Day One Hundred and Nineteen!!!!!

Should children go on weight reduction diets?


So, in listening to registered dietician Roberta Anding, she discusses how if you had asked her this question ten years ago she would have definitively said, no. She would have recommended to parents to let children grow into their weight. 


I have heard that a lot, you might be chunky now, but you are a kid and you will thin out as it is that you go through puberty, once you go through your growth spurt. 


So, here it is ten years later and Professor Anding reports that her answer has definitively changed to, a yes, because of the magnitude of increasing obesity, children are learning young how to become obese, and so she reports that both children and their parents need to be put on calorie controlled plans. 


When I think back on my childhood, and my mother recalls hers as well, we were allowed to eat whatever we wanted. There was no real direction given in regards to what food is composed of. So, when you think about it food intake was based on, ‘if you like the taste of it, eat more of that’. 


So when parents are complaining that their children won’t eat lunch or their teenagers refuse to take a lunch to school, it is interesting to think about what that lunch might be actually composed of. So life’s think about it. Generally it will be composed of; two slices of bread, peanut butter and jam or perhaps a slice of processed cheese, chocolate milk, a pop maybe, cookies, chocolate, or perhaps fruit for dessert, all considered to be a healthy lunch for a child. 


Yet, when you look at it in a different way, we are really training children to eat mounds of high carbohydrate food, and when they stop wanting to eat that for lunch parents actually become concerned and worried, some even forcing them into picking different high carbohydrate foods in order to meet the daily requirement of having lunch. 


When I think about high school, I changed my eating time from having lunch at school to forgoing the lunch and just waiting until I came home to have lunch at three o’clock instead, which I now know is very European (in some parts of Europe lunch is at 3pm). Some parents take offence to this because they think that the lunch starvation will cause overeating at three, ruining the appetite for dinner. 


Either way, what is actually really happening is that food consumption is all based on amount of food eaten during the day, societal expectations that have grown along with peoples obesity, and not based on what food is actually composed of to maintain food health. 


When I think back about my thin friends, they were the ones that actually really payed attention to the composition of food. Whether they were learning it for themselves or learning it from one another or from their parents, they were paying attention to food composition. 


I hosted a birthday party and nobody else but me and my family were eating the birthday cake, and we didn’t get why. This was during the time of the thigh gap and short shorts. 


Normally, when there is birthday cake everyone snorkels it down like there is no tomorrow, but at my high school everyone was starting to dis carbohydrates without me really noticing it. 


My high school would host a little party for kids who got over 90% averages. The celebration basically consisted of them serving cupcakes or cookies and chocolate milk. The tiny girls would come to the party, but they wouldn’t eat anything. I remember a teacher saying “why aren’t you taking a cupcake? You don’t want to celebrate? One cupcake won’t make you fat.” and the kid replied, “It won’t make me any smarter either.” The teacher was a larger woman, who took offence to the statement yet did not get it.