Childhood Obesity= CHILD ABUSE

Wait a second? I'm to blame for my fat cat? What do you think I do, hold her down and shove kibble in her mouth?

You know when she got fat? When I took her in, spayed her and forced her into a sedentary indoor lifestyle. Lack of activity kills, but there is no way I could replicate the exercise she got outdoors.

I have had cats most of my life and I disagree with you. My cats were all neutered and most of the time lived in apartments with limited possibilities to be active. However I played with them every day, they had climbing trees and other chances to exercise. None of them were ever overweight , because there is this idea to control weight. The thought is " calories in, calories out ". It means that someone burns more calories than they ingest. You might not believe it, but it works for animals also. My last two normal weight cats died at 19 years and a few month and except for the last two years of their lives were very agile and active. My neighbor also has cats that are usually very overweight and do nothing but sleep and none of them has gotten older than 9 year........I wonder why that is.

I have a 30 pound neutered Maine Coon. He's 17 years old. For years, he got only measured amounts of wet food and kibble. He had no diabetes, thyroid or other hormonal issues. We've been to many different vets and we have no idea why he's so damn fat. We feed him enough food to support a 20 pound cat, which would be his correct weight. It is a high protein kibble/wet food. His weight hasn't budged.

CICO doesn't seem to work for my cat. Suggestions then? I thought it was just that easy.

I have a 21 pound Maine Coon. He has a tree and I try to play with him a little every day. He follows me everywhere I go so sometimes I'll walk up and down the stairs on purpose to get him moving.

The weakness of your lack of argument shines through every personal attack.

A hamburger obviously CAN be, but since you seem unaware, the landslide majority of hamburger consumption comes from crappy fast food. Goes without saying that I'm not referring to the real deal. At least it should lol.

You wanna talk weak arguments?

You're a non-parent, telling other parents how easy it is to make their kids eat healthy food, when you clearly have a problem doing it just for yourself, much less anyone else, much less a child.

You may not like that it's personal. But I don't like people with no idea what they're talking about lecturing others.

9 1/2 is too early to go thru puberty.

Not sure how this judement is helpful in any way. It's not a statement of fact, because I was already menstruating at 9 years old and had clearly gone through puberty.

Edited to fix quotes.

http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/obesity/facts.htm

read/watch these articles/reports

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdGYitGIIps

How many kids do you have exactly?

Irrelevant. And a fallacious non-argument.

I'll take that as 0 from you. I will assume the OP is the same...

who cares? This is not a complex concept. Cook decent food for your family and teach your children about portion sizes. Get them involved with sports, and have them play outside. Buy them a bike, basketball hoop, take them hiking, etc. Don't allow them to get into bad habits by eating hoho's and playing xbox and they won't be a bunch of fat *kitten*.

You're right. It's simple.

Make sure you and your family only eats healthy and exercises. Don't smoke, do drugs, or drink. Get straight A's in school so you can go to a good college and get a well paying job. Be kind to everyone you meet. Marry the perfect partner and have a happy, healthy relationship with good communication. Use your loads of free time to volunteer to help others.

It's really so easy. Thank heavens all you perfect, non-parents, are here to show the way to us doddering fools with mouth breathing kids.

/sarcasm Do some of you really not live in the world that you think it's this easy?

Brett, I almost never enter these types of threads, because the "myopia" is too strong and that is time could be spending watching paint dry or something. However, in this case as a non-parent who has worked with children, I'm chiming in to support you and the other parents trying to get through the perfect world fallacies and to reality.

The baseline assumption that children will behave in predictable and linear ways is false. Human behavior and cognition is not linear. We uncover patterns in human behavior through research and study. The path is not simply "introduce factor A and observe behavior B with not other conditioning." If this were the case every parent in this thread would be breaking out the champagne and celebrating having a household free of back talk, sibling rivalry, complaints, anger, sadness, teenaged angst and so forth.

Food is no different than any other stimulus in the real world. Children are exposed to it at home, at school, in the media and can be indirectly influenced by the opinions of others. As young as kindergarten/preschool, children are coming into contact with other people's eating habits, opinions and cultural expectations around food and eating. As soon as children have enough linguistic experience to differentiate positive and negative context in speech they are exposed to outside opinions about food through advertising. Refusing or fixating on particular food are idiosyncratic behaviors that parents may have to spend months or even years trying to correct or work around, because the source of the issue is not always related to immediate family or easy to identify.

If anyone is capable right now of explaining in detail how to account for each child's personality differences and their responses to parental influence and outside stimuli, you need to write the definitive book on parenting. Every parent, teacher, doctor, therapist and park ranger will buy it if it's published. Until that book is available on Amazon, I'm going to keep agreeing with people like Brett. If you do not understand that children are just as capable of idiosyncratic behavior as individuals in any other age group, then your powers of observation are being limited either by choice or lack of adequate exposure the children's environments.

I disagree with you on this, but that's just me. I don't think someone should have their kid taken away and put into foster care just because they're fat.

Yup. Things like how fat or skinny a child is just isn't as simple and black and white as it sounds... And ignorance of nutrition and excerise is not a good reason to make an already overwhelmed system that can't get children out in worse situation than "my parents feeds me too much mcdonald's because they don't know any better" even more so.

Does it suck? Sure... But most parents are ignorant of what to feed their kids or they just make up excuses... but it does not equal child abuse in my opinion.

I have not read all 13 pages of this post.

I do NOT think children should be taken away from their parents if they are obese. I do think nutritional counseling is a good idea.

My children eat raw vegetables (I don't look cooked vegetables in most instances), fruit, grilled chicken and fish (although often they put barbeque sauce or steak sauce on it), AND they eat McDonald's, pizza, and sugar cereal. Oh and we had doughnuts for breakfast Sat. They are pretty active, playing outside a lot and we are a big bike family. I'm looking to upgrade both girls to geared mountain bikes this year. And they also watch TV and play some video games. I employ the same "moderation" standards on my children as I use myself.

My horse is only a little high.