Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Michelle Obama's Childhood Obesity Initiative

The First Lady's "very ambitious" campaign against childhood obesity, "Let's Move," is being announced today.

Given my experiences as a nerdy, awkward obese kid, I'm happy to see this attention toward childhood obesity as a public health issue. I'm particularly interested in the potential changes in cafeteria food, which I recall was heinous when I was growing up. I vividly remember the pizza and fries, the fried okra, the "pork choppette." Our government should definitely stop using tax dollars to feed that mess to our children.

My only reservation about this initiative involves the effects of all this national attention on the emotional health of kids who are already living with obesity. Is it possible to make sure initiatives like this, which are sorely needed, don't lead to greater stigmatization of obese children? Aside from the touchy-feely reasons we shouldn't stigmatize obese kids, stigmatization is counterproductive. Fat people who are made picked on eat for comfort; they get fatter; they are hassled about their weight even more; they eat more.

My least favorite activity during elementary school was the Presidential Fitness Challenge (or whatever it was called.) The gym teachers gave us a list of activities, including sit-ups, pull-ups, hamstring stretches, and running, and they kept a tally of how each student performed. It was humiliating. I don't remember whether I was a comfort-eater back then or not, but I know that humiliation didn't motivate me to lose weight.

I suppose there's no way to guarantee that teachers and skinny kids won't be cruel to fat children. Maybe that's one reason why, as I've written, there should be charter school opportunities for the chunkier among us.

2 comments:

  1. Argh. I remember that Presidential Fitness thing. I wasn't obese but I was a really out-of-shape, non-athletic child, and having to do that "test" every year was so humiliating that it made me have a really bad taste in my mouth for all sports from there on out -- and I was convinced I "couldn't do sports" pretty much for the rest of my life. Then later I started running and realized I could do that. Amazing what lasting effects things in our childhood can have, for good or for ill!

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's so true! Oh boy - memories.

    ReplyDelete