participate in a discussion about fat kids and fat adults from the perspective of trying to provide better nutrition overall. So have a look and join in, if you're so inclined.

Check out this article on Japanese attitudes towards weight. I feel almost like the author is saying "Gee, if Japanese women can lose weight and keep it off, what's wrong with Americans?"
They say the rates of anorexia and bulimia aren't any higher over there than they are here, but I have to wonder if that's because the idea of an average-sized woman not eating because she wants to be thinner is so widely accepted as normal. Certainly the act of specifically not eating or eating only vegetables when you are hungry for more is something of a disorder, whether it's officially anorexia or not.
Anyone have any other ideas about what might cause the disparity between our attitudes toward weight and that of Japanese women?

This video over at ABC.com just makes me crazy. Dr. Richard Besser is attempting to give advice to a parent on how to deal with her eleven-year-old child sneaking food and instead of addressing the underlying causes and mentioning the potential for eating disorders, he recommends that the parent sit down with his or her kid and draw up a contract for changing her behavior. This is horrible, terrible advice, and I know because it's what my parents did with me. Did I mention I weigh around 400 pounds now?

Here's the thing: a child is not an adult. There's a reason we don't let children sign contracts, and it's because they're busy making mistakes and dropping the ball and acting on impulse...things that aren't really conducive to setting a goal and following it through. Why would you want to put your child in a position where she is likely to fail over and over? Furthermore, Dr. Besser makes a fuss about how the parents shouldn't be the food police, but that's the exact relationship you are fostering with this contract business, because someone has to be the enforcer and make sure the terms of the contract are being followed. Even if you're not being 'the food police', per se, you're at least being the food prosecutor. Is that really better? The bottom line is that it enforces the adversarial relationship that is already developing because she clearly feels like she has to hide her eating from you.

I swear, that letter could have been written by my parents. The part about "she wants to lose weight", is especially accurate because when I was a kid all I wanted in the world was to make my parents happy,and it was abundantly clear that all they wanted was for me to be thin. I have no doubt that there were loving reasons behind it, like wanting me to fit in socially, but all their campaign did was drive a wedge between us and eff up my relationship with food and exercise.

Here's the advice I wish my parents had gotten when I was a kid sneaking food into my room: listen to your daughter. Talk to her about what's going on and try to figure out what might be bothering her. Hug her...a lot. Remind her that you love her no matter what, and that you will always be there for her. That kind of thing will go a long, long way. In the end, the most important thing to remember is that your job here is about providing unconditional love and support. Leave the contracts out of it.

{Promoted from the forums - CarrieP}

The BBC is reporting that a group of Cambridge researchers have discovered a genetic factor common to a number of children and teens labelled as 'severely obese'. They also seem to have identified further links between these 'copy number variants' and the regulation of blood sugar levels and appetite, concerns frequently discussed over the years on these very boards (far be it for me to suggest that people in the FA movement have long known what others have persistently refused even to attempt to demonstrate). Worryingly, several of the study's young participants had already been placed on local authority child protection registers 'on the assumption that their parents were deliberately overfeeding them'; the research findings are apparently sufficiently robust that those participants who were previously slated for intervention or removal by the social services have now been deleted from the database and their parents presumably exonerated.

I give this news a cautious welcome, for the 'may' of the headline is not by any means a 'will' and the enormous moral panic and incessant misinformation of the last decade have left us with a metaphorical supertanker of ignorance and prejudice to stop and turn around before the social work and child health professions begin to realise that a child's size may be as natural as their height and entirely unrelated to parental immorality, abuse or neglect. After all, last month's effective admission by a major obesity research institute that their initial apocalyptic predictions, on which much of the policy and media overreaction seen since in the UK have been based, were way off the mark has so far failed to have much by way impact on those policy makers and the government approach to the 'issue' and indeed was quickly shunted from the front pages.

However it is an important step forward which I am hoping that, given the esteem in which the University of Cambridge is held, will maybe encourage more researchers to break from the consensus and have the courage to challenge the assumptions about over-eating and lack of exercise (and perhaps even the scale of the 'epidemic' itself) without fear of censure and dismissal. Most importantly, tonight maybe Britain's fat children and their entirely blameless parents can sleep that little bit easier in their beds as a result of this good work by Dr. Farooqi and her team. I hope that David Rogers, the Local Government Association public health spokesman who called for a nationwide policy of taking obese children into care a couple of years back, sees this and eats his words, and that lawyers acting for the Dundee family, whose teenage son and daughter remain in the hands of the local authority, are paying attention.

ETA: more about the story here, from AOL via the NAAFA blog (whatever you do, don't read the comments on the AOL link!).

Look at this poor woman. Doesn't it look like maybe she needs a big ol' fat hug? I concur.

The thing I like about MeMe Roth is that she is such an easy target. She wears her hatred and her bigotry on her sleeve, has no good advice to give, and 99% of the time comes across to even fat-phobic reporters as bat sh*t crazypants. Aside from the fact that she is all about the fat hatred, there are two things I don't like about MeMe:

1. She gets a lot of attention from the media for her anti-fat blather
2. I am starting to really feel sorry for her

I mean, how could you not? She's so delusional! She insists she's not anorexic, in fact says she's "never been on a diet", but then in the next breath talks about how she doesn't eat breakfast, forces herself to work out before eating during the day, and finally admits that, the day of the interview, which occurred at 3:30 PM, she hadn't eaten at all! Sounds like disordered eating to me.

The article says her (fat) family finds her crusade to be hurtful, so I can imagine that family get-togethers are probably strained and uncomfortable for everyone involved. On second thought, I really feel sorry for her kids. MeMe comes across as so cold and controlled that I can't imagine she's all that warm of a mom. Not to mention what hell it must be to grow up in a house where no one eats. I hope I'm wrong about that, but I bet I'm not.

She just seems so intensely unhappy, so rigid, so devoid of joy that I can't help but feel empathy about the lifetime of hurtful experiences she must have gone through to get to this place. That woman does NOT like herself. Not even a little bit. Sure, I absolutely hate everything she stands for and most of the time I really wish she would just stuff a sock in it, but the sad little fat girl inside me recognizes that the sad little fat girl inside her really just needs some love. I hope one day she finally gets it.

Thanks Jenny!

Hey folks! withoutscene gave me a heads up to this article over at Sociological Images regarding fat camp. I had some experiences with fat camp when I was younger so I figured I'd post a comment:

I went to fat camp for three years in my mid-teens. I enjoyed being there a whole lot more than I enjoyed being in the outside world but there was definitely a hierarchy of fatness and there was plenty of fat shaming and unhealthy food behavior perpetuated. The camp I went to inexplicably also allowed girls with restricting eating disorders to attend, only they had to come up to the kitchen and eat extra snacks before bed to keep their calorie count up. I can imagine being in an environment where everyone is pushing eating less and exercising more could be a serious triggering thing for an anorexic or bulimic person.

My camp was pretty much the same as the previous commenter described, low calorie meals and exercise all day long. I definitely lost weight by the end of the summer and was happy about it because my parents were happy, but once I got back to reality the weight came right back on and it was back to the dysfunctional power struggle between my parents and my fat. They ended up sending me back two more summers but finally we just couldn’t afford it anymore. It’s not a cheap way to spend a summer, which is another sociological consideration because most of the kids there had pretty rich parents.

So. I can’t speak for every kid who has had a fat camp experience, but I knew I was there because my parents thought there was something wrong with me that needed to be fixed. It was not just a fun time. To an extent it felt like camp was my atonement for not fitting the mold. The fact that I enjoyed interacting with other kids like me at camp didn’t really ever make up for that.

As I was writing I became curious about the rest of the fat community out there. Did you go to fat camp? Were your experiences similar to mine or totally different? Do you think your experiences shaped you in a positive or negative way? If you never went to fat camp, did you ever want to? Other thoughts?

I went to Kingsmont, by the way. Anyone else?