Diary of a Fat Kid

This article depressed the crap out of me.  A three year old asking how many calories are in her turkey sandwich?  Way to prepare your child for a lifetime of paranoid and obsession with her weight.

I really do think dealing with childhood obesity should depend on the personality of the kid.  I've said before that I have crazy perfectionist qualities.  In fourth grade, when I started to gain weight and people started to gently (and not so gently) point it out, I was absolutely devastated.  To have this flaw just out there for all the world to see was too much for my type-A little brain to handle.  I'd go home from school and cry and beg my mom to write letters getting me out of gym.  It was obvious that this was a problem.  I still don't know what a good solution would have been.

My parents tried everything, and I know that it was with the best intentions.  We went to two different nutritionists, an eating disorder program, and a psychologist.  They promised me a pool, vacations, new bedroom furniture and Game Boys if I could lose weight.  I went on special diets and they locked junk food up to prevent me from binging on it.  I was involved (and awful) in every sport my grammar school offered.  Still, my weight went up and I became harder and harder on myself.  Truly the definition of the vicious cycle.

That picture above makes me so sad, because I remember the day it was taken and I remember being so down because I felt like a fat cow.  Now I look at it and that just blows me away.  As an adult, I've watched as a few of my young cousins got a little chunky right around fourth grade, just like I did.  It seems like it was just a precursor to puberty and when that finally hit, they grew into their weight.  Part of me wonders that if such a big deal wasn't made about my weight that this problem would have dealt with itself.

I do know that I was miserable and dealing with the weight issue made it worse.  If my school had started a program about childhood obesity, I would have felt singled out and that would have made it worse.  At that age, I just wanted to be like everyone else, and I knew most sixth graders weren't going to dietitians and psychologists, so none of that ended up being very helpful at all.

Solutions?  I don't know.  I don't think freaking out about your child getting a little chunky is helpful.  Maybe head out as a family on walks on a daily basis or something?  Overhaul the diets of the whole family instead of the child, but in subtle ways so the little chunky kid doesn't feel like he or she killed dessert for the rest of the family?  I don't have children and when I think of issues like this, I am not sure I want to have them.  Being a parent seems like the hardest job in the world, and it's not fair that the kids they try to do their best with end up being their harshest critics.

It seems like letting go of trying to be perfect and just trying to be myself helped a lot for me, but it took twenty years of counting calories and feeling guilty about wanting ice cream to do it.  Teaching your kid about calories at three?  That seems like setting her up for an eating disorder to me.

Do any of you guys have any better ideas on how to deal with this issue or stories about what worked for you?  It's still a little hard for me to talk about being a fat kid, which shows how long those wounds take to heal, I suppose, but it's a subject that is really close to my heart.