Overweight children

I thought I was fat. I wasn't. Then I was underweight, then I ballooned and was a UK 16 by 16 years old.

I was always pudgy, always taller than friends (was 5'5 by 11 years old until 12 years old when I stopped growing at 5'6 and they overtook me.

I was quite muscular due to swimming but that's it. I always felt huge, in the way and clumsy though and that contributed to eating problems.

Obviously having worked with families I have seen my fair share of over weight kids and had the conversation numerous times while feeling a total hypocrite for being overweight myself. My kid is on the smaller side of things, short and petite is how the doctors describe him usually. I think he's in proportion and he has fairly low body fat, he has definition in his arms, stomach and chest at 4 years old, he's active and eats a great diet so it's to be expected. I would say out of his nursery of 35 students there are 4 or 5 who are overweight at least, 1 is considerably obese. None have special needs that I am aware of.

i can tell ya where they are they are in east tn i swear there are some of the fattest younguns here i have ever seen we are talking 200 lbs 12 yrs olds i work in a grocery store and i see em every day coming in with their obese parents riding the carts to fill it up with little debbies fried pies and donuts its sad and disgusting just prepping em to abuse the system one day also

I was overweight starting in about the 5th grade and I wasn't the only one. I know there were others, but I don't know how many. I hit 100lbs when I was 10 years old (90th percentile.) I was over 200lbs my freshman year in high school which was off the charts. I would say maybe 20% of the students were overweight then.

This is kind of my personal mission. I was extremely obese as a child. I was 265 when I graduated high school. There has been a huge increase in the last 10-15 years, mostly started when fast food chains started to super size their meals. Now they don't do that so much, but they have dollar menus and really cheap food with large portions.

Couple that with programs like gym and recess being removed from school, less sports to play, and more video games at home and kids today are just less active.

I was a skinny child and my sister was fat. We were both at school at the same time, and there were children of every shape and size. My sister wasn't the largest, but I was among the slimest and we always got called anorexic and stuff even though we weren't. I was always just in the healthy weight to height thing, but I was always eating.

I was in the same boat as you... the pudgy kid, but not obese like some kids are today. I don't remember more than one or two obese kids in my entire 12 years of school.

Of course now that I am sitting here thinking about it, I'm trying to remember if any of the children at my son's day care are really that obese. I can't think of one... granted I don't see them all but they all seem fit and within the normal ranges. So who knows maybe we are just noticing the bigger kids, while all the "normal" ones go unnoticed.....

That's not to say there isn't a problem with raising our kids today to be responsible about their food choices... I'm just not sure if relying on our memories and perceptions is the right way to look at things. I suppose ultimately it does not matter what it was like back in the day when we were kids... the key is to help the kids today!

I've seen some programmes on this on the tv, and what I noticed was that in terms of children, what I would consider 'a bit plump' was to my surprise classed as obese! I think maybe we all underestimate the problem of obesity in children - we've all been told I think that it's ok to be a bit plump as a child - puppy fat! When you re-evaluate your standards and look more closely at the kids you see, you may find that more of them are obese than you believed. I also find that in inner cities the children are in general fatter than in more affluent areas - I teach martial arts to kids in a city, but I live in the country and I notice a lot less overweight children where I live rather than where im working. I'm sure theres been analysis done on why that is, but I do find myself feeling very sorry for the kids.

I personally feel that food nutrition and exercise for health and weight control should be taught in all secondary school as a compulsory core subject - all kids should be leaving school with a sound knowledge of nutrition and how to feed themselves and their family, plus the NEED for REGULAR cardio exercise to be a constant part of everyone's lives. Until this happens I cannot see ant change being made to the obesity epidemic we are facing. Rant for the day over!

I classed myself as overweight when I was a child. My daughter is classed as obese. She is 5 and 55lbs. Saying this she is the height of an average 7year old. We have monitered her since she was under 2 and had thyroid tests and Prada Willi tests done on her and metabolic tests etc. We now don't weigh her and consistently watch what she eats but try not to let her know. She exercises regularly, ie dancing and swimming and walking to and from school. My other 2 are both of normal weight. I am hoping she will slim out when I did at around 9/10 years old. She is very healthy and I really don't want her getting an eating disorder (of which I suffered Anorexia/bulimia. I used to think it was the parents fault but now experiencing it myself don't think that way anymore, well not for all anyway :-(! Her diet is very healthy too but she does have treats occasionally

I only graduated high school a year ago. But I was definitely overweight (slightly obese for a bit) and there were certainly people who were much fatter than me. I weighed over 100lbs in the third grade but I never thought i was fat, just big.

i was always a big kid, but very, very,very active. played orgainzed baseball, pick up basketball, hell my friends and i got really into tennis and volleyball, like really into it.

when i graduated from highschool and started drinking, eating, and stopped playing sports i started to gain a lot of the weight i have now. getting married didn't help!

I was an overweight child, I grew up in the 90s... I was pretty active but could be very lazy at times and ended up sedentary while reading a lot. I don't remember other children being overweight in my classes until middle/high school in the early 2000s, then it seemed like there was a sudden abundance of overweight kids and I ended up looking more "normal" in comparison. I went to a private catholic grade school, though, and switched to public school in 6th grade so I don't know if that makes a difference *shrug*

I grew up in the 70's, one overweight boy in my primary school, but we lived in a country which at the time had no fast food, no culture of eating out apart from special occasions, only three TV channels and not much for kids at all, and I lived in the country, we all played outside, I would go all day with nothing to eat other than breakfast and come home when I was hungry.

At High School, a couple of chubby kids, and one VERY fat boy who had a VERY fat mother and didn't do phys Ed as his Mum wrote a note saying he had some reason why not to do it. He was very fat and did nothing with the other kids at break time, he took in more food than most families eat and I saw him one time after school when we were adults, and he was so fat that he was having to use a scooter to get around.

People ate less junk when I was a kid, McDonalds et al never arrived here until I was an adult, kids did not get treats and sweets in the culture I grew up in. You swam and played outside.

What I see is that obese/overweight children usually come from obese/overweight parents. For the life of me if the parents were teased and ridiculed by peers, why would they let their kids go through it?
I feel for those kids since they aren't buying the food in their houses. They only eat what's in front of them.
I have a really bad habit of "peeking" into carts of obese/overweight people especially if they have obese/overweight kids.

I may have posted this before. I seem to be stuck in groundhog day.

Anyway.

When you were a child, were there overweight or obese children? I remember 2 at my school, in the entire 5 years of senior school, and maybe another 2 at my prep school. I was always on the podgy side as a child, at least, I was by the standards back then. When I look at photos now, I think I would be considered average by today's standards.

When I see statistics like 40% of children are overweight at 14% obese, I wonder where these children are, and how things have changed so much since I was a child.

I was too skinny as a child and I can only recall two obese girls and that was in high school (there were twice as many boys though who were obese). I think our eating habits have changed. When I was younger, it was a treat to go even to McDonalds. Now it's the norm. Also, we didn't have the snacks and all these sugary treats at home that kids do now.

My son started gaining too much weight so when I went on a diet, he went on a healthy eating kick (my word for it because an 8 year old doesn't need to be told to diet. I worry about creating an eating disorder). I basically reverted to the way I ate when I was a child and he has dropped 15 pounds since December. That is more than 10% of his body weight. He is no longer overweight.

He also doesn't get the snacks, treats, and eating out all the time that his friends get but he likes that he's slimmer. He says he likes that he can move his body and do active things now and doesn't want to become unhealthy again. He knows more about nutrition than most adults.

I think another problem is that children are not taught nutrition. Do they even teach that in school anymore? When I was in school it was a huge part of the curriculum.