Attitudes About Obesity

INTRODUCTION

I had a girlfriend who was ordinarily a very nice person, but she had in-laws who had a baby when she and her husband did. Not in the presence of her little niece or in-laws, of course, she'd talk about how she "couldn't stand" her five-year-old nice and how "she's so fat". I liked my friend, but her own child was, to be blunt, an absolute brat. Her niece was a beautiful little girl who was kind and well behaved. I tried to kind of laugh of the remarks I found uncharacteristically cruel of my friend; but somewhere along the way it really got to me. I said, "She's such a nice little girl. I don't know why you say that." Again, my friend said, "She's so fat. I can't stand her."

I couldn't help but remind my friend that among all the problems children (or anyone else) can have, being "chunky" is pretty much the least of them; because when someone like her beautiful, well behaved, and kind little nice trims down she's left without any problems - as compared to kids or older people who have problems that are not so easily fixed. I never knew if the little girl's parents or grandparents had the same contempt for her slight pudginess, and I eventually drifted from that particular friend (for perhaps obvious reasons).

One reason I've written this Hub is that last week I discovered my former friend's grown children on Facebook, and through their pages I found a picture of the niece, who is now a pretty young woman of average weight, and with a Facebook page that shows her good nature, kindness, and academic achievement. It was nice to see her picture, but I still felt bad to know how cruel her aunt had been about her when she was only five years old.  (I suppose, of course, it was better that, as far as I knew, it was behind the child's back and not to her face - but is "behind-the-back" ever really a harmless thing either?)  When I read a HubPages forum thread about girls having bad attitudes toward other girls who have a weight problem, I was reminded of my friend's little niece, as I thought about how the problem overweight children have with others' attitudes isn't always related to the ignorance or cruelty of other children.

You can't generalize about fat people or thin people. There are people who nice people, who don't think the measure of a human being is whether or not he has washboard abs, and who wouldn't be mean about other people. Then there are people, particularly children, who think appearance is the measure of someone else's worth or respectability as a person. I was a small (thin) kid, and I remember girl-classmates who who were heavy and who were the nicest kids in the world. Then there was one or two who had a "real attitude" about all the girls who were thin/average, or who just had "attitudes" about all the other kids in general. I also remember one strikingly nasty, skinny, little girl who was mean to everyone (and I think that was because her mother had taken off and left her behind).

Being overweight isn't always a kid's fault because mothers often feed their kids all the wrong foods, don't make sure their child is active, and just kind of let the pounds add up. An overweight kid isn't always the mother's fault either, though, because stress can cause hormone changes that make a person have fierce food cravings that, if not given in to, will make the person feels as if he can't even function.

Then, too, there's the thing where some kids "thicken up" a little as a result of adolescence, and then return to be slender once their height catches up and their "awkward" build matures.
Some people naturally have metabolisms that allow them to eat whatever they want without gaining weight. Others aren't as fortunate.

Even before this fitness-conscious age we live in, most people have always known that being fit is the healthiest thing. Today, with increasing obesity in adults and children, there's even more talk (and messages being sent to children) that being fit and trim is "the only way to be".

Children and teens may admire "Hollywood people" or fashion models who are super-thin and who are often considered "ideals" when it comes to appearance. Young kids may not realize that a lot of these people have tummy tucks and/or work out in order to stay fit for their work (when people in other work, and of fewer financial means, often spend their time on their non-Hollywood/non-fashion-industry work and/or don't have the money for personal trainers or cooks.

On top of that, a lot of these "beauty ideals" are people who have eating disorders or else live on drugs, cigarettes, and water in order to stay as thin as they do. Some end up dead, and all anyone talks about is how "drugs may have played a role in the death" (with little said about the role drugs may have played in the thin-ness). Some of these people decide to stop doing what they're doing, pack on some weight, and become the object of jokes and disdain for having done it. Young people hear all the jokes about actresses and models who have "gotten fat". A lot of adults wouldn't be very comfortable being the object of such cruel jokes, and it may be a rare heavy kid who could keep his sense of self-esteem when he has heard, for himself, how nasty and belittling "the world" can be toward someone with even a few extra pounds.

It may be a minority of adults, and an even larger minority of children and teens, who understand that weight is nothing more than a matter of math - calories taken in versus calories expended. It's not the measure of person. It doesn't necessarily make someone completely ugly, and thinness isn't necessarily a guarantee of being beautiful (either inside or out). What people too often don't realize is that, while emotions can play a role in weight gain when a person is stressed out and his body is craving high-energy foods, and while some people (probably a minority of overweight people) may have an eating disorder that involved "equating food with love", most weight problems are nothing more "emotionally impactful" than too many calories and too little exercise. The complicated part is that there are often "legitimate" reasons (circumstances other than just liking to eat or being "wildly self-indulgent and lazy") why a person takes in too many calories for his level of physical activity. Stress cravings, age-related slowing of metabolism, or a demanding/tiring lifestyle that requires eating "to keep going" are some of those "legitimate" reasons.

People who feel depressed are often told that exercise would make them feel better (and it can if "being depressed" isn't a matter of mistaking being over-stressed for being depressed). The trouble is that prolonged, un-relenting, stress can lead to a "worn out" adrenal gland that can no longer provide the extra cortisol needed for a person to feel as if has "has enough fuel" to keep "up and running". Someone with adrenal fatigue won't necessarily feel better if he exercises. In fact, adrenal fatigue can make a person feel anxious, depleted, and generally terrible in a way that can be unsettling and that can take time to recuperate. In fact, the person who is physically and truly exhausted can feel as if he needs time to recuperate after activities that would, for someone else, be far from strenous.

Can children be stressed? Of course they can, and much of the time the cause of their stress is something parents and/or teachers may have no idea about and/or is something to which the adults in a child's life contribute.

Adrenal exhaustion aside, being "plain, old, tired" is now known to contribute to weight problems in ways more complex than just "needing an energy boost and eating".

On thing that actors do that's unfortunate children aren't always very aware of is that sometimes an actor will intentionally gain weight for a part and then lose it. Actors who do this will talk about how they "just ate" to gain weight and then how they stopped eating all that food, added exercise, and simply returned to their normal weight. What a great example of how weight gain isn't "who a person is", but nothing more than what he weights at any given time.

My kids were always slender kids. Besides my making sure they had healthy foods and aiming to teach them healthy eating habits in general, it happened that they were small-framed children who didn't have particularly big appetites. I had nieces and nephews who were larger-framed kids and who seemed to need more food than mine did, and a few of these children were, as babies, pretty chunky babies and toddlers. With a mother who did much the same things I did when it came to food, these babies/toddlers thinned out once they got past four or so and had the growth spurt that happens then. My own children were surrounded by adults who didn't make a big deal over children's weight, because we all knew if you eat right you won't be overweight. The point is that to some degree, children's frames can play some role in how much they eat.

Besides frame, children have different natures when it comes to how active they are. My own were normal, active, children who weren't stuck in front of a tv or computer screen (ever), but they weren't "billiard-ball children". There are some children who aren't likely to ever gain weight because they're "billiard-ball children" who almost never sit still and are always going at top speed.

At one time or another, each of my three children reported to me that one or more classmates had said something "mean" to another child who was heavy. They were bothered to have witnessed the meanness toward another child, and I was glad they were. I'd "confirm" that they were right to think it was rotten of the name-calling child; and I'd talk about how children who are overweight are often very unhappy about it already but may have a mother who serves high-calorie foods or else may "just have a build that tends to be heavier". I'd tell them that sometimes heavier kids are the ones who grow up to be thin, and who turn out to be far more good looking than some of those nasty kids who called them names. I guess I wanted my kids to know that while extra weight is something "some people just happen to have", it doesn't always have to be permanent - and it is never the measure of the "niceness" or "smartness" of a person.

When there's some problem you don't have it's easy not to understand how/why someone else would have that problem. Whether it was related to weight or anything else, I didn't want my kids to grow up to be the kind of people who indulge in feeling superior to other people because they were fortunate enough not to have the problem in question. I wanted them to know that if a person has some problem (like a weight problem) most often it isn't because the person is too stupid, too lazy, or otherwise too inferior to solve the problem; and that most often it's because the person is facing some kind of challenge that others without the problem have to face.

Most importantly, I wanted my kids to grow up knowing that "in the scheme of life" washboard abs aren't a very impressive accomplishment and are never the measure of a man or a woman. (That lesson was easy because my children had two grandmothers with varying degree of extra weight and an aunt with a lot of extra weight, and all three women were people my children knew as kind, smart, strong, giving, people who would went above and beyond to try to make my children happy or help when anyone needed it.)

It's in the nature of children (particularly, I think, girls) to admire other people (particularly adults) who are attractive. Every September there are little girls who are happy to have been assigned to a pretty teacher, because, based on how much they admired her looks, they had made the mistake of thinking she was "nicer". Studies have shown that even when adults are show pictures of faces, they're often likely to "like" the good looking people better than the unattractive ones. If this natural tendency to like someone who's good looking more is something a lot of people have, I imagine with children it's just a matter of not having grown sufficiently past the most "raw" of these instincts. Most adults may move mostly past their "hard-wiring" and start using their hearts and minds more when they're judging other people. Some adults, however, don't seem to have grown past their childhood natures; and for others, I suppose, the wish/need to boost their own ego by feeling superior to other people means they won't have "emotional incentive" to understand something like weight problems better.

Children need the benefit of a mother who helps them understand weight problems and the ignorance so many people have regarding them. Unfortunately, a lot of the meanness some children show toward others is something they learn at home, from their own parents. I'll admit that I felt like I'd done something right when my children reported to me that some classmate(s) had been mean to another because the other was heavy. I was proud that my children didn't like it, didn't understand it, didn't know what to do about it, and worried about the wronged child. They showed the kind of compassion that a whole lot of adults don/t/won/t show and/or can't feel.

The thing is, though, I don't think it was a big deal that I was able to teach children who, although certainly not above doing the occasional wrong, weren't mean about other children with problems like being overweight. I had had the benefit of being a smalled-framed person myself, and of not being one to care much about eating. Without any particular stress or challenges to my 100-or-so-pound weight, I had always had the benefit of an under-forty metabolism to boot. I knew how effortless it had been for me to stay under 110 pounds and how I had no right to feel superior or accomplished for having done so.

Also, I had a few family members or friends with weight problems, and I knew what their challenges were. My mother, who had been thin enough most of her life, became ill with tuberculosis when I was six years old. Her weight dropped to the point she looked like a skeleton, and my sister and I knew how sick she was. After months of being in the hospital and being "built up", my mother returned home with quite a bit of extra weight and also with the worry that she could become sick again. She was just about forty at the time, so besides having had an over-active thyroid treated, her age wasn't particularly in her favor in terms of metabolism.

For the rest of her life my mother would remain unhappy with her weight and herself and have the negative self-image so many people with extra weight have. At the same time, there was a part of her that was just happy to be healthy and able to have seen her children grow up. I guess I was a pretty little kid when learned that there are things in life that are far more important than whether someone no longer has a flat belly.

35 years after my mother's tuberculosis "episode" she would lose her both her legs from the knees down to the whole "Diabetes/Heart Disease/Medications" thing; and even though I've always been aware of the importance of being fit and didn't need this "lesson", it did drive home a pretty big message. Knowing the level of doing for other people my mother kept up, I still don't feel superior when I know she could have fended off a lot of the horror by eating right and losing the extra weight. (She wasn't someone who weight a couple of hundred pounds or more. She had, I think about fifty pounds that should have gone.) Knowing how hard she worked, how much stress she was under (by that time as an over-60/over-70 woman), and all she did as a widow keeping the house she owned and caring for any number of children; I understood when she'd say she didn't know why she couldn't find the willpower to "just stop eating".

While other people's weight hadn't been anything I'd ever thought much about, and while I hadn't had to think about weight when I was younger, my mother's weight and health issues most drove home to me that sobering reality that weight is so much more serious than whether we look great in skinny jeans. More importantly, whether it's a child with extra weight or an adult; and whether it's the self-esteem and health of a child or adult at stake; weight is never a joking matter. Neither is something over which to attack, insult, or feel superior to, others.

There are people with extra weight who are happy with themselves. That may be because they don't have too much extra weight, because they know they're attractive and/or feel attractive, or because they think heavier-than-perfect thighs are the least of the problems in this world. Everyone else should be so at peace with themselves and have such values. Then there are people who hate themselves for having extra weight, even a little bit of it. They may not understand why they can't "just stop eating". They may worry about their health. They may be badgered and belittled by family members or so-called "friends".

It may bother them that the world seems so full of people who don't understand why they don't "just eat right and exercise". If they're children (and even if they're not) there's a good chance their self-esteem is eroded or destroyed by the insults, ignorance, cruelty, and jokes that fly through air even in a world when so many other people also have more weight than anyone else thinks they should have (or more weight than super-models or actresses usually have).

We live in a world where a woman makes history by being the first to run for the U.S. Presidency, and it can seem as if all we hear about is whether this over-60 woman has enough extra weight to make her look like "the average woman", rather than super-model! We live in a world where young girls think it's so critical to be thinner and thinner they starve themselves to death for it. The irony is that it is the same world where adults, children, and whole families go hungry because they can't get food; and where death and disease kill even people who eat healthy foods; and yet so many adults and children, alike, haven't yet figured out that minds and energy would be so much better spent worrying about something other than whether someone else is fatter than they think they ought to be.

It's so often said that "kids will be cruel". Well, kids wouldn't be cruel if someone managed to help them understand that weight isn't the measure of a person, and that the person who feels superior to others because he's think is someone who doesn't know any better. Adults who choose not to understand that it isn't always so easy for some people to "just eat right and exercise" might, themselves, become better people (and better parents) if they traded in their wish/need to feel superior for at least enough understanding to realize they don't understand what someone else is dealing with.

Kids (or adults, for that matter) wouldn't be cruel about weight if someone managed to get it through their skulls that, when all is said and done, it's pretty arrogant for any of us to presume what we think about anybody else's appearance matters a whit. I have a friend (who happens to be awfully pretty and fit) who lives with family who frequently criticizes her. She said her response is to look around a little and say, "Oh - am I missing the sign that says, "I care what you think." It's too bad heavy children who have to deal with the rotten remarks of others can't do something like that; but the lack of such self-confidence that most children lack because they're children is the very thing that makes so many of those cruel insults leave their mark on self-esteem, and even outlook on the world.

Maybe the sign my friend talked about is an imaginary one, but when someone is cruel about someone else's weight I actually see my own imaginary sign hanging around there neck or stamped across their forehead. The sign I see says one of several things. Either it says, "I'm a mean person who feels superior to others because I don't have a clue about how inferior I really am," or else it says, "I'm a person who feels so bad about myself, or what I worry I'll turn into, that I need to be mean to other people." It might also say, "I'm someone who doesn't have a clue about what's important in this world," or even, "I think the measure of a man or woman is how flat their stomach is."

What the sign says, children need to be made aware that if they're cruel to other kids about weight they'll have one or more of those signs stamped across their forehead or hanging heavy on around their neck; those signs are never flattering and often say far more than most people would want anyone else to know. Children, after all, grow up to be tomorrow's parents.

Whether it's someone like my mother, who walked around wearing a size 14 dress; someone like my friend who, I think, probably wore a size 20; or some little kid in first grade who wears a size other don't wear until fourth grade; people with extra weight wear their "crimes" in public, for all to see.

Someone who cheats on his taxes, neglects an elderly parent, beats his child, or even just fails to wash his hands after using a bathroom, gets to keep his misdeeds and sins a secret. Some misdeeds stay behind closed doors so those guilty of them don't have to face a world that demeans, or at least judges them.

Overweight people, though, are at the mercy of the people who see them; and if they're children in school or out playing in the neighborhood, they're where a high number of people are too young (and sometimes too mean) to know how damaging and misguided their taunts are. A woman who runs for President and wouldn't win in the Miss America swimsuit competition has to be tough enough not to care that the whole world may be making jokes about the size of her hips. The capable, heavy, individual, who is young and healthy and applies for a job that really shouldn't require a super-model's shape, may wonder why nobody ever calls to let him know why he didn't get the job. Not only do heavy people not get to keep their "sins" a secret, but they face a world that so often doesn't understand that their weight is neither a matter of laziness nor ignorance.

The "killer" is that we live in a time when obesity is a bigger problem than it's ever been before in our country, and even with that the general population tends to be dismally ignorant about the real causes of it.

So what's the problem if someone looks down on overweight people but is polite enough not to express his disdain or disgust? The problem is that most of us have at least a person or two who are close to us and who have some extra weight. If we look at our overweight loved ones and see someone weak or lazy or "let go", we won't be seeing the strength they may have, the degree of "hard-working" they really are, or how bad they already feel about having cravings get the best of them (often through no fault of anything other than their endocrine system). For those who eat because they're so unhappy they need something to make them feel better for just a little while, if we see them as "lazy" and "weak" we won't see how unhappy they really are. In other words, as long as we're misguided about what causes weight gain, we can't respect any who has, in opinion, commited the "crime" of gaining too much weight; and love or genuine friendship can't ever truly exist without respect.

No overweight person (or even person with some figure flaw that involves too much fat in one area or another) that I've ever know has liked his weight problem (or fat problem). Just about everyone I've ever know who isn't absolutely thin talks about how he'd like to lose weight and somehow can't muster up the willpower or energy to diet and exercise long enough to lose enough fat. These may be accomplished, hard-working, intelligent, caring, and otherwise self-disciplined people (who even get lots of physical exercise and try to watch what they eat); but they'll talk about how, in the area of weight loss, they're "out of control". The unsolicited (or even solicited) advice they get tends to be along the lines of "eat celery", "drink water all day", or "join a health club". Worse, they hear, "Get off the couch," when many of them don't get a chance to sit on a couch from one end of a month to another.

American society is full of a lot of really good, decent, people; but so many of us have this shamefully ignorant and counter-productive attitude about weight. The common thing is to point the finger at fast-food restaurants and assume the overweight are "going wild" eating at those places. The common thing is to assume the "just don't care how they look" or "are too ignorant to realize how weight causes health problems". The common thing is that many overweight people condemn themselves because sometimes even they don't understand the real cause of their weight problem; but whether or not they do, the world has "drummed it into their head" that they are lazy failures for not being able to fix what causes their weight problem.

We live in a time in our society when it can seem as if nobody cares much who does what questionable, or even rotten, things, as long as he does them as a slender person. People who do those questionable or rotten things get away with feeling superior to better people who happen to have some extra weight. Few people seem to even talk about how backwards and bizarre all this is.

And, in the meantime we have so many children who are guilty of nothing more than having a mother who cooks the wrong foods, or living with so much stress they crave too many snacks, learning painfully what our society seems to think about "fat" kids like them. The problem won't be solved until the adults in charge understand it, and it just seems to me that far too many people have absolutely no clue when it comes to truly understanding that weight gain isn't always a matter of someone being not caring, not bothering, and "just being a pig".

I'd like to see the school spend an hour each school-year, explaining to children the causes for increased appetite and cravings, and taking the shame and blame out of obesity. I'd like to see public service announcements that did the same thing. I'd also like to see a little less talk about celery and other fresh vegetables (although I have nothing against vegetables and the health benefits they offer) and more talk about stress, emotional needs (particularly of children), and tiredness. I'd also like to hear more honest (even blunt) talk aimed at children about how socially unacceptable it is to taunt other children because of their weight.

I'd like to see straight-talk, no-nonsense, messages like, "Look, you don't have to like what obesity looks like; and if you're not fat you should be happy you aren't; but people who spend their time having opinions about other people's weight or, worse, being mean about it, means YOU are the one who has a serious problem." Kids get this kind of message. The reason so many haven't seem to get it until now is often because nobody, or not enough people, have sent it.

I know this Hub has been long, but the brief, "eat-celery-and-drink-water-all-day" answer to the obesity epidemic hasn't always been very effective; and while the recent White House spotlight on the benefits of vegetables may be well intentioned and sound, it just isn't enough.

(RT, on Facebook, if, by any chance, you happen on my Hub, which I know is unlikely; just in case you didn't hear this when you were five, you were an absolutely beautiful little girl.)