kids and dieting
Jun. 21st, 2004 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryxThere's a discussion on BFB from last week about people's dieting history. This highlights just how much time and energy people, women especially, waste in fighting fat.
My parents never put me on the absurd diets some of these other women report, but - they and people around me berated me for being fat starting when I was 5 (and I was cute, not fat), and I recall being asked "should you eat that?" whenever something "bad" was involved ("bad" was ill-defined in my house, as my mom still thinks a cupcake is an acceptable breakfast as long as it's eaten with orange juice). I started dieting when I was 10 or 11, I think. And didn't stop permanently for over 10 years.
The article that Paul posted specifically points out that dieting at a young age, more than dieting in general, seems to make people fatter. But that aside, the thing that dieting at a young age seems to be most effective at is keeping you dieting, which is a tremendous waste of time. I still spend too much time and energy just trying to have a healthy, reasonable attitude towards food and exercise. If the people around me had just modeled healthy living instead of yelling at me for my phantom fatness, maybe I wouldn't have ended up like that.
If you added up the hours any woman spends worrying she's too fat - or too whatever - we'd probably each have enough hours to run a small business, or start a political career, or raise a kid really really well. That's depressing.
So, I hope the news that putting kids on diets makes them into fat adults will convince people paranoid about the "obesity crisis" (aka the dieting crisis) not to start kids down that road of wasting their time.
My parents never put me on the absurd diets some of these other women report, but - they and people around me berated me for being fat starting when I was 5 (and I was cute, not fat), and I recall being asked "should you eat that?" whenever something "bad" was involved ("bad" was ill-defined in my house, as my mom still thinks a cupcake is an acceptable breakfast as long as it's eaten with orange juice). I started dieting when I was 10 or 11, I think. And didn't stop permanently for over 10 years.
The article that Paul posted specifically points out that dieting at a young age, more than dieting in general, seems to make people fatter. But that aside, the thing that dieting at a young age seems to be most effective at is keeping you dieting, which is a tremendous waste of time. I still spend too much time and energy just trying to have a healthy, reasonable attitude towards food and exercise. If the people around me had just modeled healthy living instead of yelling at me for my phantom fatness, maybe I wouldn't have ended up like that.
If you added up the hours any woman spends worrying she's too fat - or too whatever - we'd probably each have enough hours to run a small business, or start a political career, or raise a kid really really well. That's depressing.
So, I hope the news that putting kids on diets makes them into fat adults will convince people paranoid about the "obesity crisis" (aka the dieting crisis) not to start kids down that road of wasting their time.