As a parent, how do you deal with an overweight or obese child?
This is a question that can plague any parent who has a child that is maybe a few more pounds that is medically recommended. I know that it's a question that must have been on my mom's mind as I grew in size (and I don't mean that I got taller) when I was a tween and then teen. Yes, I was overweight for as long as I can remember. That's why I can really relate to the struggles of Dara-Lynn Weiss, author of The Heavy, a new book in which the mom describes putting her 7-year-old on a diet and the subsequent backlash after she wrote about her ordeal in Vogue magazine.
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It's really easy to hate the mother that put her young daughter on a diet. When I first heard about her, I was fully prepared to hate her guts. I mean, what kind of mother purposefully tortures her daughter so that she can fit into some sort of unrealistic standard, like the ones set forth by the way-too-skinny models that appear in the pages of the fashion bible she was writing for?
Then I saw a story about her on Huffington Post, where she speaks about why she made the choices that she made and why she doesn't have regrets about putting her child on a diet. To be honest, it sounds like she made the best decision she could have made for a daughter who has been eating a lot more, portion wise, since she was 3 years old. She gained twice the amount of weight than her brother for several years and, by age 6, weighed 93 pounds, which put her in the clinically obese category. And it wasn't due to junk food, according to Dara-Lynn, but more because the girl could simply eat more. As a mother, how do you deal with that?
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Dara-Lynn dealt with it by putting her family on a nutritional program aimed at children. Each member of the household was given a personal allotment of food, with daughter Bea having the fewest. However, that's the issue that ended up causing the girl to become upset when she would see that her brother was able to have pasta and the girl could only have veggies. Even in her conversations, Dara-Lynn was careful not to use the words "fat" or "obese," instead talking to the girl about "overweight" in order to strike the right balance. Still, handling food in public (like at a friend's dinner party or giving her daughter diet soda) was rough.
Unfortunately, it's really easy to demonize a mother who is only trying to do the best for her child. As someone who grew up overweight and became morbidly obese in adulthood (before ultimately deciding to get a gastric bypass), I don't know that there is a sure-fire way to deal with your child's weight issues. If it were me, though, I would try to focus more on healthier eating habits (having the WHOLE family eat veggies instead of pasta) and trying to incorporate more activities into the child's life.
Is that the right answer? I don't know. The only thing I can really recommend is that parents do NOT call their children "fat" or "gordita", something that my mom did that still hurts me to this day. In the meantime, we can only watch out for our overweight kids and, well, do our very best to help them control the weight, just as Dara-Lynn has done.
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