Yeah, you read this and then tell me it’s just about “being healthy” and not about fat being hated in our society. You tell me that this plan which advocates medication and SURGERY for kids who don’t lose (maintaining isn’t good enough, this is about weight loss) enough weight to fit into an arbitrary BMI (which is a notoriously shitty way to judge body composition, especially for muscular people and DEVELOPING CHILDREN) category is just about making sure kids are healthy. You tell me that this is not about people panicking because OMG BEING FAT IS THE WORST THING EVER! Read this summary and tell me this isn’t one statement that should never be coming from a medical group: The magnitude of the obesity epidemic is too great to wait for evidence-based guidelines before increasing efforts focused on prevention and intervention.
Oh, noes! People are fat and so are their children! Rather than figure out WHY or what sort of long-term effects putting children as young as TWO YEARS OLD on highly restricted calorie diets might have, let’s just go ahead and take children away from their parents if they don’t comply with this plan!
I’m all for body autonomy. You can do whatever you want with your body because I respect your right as a human being to have free will and be self-regulated. I am not going to tell you, as an adult, not to go on a diet or pursue whatever it is that will make you happy with your body. I might not want to be involved in your diet talk, but I’m not here to tell you not to do it, either.
But if you want to put your goddamn kid on a highly restricted diet and teach them about shame and body-hatred and why they are bad people because they do not meet the useless numbers on the BMI chart? You want to tell your kid s/he is lying to you about what they ate because otherwise they’d be losing weight? We’re going to have a serious problem. And don’t try to placate me with “well, it’s medically supervised and the doctor says it is okay!” because, honestly? That doesn’t generally mean shit. I know there are some kids and some diets that work and there is a genuine and real health issue going on. That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about kids who play outside and run around and eat well and are fat – not even that fat, if you look at the percentiles on the BMI and compare them to real people – anyway. I’m talking about kids who are going to be given a surgery that has a 1 in 100-200 (it’s hard to come by these numbers as they are highly protected so there are two different common statistics) mortality rate.
That means 1 out of every 1-200 people who have this surgery DIE as a result. DIE. They were alive and fat. Then they were dead. Being not fat was worth the risk of being DEAD. And these are adults, making adult decisions. You want to tell me it’s okay to put your kid on the table when NO LONG TERM STUDIES regarding how it affects kids have even been conceived of? No studies regarding mortality rate. No studies that will even tell you about quality of life for these kids AFTER the surgery is performed.
This is ridiculous. And “we must take care of the children” doesn’t justify this. The government is not our nursemaid – they don’t belong in our bedrooms, in our uteruses, in our kids’ lunchboxes determining whether or not they get to eat a carrot stick or a celery stick today. You think it’s shameful that your neighbors’ kids are fat? I don’t care! You are welcome to think that til the cows (metaphorically speaking) come home. But you don’t get to go over there and tell them how to raise their kids because a) you don’t know HOW they are raising their kids and b) being a fat kid is not the same as being an abused kid.
Go on. Tell me our culture is just concerned about health and that this has nothing to do with the fat=bad equation that fat people have just made up to make themselves feel better because people don’t like them.
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*sputters*
Yes, I want to make sure to screw up my daughters have a screwed up metabolism and body image, just like me.
let’s just go ahead and take children away from their parents if they don’t comply with this plan!
And of course the scariest part is the very real possibility that parents who DO comply with this plan will still be punished if their kids remain fat because of, oh, one of THE 80 KABILLION OTHER REASONS WHY PEOPLE ARE FAT BESIDES EATING TOO MUCH AND NOT EXERCISING.
And of the kids they take away from their parents… where exactly do they plan on putting them? Foster care? Orphanages? Fat camps? Boarding schools for fat kids?
And all of the already overworked social workers will now have to put fat kids in the same category as children who actually ARE being abused.
Fucking around with a growing child’s metabolism is almost a set in stone way to guarantee health problems later on in life.
I’m so mad about this i could spit.
Augh! I am going to link to this from my LJ, if that’s cool.
being a fat kid is not the same as being an abused kid.
But being a kid on a forcible diet often is. Undernourishment, shaming, insult, learned helplessness… and that’s before you even get to the point where people start considering forcing their children to submit to a dangerous and serious medical procedure. We would never condone, much less encourage, this kind of mistreatment for any other physical infraction (shortness is closest — here, have an injection in your stomach! — but not nearly so widespread and not medically mandated).
One of the things that upsets me most is when people say “but my child wants this, s/he hates being fat.” Well, of COURSE. Your child wants to be loved and treated well. If that’s contingent on being thin, he or she will absolutely go under the knife.
I should point out that I meant mistreatment of children based on height is less widespread, not shortness itself!
All I can think to say is a-fucking-men. Great job of pulling all these issues together. I just wish I had a plan of action to put all my outrage to use.
Lately I’ve been reading Shakey, Neil Young’s authorized biography. In it, Young’s mother said that when Neil (b. 1945) was very young, he was a big eater and very fat, “as wide as he was high.” Then, when he was 6, along came the Canadian polio epidemic, which confined him to bed for almost a year and wasted his body considerably — made him look, in the words of his mother, “like hell on the highway, skin and bones. He never got fat again.”
Reading that, I had to wonder how many people would trade the return of polio for fewer fat people. Probably way the hell too many.
I’m so angry about this I can’t even put words to it. I am however, somewhat glad to see I’m not the only one completely horrified and outraged by this.
as a pregnant woman who will most likely have a fat kid, stuff like this scares the hell out of me. i was fat all through childhood (still am!) and my parents were great parents. i played soccer and hockey and was a total “outdoors” kid – always running around with (and keeping up with) the other kids in my neighbourhood, our family ate well and i wasn’t abused or neglected in any way… but guess what? STILL FAT. i plan to raise my kid the same way and it scares the hell out of me that i could be seen as a shitty parent or even risk having them taken away from me for doing so. i mean, i know that it is very unlikely that the canadian government would ever get on board with crap like this, but the way people are freaking out about the so-called “obesity epidemic” and with the idiotic anti-obesity campaigns that a lot of governments are running right now, i can’t really rule it out. ugh.
My mother (now in her 70s) has always been thin.
She’s also dieted, taken diet pills, monitored her food intake (and her children’s) with an almost hysterical fervor for Her. Entire. Life.
Swear to Ishtar, I have not one solitary memory of my mother just plain being hungry and eating some damn food without counting calories/fat grams/carbs/whatever, talking about how ‘naughty’ she was to be eating this food item/so much/at this time of day. On and on and on.
In other words she has a Bog Standard female relationship with food and her body- she’s nuts on the subject. And she made my sister and I nuts too. It’s taken me decades to get even parts of that nuttiness out of my head.
That? That’s a ‘won’t someone think of the chillrunnnn1?!’ issue, which is being totally ignored in favor of shaming fat kids and scaring their parents.
I’m afraid I have nothing to offer but my empathy and similar gibbering rage. That quote about not waiting for evidence-based guidelines before prevention and intervention positively chills my blood. I’m telling you we’re mere steps away from the Thought Police driving dumper trucks through the streets to scoop up all the fat people and turn them into Soylent Green as a groundbreaking solution to end world hunger.
Can’t we do something to educate these fuckwits?! Lord knows, if government hysteria is anything to go by, there must be more than enough of us. And so many of us are veterans of enforced childhood diet regimes – with all the body hatred, dysmorphia, buggered metabolisms, anxiety, guilt and compulsion around food to show for it. Not to mention we’re still fat and almost certainly fatter than we would have been had we not been taught to wage wore on our developing bodies. Surely we are all the evidence anybody needs to prove they’re on a hiding to nothing but mass neurosis. And entire continents full of mentally ill people ain’t going to be cheap to treat either.
Ugh. Sorry. That should be wage war on our developing bodies. I can’t spell at all when I’m cross.
This actually charts at about #2 in my Reasons I Don’t Want Kids List.
Things were bad enough when I was a fat, nerdy, painfully shy kid. There is no way I am going to make somebody go through what I went through — and probably worse, if this is the sort of programs being implemented these days.
Sick sick sick freaking morons! I say this every single day, but I can’t believe how stupid people are. I have kids myself, and I would almost dare someone to try to take them away from me just because they may get fat! I will go down swinging!! BLAH! People are so ignorant!!
I was a stick until about 3rd grade; then I got a bit pudgy, at least as such things are held. My grandmother started harping on my mom about my weight; my mom would sigh in disgust when she had to buy me jeans from the “hefty” section for summer camp and say in a Sever Voice “Well I guess I’ll have to tell your father about this.” And my ~dad~… don’t get me started on him.
When I hit puberty it was much worse. I grew up with a mental image of myself as a total blimp, like that chewing-gum girl from “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (only without the blue face). My parents were on me ~constantly~ about what I ate, how much activity I got, etc. And I was constantly told how “lazy” I was (even though I walked to and from school every day, carrying a ~tuba~ no less, and walked and rode my bike everywhere. It was a small town, all the kids did this.)
Yes, compared to most of my classmates I was heavier, and wasn’t (comparatively) good at sports, etc. But I was in summer marching band, still carrying that tuba (well, a sousaphone actually) and I had ~stamina~.
So guess what — when I hit my late teens-early 20’s, I ~did~ grow to fit my mental image. I ~am~ fat, by ~any~ standard. I look back at pictures of me in late grade school thru mid high school, and especially in Jr High when I got the most of those “you’re FAT FAT FAT!” messages, and geez, I was ~thin~. My clothes were too tight not because of my friggin weight, but because my mom continually bought clothes a size too small, or else I had to wear clothes long after I outgrew them.
If those years of my life were transplanted to now, I’d be one of those kids on the cutting table, no doubt. And I’d be even more screwed up than I am now.
IBTP.
Waitaminnit… I’m wrong! About the athletic thing, that is. I don’t know why I keep forgetting this, but I was part of the summer swim team for six or so years, all through the elementary school grades. (All the towns across the whole SE part of the state had summer swim teams… the competitions were a Really Big Deal.) And while I wasn’t a star, I accumulated quite the collection of ribbons, even many red and blue ones. A surprising amount of those, I remember realizing when I was paging through my old scrapbooks back in my college days.