Kevin1708
Century Club
Mums are normalising fatness by giving kids the wrong message.
by Lowri Turner, Western Mail ~ Apr 15 2011
IT’S OFFICIAL – as a nation, we’re obsessed with our weight. I looked through just one of yesterday’s newspapers and there were five completely separate stories about food, health and obesity. Not even Katie Price manages that mid-divorce.
First, a new report out this week saying that weight-loss ops, of the sort used by Fern Britton and Vanessa Feltz to shrink their formerly substantial muffin tops, actually save the NHS money. Admittedly, the author of this piece of research is the National Bariatric Surgery Registry – I bet they don’t serve crispy pork belly at their annual knees up! – so it’s in their interests to promote stomach stapling and the like.
Still, the £8,000 average cost is said to be recouped by health trusts in just three years. Perhaps beleaguered Health Secretary Andrew Lansley should mount a mass gastric bypass campaign. He could balance the NHS budget and improve his popularity with at least some of his voters by giving them a size eight figure in one fell swoop.
Next up in my foray into health news, by way of a snap of post-diet Fern Britton doing the splits, was more grim news that girls’ waistlines have gone up some three or four inches in 30 years. Then we could read all about “mirror phobia”. A survey of 1,200 women over 50 found that most avoided mirrors because they didn’t like what they saw. Only women over 50?
The overall picture is that we are getting fatter, we hate our bodies and then, in desperation, we are queuing up to go under the surgeon’s knife. We used to laugh at fat Americans. We are now them.
The obvious answer is to blame parents in general and mums in particular. The new stats on girls’ waistlines are an especially strong indictment of maternal feeding. And some mums clearly need a good shake.
I was on the bus this week behind a teenage mum and her four year-old daughter. The child was bright as a button, but her mum barely spoke to her. She couldn’t as she was wearing huge headphones so she could listen to her iPod and ignore her own child. Instead, she handed the poor little tyke a bottle of cola; 10 years and Evans will have another customer.
Most of us try to do better. While I have inflicted “healthy” food on my two sons with varied success, I am particularly aware with my daughter of the need to balance this with the desire to avoid her becoming obsessed with her weight or how she looks. The problem is that the relationship between girls, women and weight is an increasingly difficult one.
I once interviewed a doctor who worked with very overweight children and he said that he had never met an obese child who did not have an obese mum. Genetics play a part, but in the main, it’s about learned behaviour.
We want our girls to have confidence, to be proud of their bodies, however they look. But the result is that we are normalising fatness. It is now commonplace to see a slimmish teenage boy with a girlfriend who is three times his size. God forbid these lads ever have to try to haul their sack-of-potatoes girlfriends over a threshold. They’ll need a chiropractor on standby.
I realise that this may sound harsh. But I write as someone who was a fat teen herself and am but a couple of muffins away from going back there.
The past five years has been dominated by hysteria over size zero, but the real issue is that increasing numbers of younger women are eating too much, not too little. When I was a weeble-shaped teen, I could only buy clothes in horrible specialist shops. These days, plus-sized clothes are everywhere. We have to ask ourselves, is being fatter making today’s young women happy? It seems not.
Yet another study out in the past month revealed that 60% of teenage girls would give up a year of their lives for the perfect body.
How sad, that our daughters think so little of themselves that they would shorten their own lives for longer legs or a flatter tummy. No-one can deliver the former, but it might be useful to gently point out that, with a bit of effort, they could move closer to their ideal on the latter.
Mums should worry less about raising their teen daughters’ self-esteem and suggest a few more circuits of the local park and a few less alcopops might do the trick instead.
See : Mums are normalising fatness by giving kids the wrong message - Bala - Local news - News - Daily Post North Wales
by Lowri Turner, Western Mail ~ Apr 15 2011
IT’S OFFICIAL – as a nation, we’re obsessed with our weight. I looked through just one of yesterday’s newspapers and there were five completely separate stories about food, health and obesity. Not even Katie Price manages that mid-divorce.
First, a new report out this week saying that weight-loss ops, of the sort used by Fern Britton and Vanessa Feltz to shrink their formerly substantial muffin tops, actually save the NHS money. Admittedly, the author of this piece of research is the National Bariatric Surgery Registry – I bet they don’t serve crispy pork belly at their annual knees up! – so it’s in their interests to promote stomach stapling and the like.
Still, the £8,000 average cost is said to be recouped by health trusts in just three years. Perhaps beleaguered Health Secretary Andrew Lansley should mount a mass gastric bypass campaign. He could balance the NHS budget and improve his popularity with at least some of his voters by giving them a size eight figure in one fell swoop.
Next up in my foray into health news, by way of a snap of post-diet Fern Britton doing the splits, was more grim news that girls’ waistlines have gone up some three or four inches in 30 years. Then we could read all about “mirror phobia”. A survey of 1,200 women over 50 found that most avoided mirrors because they didn’t like what they saw. Only women over 50?
The overall picture is that we are getting fatter, we hate our bodies and then, in desperation, we are queuing up to go under the surgeon’s knife. We used to laugh at fat Americans. We are now them.
The obvious answer is to blame parents in general and mums in particular. The new stats on girls’ waistlines are an especially strong indictment of maternal feeding. And some mums clearly need a good shake.
I was on the bus this week behind a teenage mum and her four year-old daughter. The child was bright as a button, but her mum barely spoke to her. She couldn’t as she was wearing huge headphones so she could listen to her iPod and ignore her own child. Instead, she handed the poor little tyke a bottle of cola; 10 years and Evans will have another customer.
Most of us try to do better. While I have inflicted “healthy” food on my two sons with varied success, I am particularly aware with my daughter of the need to balance this with the desire to avoid her becoming obsessed with her weight or how she looks. The problem is that the relationship between girls, women and weight is an increasingly difficult one.
I once interviewed a doctor who worked with very overweight children and he said that he had never met an obese child who did not have an obese mum. Genetics play a part, but in the main, it’s about learned behaviour.
We want our girls to have confidence, to be proud of their bodies, however they look. But the result is that we are normalising fatness. It is now commonplace to see a slimmish teenage boy with a girlfriend who is three times his size. God forbid these lads ever have to try to haul their sack-of-potatoes girlfriends over a threshold. They’ll need a chiropractor on standby.
I realise that this may sound harsh. But I write as someone who was a fat teen herself and am but a couple of muffins away from going back there.
The past five years has been dominated by hysteria over size zero, but the real issue is that increasing numbers of younger women are eating too much, not too little. When I was a weeble-shaped teen, I could only buy clothes in horrible specialist shops. These days, plus-sized clothes are everywhere. We have to ask ourselves, is being fatter making today’s young women happy? It seems not.
Yet another study out in the past month revealed that 60% of teenage girls would give up a year of their lives for the perfect body.
How sad, that our daughters think so little of themselves that they would shorten their own lives for longer legs or a flatter tummy. No-one can deliver the former, but it might be useful to gently point out that, with a bit of effort, they could move closer to their ideal on the latter.
Mums should worry less about raising their teen daughters’ self-esteem and suggest a few more circuits of the local park and a few less alcopops might do the trick instead.
See : Mums are normalising fatness by giving kids the wrong message - Bala - Local news - News - Daily Post North Wales
