As this blog has suggested before, there is a difference between feeling generous concern for the health of an obese person and being an ill-intentioned busybody.
As much as we wish that a certain relative would lose a few dozen pounds, this does not necessarily have to be said out loud — not to that person, or to third parties, or even to ourselves. Maybe our need to criticize people should be quashed as vigorously as their need to consume cheese crackers. It is incumbent upon us as grown-ups to restrain our own worst impulses.
Also, where children are concerned, adults really ought to acknowledge our own culpability in the whole childhood obesity quandary. Let’s face it. If a bunch of children were left alone in an island society free of grown-up mistakes, where there was just enough to eat, they wouldn’t get fat. If the opportunity to gobble down a bunch of junk did not exist, it simply would not happen. To be blunt, without the participation of grown-ups, children would not have the means or the opportunity to gain inappropriate amounts of weight.
What could help?
It’s a safe bet that every last person who ever expressed an opinion about someone else’s body has something less than perfect about their own body. In life, some things are just guaran-dang-teed, and one of them is that nobody is perfect. Couldn’t we just hush up about it and move on? Unless, of course, we are health professionals, but that is a topic for another day.
In society at large, would it help to more seriously study people who have somehow turned their lives around? How does a decision like that get made, anyway? What or who helped the person change their life? What were the aims and ambitions behind it? What finally changed their lives, and can we gain from that knowledge a sense of what might help children not be obese?
Story time
An anonymous reader tells about a childhood that included frequent visits to her maternal grandmother’s house, where she was allowed to make “icing,” otherwise known as a bowl of powdery confectioners’ sugar, moistened with water and consumed with a spoon. She writes:
One time when Mom came to pick me up, the bowl and the spoon were still in the kitchen sink, and the sugar hit the fan. Me turning into a pimply pile of blubber wasn’t even the issue. It was that Grandma had the nerve to make a decision like that. Mom did a lot of messed-up things, but she was the mom. At the time I was pretty upset, especially because Grandma didn’t stop feeding me that mess. So in addition to scarfing down liquified sugar, I was lying too. Eventually Mom found a neighbor close to home, and didn’t ask Grandma to babysit me any more.
Then she added,
Who knows, maybe that’s what Grandma was aiming for all along. I mean, it wasn’t a hundred years ago. Surely, tin cans were invented. She could have kept some canned peaches or something on hand instead, and fed me that. Just to show some pretense of awareness. Even if it had the same amount of calories as a bowl of sugar, it would have avoided trouble.
Peeks into other lives
In childhood, visiting a friend’s home can be an unsettling experience. Many of us grew up marveling at the items other kids sometimes brought to school in their lunchboxes, and all of a sudden, there we were, right in the heart of weirdness. It probably smelled funny, and you never knew what you would find.
Maybe anybody was allowed to raid the refrigerator at any time. Or maybe there was a locked cabinet above it. Did the big sister have an eating problem so serious that the parents had to keep her out of the cupcake stash? Or is that just where they stored the schnapps?
This should go without saying, but it would really behoove us, as grown-ups, to zip our lips and refrain from disparaging anyone — old or young, fat or thin, etc. It 99% won’t help, and might hurt. There isn’t a chance in Hades that any good will be done, any improvement attempted, or anybody going to sleep happier than they woke up.
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