Child Anti-Obesity Education: the wrong approach

When I tell people about my blog, this is the most common response that I get:

Really?  Don't you believe that people should be healthy?

Most people who have lived on Planet Ruthless Beauty Gods their whole lives really believe that our society's current approach is the only, best way to get people to be healthy, may the Most Motivated woman win.  

Obviously, yes, I do believe in good health practices.  I happen to be a very health-conscious person.  Doing some kind of physical activity every day is essential not only to my physical well-being but to my sanity.  I cook for myself as frequently as possible, and am careful to make balanced meals for myself with plenty of protein, grains, veggies, and yes, fat.  Hell, I even like my kale raw (sometimes).

Of course, through this blog, I am working to make the point that being fat and being healthy are not at odds with each other.  If you read my posts, you've noticed this is more of a "Raise Your Consciousness and Don't be a Jerk" blog than a "Do this to be healthy" blog - seeing that you can find that information, uh, pretty much everywhere.

I am an advocate to all people who struggle with society's messages about fat, but I am specifically an ally to fat people because the ways in which the anti-fat stigma affects them are the most obvious.  And I strongly believe that in accepting and loving fat people's bodies and humanity, us non-fat people can learn to feel better about ourselves and all of the non-conforming features of our bodies.

(On a tangent, I appreciated that poster that was making the rounds on facebook with the pieces of fruit complaining about their bodies and the tagline that said, If only they knew, they had such sweet bodies, but I also think that's hands-down the creepiest thing I have ever heard.  Maybe it's the past tense?  I imagine a tall faceless man in a cloak, whispering that while smacking his lips together.)

And some people are both fat and unhealthy.  And while I encourage every one to take care of themselves, I understand that stigma and shame and hatred are utterly crippling, especially when all your medial information reinforces that you are a social problem and a freak.  And if I am not vested in that person, personally, I can write a blog post and tell people to stop laughing at her, but it's really none of my business.  

Also, it does not mean that her body is ugly.  

And it does not give me permission to exploit her in any number of ways that other people, the media, and medical professionals exploit her.

Just to remind you, this is the bare minimum of human decency.  

But then, the conversation shifts to our children.  And it gets even more personal.

Childhood obesity is a hot topic.  There have been several popular reality TV shows to raise our awareness on the topic, including Shaq's Big Challenge and Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.  Our much loved First Lady Michelle Obama is a champion of combatting childhood obesity.

What causes childhood obesity?  Nature or nurture?  In either case, the blame falls on the child's parents.  This view makes me cringe a little.  Parents already must accept responsibility for all their children's' imperfections.  Our society's view of what constitutes good health is privileged -- access to good food, green areas in which to play, safe areas to be outside, the availability of adult chaperones -- many people can't take these things for granted.

But if you're going to tell people to not be obese any more, Minnesota is doing it wrong.  You can't stigmatize the fat away.  It doesn't work.

The MN Blue Cross has been airing these commercials, targeted at parents who have a sudden wake-up call:

GAH.  Blogger is not finding these videos.  I'll see if I can upload them later.  To summarize, in one video, two boys in a fast food restaurant are bragging that their father can eat more.  One of the fathers comes to the table holding a tray straining under the weight of tons of food, looking down and feeling ashamed.  In another video, a fat woman is in the grocery store, wheeling around unhealthy groceries, and notices that her daughter is doing the same with her little cart.

The Atlantic ran an article on anti-obesity campaigns, highlighting findings from the Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity on American's attitudes towards various visible obesity slogans.  The study found

basically what was expected: the public craves positive reinforcement and rejects stigmatizing or otherwise negative messages. . .'The most positively rated were campaigns that focused on encouraging specific health behaviors or actions, like eating fruits and vegetables every day or engaging in physical activity' said lead author Rebecca Puhl, 'And the most motivating were the ones that made no mention of obesity or weight at all.'

Few studies have been done to correlate between well-received obesity slogans and better health practices.  This post is already far too long, so I'll leave it to you, readers: what do you think?

The BMI post

Hey!  Long time no write.  I've been working, cooking, and receiving a slew of impersonal mass apologies just in time for Yom Kippur.  Although, some one made the good point in my hippy-dippy non-denominational synagogue today that it's not necessarily a bad thing to "exercise your apology muscle" and remind yourself that you have a huge capacity to forgive.  And I think I understand forgiveness for misdeeds better than atonement for sins.  Jewish thought for the day.

Also - since I'm fasting - I'm more attuned to the idea of fat people being chided whenever they are spotted eating.  This morning, I was sitting next to a man who half-jokingly was telling us about how he will weigh himself for Weight Watcher's tonight before break fast.

He can joke, but there is a very real trend of a high incidence of eating disorders among fat people.  Eating disorders are not a new phenomenon in this culture.  There are many different types of mainstream medical professionals who work with eating disordered patients.  And yet all too many of these people have encouraged overweight patients to starve and purge themselves.

Because apparently, you can only have an eating disorder if you have a "normal" BMI.

It's hard to rally laypeople's attitudes around medical science.  But it sickens me, the number of licensed medical professionals that are complicit in favoring the BMI - a quick 19th century formula to determine the average weight proportional to height (according to this 2009 NPR report, in order to determine the allocation of resources to the population) over the urgent psychological/health care that these people really need.

And the BMI's own website is upfront about some of the its shortcomings, but in this society, where invoking the BMI has become a shorthand for determining the be-all end-all of a person's health, I thought it would be useful to talk about some widespread BMI misconceptions.  Namely,

The people with "obese" BMIs look like the headless fatties.

Blogger and fat activist Kate Harding founded the BMI project.  You can read her concise guest post on Shakesville.  To sum it up:




According to BMI, this woman is overweight.  She wears a size 4.

And compare these two women:



(Joy, 5'8", 224 lbs.), "obese with high risk of associated disease", and



(Fillyjonk, 5'7", 225 lbs., one inch shorter and one pound heavier), "obese with very high risk of associated disease".

Also, since BMI does not distinguish between relative bone, fat, and muscle density, then, according to the NPR report, "a person with strong, bones, good muscle tone, and low fat will have a high BMI."  I know I already made this point in my post about Cheryl Haworth, but these olympic athletes clearly have widely varying BMIs:

courtesy roundshape.wordpress.com

Okay, in the meantime, I enthusiastically refer you once more to the NPR report, remind you that our societ's blind hatred of fat often causes us to accept oversimplified explanations to justify that hatred, and advise you to be wary in the future when you hear about the BMI referenced as a health ideal.  Especially if a person who does not have an average BMI is creaking under the pressure of society and killing themselves with disordered eating habits to get there.

Feeding your mind, pt 2 - union edition

Readers,

I am diverging from my favorite/least favorite topic of body image to express my strong support for the striking teachers in Chicago.

credit New York Times

Any one who has spent any amount of time inside an urban public classroom can tell you that teachers and their administrations are severely underpaid.

Any one who has spent a month there can tell you that public school teachers have responsibilities that extend far beyond teaching.  Low-income children, with fewer community resources to address their needs, are not only underprepared for a day of learning, they look to the school to provide them with these resources.

Let me start by explaining what I mean by underprepared: maybe their homes are cramped or loud and they don't get enough sleep.  Or they do not get enough food at home and are hungry during the day.  Some have no one at home who has the time/the ability to help them with their schoolwork.  Or to provide them the discipline to complete it.

Also: the drinking water at the school flows through the building's original lead piping and is not safe to drink.  There is not enough funding for a school psychologist.  Three first-grade classrooms share a single pencil sharpener, and student liaisons must be sent between classes to bring it back and forth.  There is a shortage of all school supplies.  The classrooms are old and ugly and don't get a lot of natural light.

These are a few among a myriad of reasons why a student might easily lose focus.  And they all were huge factors that hindered student learning at the elementary school where I volunteered my time last year.

Now, I'll shift to some problems teachers had to face.  Unmanageable class sizes of students with very different levels of ability.  And almost all these students would benefit from the help, either because of a learning disability, behavioral disorder, or emotional problem, from a social worker.  And an administration, lacking the funding to issue more than six IEPs per classroom, because seven means that the teacher gets a full-time aide.  The teacher had to spend so much time on discipline that her first-graders hated coming to school.

And when she went on a maternity leave, she was replaced with a rookie teacher, fresh from school, who cried every single day in trying to cope with the stress of disciplining/establishing ground rules, teaching, and handling the problems at home for every student of this very difficult class.  As a volunteer with a BA but no background in elementary education/power in the classroom, I could only handle problems as they came up, like a very large-scale game of whack-a-mole.

credit dailykos.com

There is no question in my mind that basing 25% of a teacher's evaluation on the basis of student growth is a misguided and harmful policy.  And of course student growth is measured by standardized testing, whose effectiveness is disproportionately affected by all the factors I listed above.  And extending the school day and school year without providing the support of aides or secondary teachers in the classroom is out of the question.  Urban teachers need smaller classes if they are to successfully get any teaching done.

And to those who are demonizing these striking teachers for taking away two days (and counting) of learning from the students.  These teachers sure ain't getting paid for striking.

Listening to diets instead of reason

This is not just some crazy celebrity diet.  There are far too many cleanses out there that defy logic and reason.  This one is not too different from all those diets that replace meals with shakes.  Please take care of yourselves!

UPDATE: I apologize for my lazy, hasty post.  I got completely carried away and took the sensationalist news personally.  I promise to be more careful next time!  Eddie Van Halen has diverticulitis.  The best hopes for him and his recovery.

Getting angry . . . for the wrong reasons

thank you abcnews.go.com

The RNC came and went in a flash of lightning, didn't it?  I've just spent the last twelve hours or so procrastinating instead of unpacking and catching up.  First, there was that hurricane, then Ann Romney and Chris Christie talked about how much the GOP totally loves women, then Clint Eastwood totally upstaged Mitt Romney (which was probably the point, now that I think about it).

Of course, the national conventions do nothing if to further polarize Democrats and Republicans.  The POINT is that they are unabashedly partisan and utterly lacking in a substantive political conversation.

And of course, there has been quite an uproar from my news feed, which I imagine as a single, many-headed entity that breathes fire at even the most innocuously-stated right-wing politics.  Unfortunately, social media is not structured to generate brilliant political dialogues.  There's only so much you can say in 140 characters, and with as many people reading it as possible, it had better be snappy and/or funny. And by now, I expect most people are browsing with the awesome/evil Google Chrome, trying to show me as many things that I like as possible.

Look, I can't point my finger at the naysayers, as I have definitely been guilty of taking cheap shots.  Sometimes, it's so satisfying.  And it's easy.

But it's important not to channel that anger into your pithy, brilliant tweet with the widest possible appeal.

Guys, STOP being angry at Chris Christie for being fat.  We ALREADY KNOW that he is fat.

credit jerseynut.blogspot.com

I should note that as far as today's GOP goes, Christie is a moderate.  He supports civil unions and believes that non-violent drug users should be sent to therapy rather than jail.  He has created some incentives to support local manufacturing  of sustainable energy.

Instead, maybe you'll be angry for his propaganda-style portrait of the current administration's policies at his RNC speech.  For at his relentless attacks on unions.  Or joining the rhetoric on "American exceptionalism" and for spewing misleading information about New Jersey's budget.

Exercise your democratic rights and educate yourself.  You're going to vote for Barack Obama, but what don't you like about him?  Where doesn't he go far enough?

It's hard.  Not every one can know everything about everything.  And you don't have to.

But if you scoff at the RNC because Clint Eastwood performed a shtick with a chair and Chris Christie is fat, and therefore scary/ lazy/ a bad example/ any other uninformed conclusion, you clearly know nothing.