Killing with Kindness: America's Big Fat Problem

A recent study found that many doctors are reluctant to label fat kids as obese, preferring instead to use less-serious euphemisms such as ?at risk for overweight? or ?overweight.? The reason? Doctors? concerns over self-esteem: Calling fat kids obese may hurt their feelings.

http://www.livescience.com/health/070813_bad_ obesity.html

I'm not a kid, but last year I had major problems with my sciatica.  I went to see a doctor and the nurse practicioner told me that I shouldn't be having these problems at 26 years old.

But she didn't come out and say "you need to lose weight"

Acutally no one in my life told me that I needed to lose weight. 

I don't understand why feelings are an issue when health is a far more important priority.

It's like letting someone walk around all day with their zipper open or with something between their teeth.  It might be embarrasing to say something at first, but in the long run, they'll thank you for helping them out!

i disagree with the manner in which this article was presented.
people who are overweight know they are overweight. majority of women of all shapes and sizes wish they were smaller, have poor body images and experience some kind of dysfunctional relationship with food at some time in their lives.  binge eating IS an eating disorder the same as anorexia, and does NOT mean that a person doesn't know its wrong behavior or is comfortable with being overweight. 

whats wrong is that parents and kids need to learn to slow down their stressful lives, cook healthy fresh foods and stop being bombarded with controdicting advertisements that both encourage us to unsustainable diets/pills and consume unfilling, processed junk foods.  we need to learn to treat our bodies with real nourishment and develop a healthy attitude towards ourselves and our eating/activity.  and yes, people who have weight issues still deserve to feel they are worthy human beings that deserve respect and acceptance.  you don't need to "shock" them into recovery with blunt, callous, threatening remarks.  blaming doctors for someone's eating habits is like blaming them for people who smoke or have unplanned pregnacies!  it's perfectly possible to educate and encourage them to be healthier without killing their self esteem.

Doctor visits are stressfull enough for kids without having to worry that the dr. is going to call them fat.  If a doctor is truly worried he should talk to the parents in private. 

Trust me on this one.  As a child I had to see my doctor monthly (heart murmur) and was always weighed and reminded of my weight.  I remember feeling confused and ashame.  At age 9 or 10 I started my diet roller coaster.   To this day a doctor scale gives me a sick feeling in my stomach and only go if I am really, really sick. 

For my own kids checkups I always let the doctor know in advance to only talk to me about their weight.  (They seem to take after me but are now slimming down naturally as they grow.)

Whew!  I guess this is a VERY sore topic with me! 

The first time I went to the gynecologist...she was a horrible woman...so mean, the whole way through, she wasn't my regular practitioner, but a NP at the local health clinic (this was a few years ago and I was on a low income with no insurance). She treated me with such disrespect for the exam, but then told me I needed to lose weight, and then gave me some pamphlet that would "teach me how"...anyways...I was around 160 lbs at the time, which for me is only "slightly overweight"...but she certainly had no problem telling me I needed to lose a few pounds, I do however think that she could've used much better tact, and could've been altogether much kinder than she was...it's not like I'm stupid and didn't know that i was overweight....But it was like she looked down on me for being overweight...it's one thing for a medical professional to show genuine concern for overweight people and their health and to be honest about the health problems that  a person risks...it's a whole other thing to treat overweight people with disrespect, and to demean them the way that I was.

I think that parents should be educated by the doctor on how to make healthier choices in their own lives that they can then pass along to their kids. It's the parents faults for not teaching their kids proper nutrition and for feeding them junk all their young lives, not the kids fault.

As a child, I knew I was fat but had no idea why. I had no idea what a serving size was. When I looked at the food pyramid, I thought I could do that to be healthy, but I didn't realize that potatos don't really count as vegetables or that the stuff on the outside of my chicken nuggets was a serving of grains. I had no idea about nutrition. No idea. So yeah, people might KNOW they are overweight but they might not know HOW to handle it. Especially kids.

This is a VERY touchy subject, and I don't have any kids - yet.

However, I WAS a "fat kid" from the time I was 10 yrs old, and I have to say - I wish SOMEONE would have intervened (be it the doctor, my skinny eats-whatever-he wants father, my mother who always struggled with her weight, SOMEONE).

Rufus, I DO agree with you in that the parents are the ones the doctor should be speaking with about weight issues, but is there anything wrong with giving a kid a pamphlet about good eating habits? I dunno.

I vascilate back and forth between the concept of "accept yourself as you are" and the horrifying fact that ONE IN THREE children in this country are overweight. Something is wrong here. Right?

I guess I correlate that "you (or your child) is obese" statement from a doctor as the injection that hurts - the hurt only stings for a bit, but if it creates ACTION in the child and the parent, then is it so bad? I spent my pre-teen years through my twenties clinically obese (though my friends just said I was "a bit chubby") and the lasting emotial scars of being a "fat kid" were far far worse than some adult that I trusted sitting me down and saying, "You need to lose weight, your health is at risk."

The primary reason that I myself have lost 53lbs this year (with 20lbs or so to go) is that I was turning 30 and realized that children were in my near future. I didn't want to be overweight and pregnant, and I wanted to pass on HEALTHY eating habits to my children.

There's something very askew in this country. We glorify celebrities with miniscule BMIs and yet we're fatter than ever. I live in NYC, and I have to say, maybe it's just because everyone walks here and doesn't drive everywhere, or because being the city that it is, people are more appearance-aware, but I don't see too many obese people day to day. However, I was in suburban Pennsylvania this weekend, near where I grew up, and I couldn't get over how many people were obese. And YOUNG people. I saw a little girl eating a fudge-dipped ice cream cone, she couldn't have been more than 9 and was way under 5 ft tall, and she probably weighed 150lbs. It hurt my heart. I WAS that girl 20 years ago. I wanted to take her gently aside, toss the ice cream, give her an apple, tell her she really WAS beautiful, but she needed to take care of herself. Fast. Before it was too late.

Ok, that was a rant, but hopefully, someone gets my point. :-)

Colleen

A doctor should be discussing a child's health and weight with the child's parents.  A child doesn't have the concern for their health that a parent does/should.  A kid wakes up and eats what his parent gives him for breakfast.  Then eats what Mom packed for lunch.  Then eats what Mom made for dinner - or picked up at McDonalds for dinner.

I was always fat, but I don't recall until I was in my mid-teens any direct concern from a doctor about my weight.  I had very poor examples set for me as a kid.  I NEVER had breakfast and had more fast food than home cooked meals, it seems. 

Now that I am older, I can take responsibility for myself and my health.  But as a child, ITS UP TO THE PARENTS!!!!

I started going to an adult doctor at age 16. He always avoided the issue of my weight, just saying I was fine. There was no way I was fine at 235lbs and 6'1" I wish he had been honest about it. I knew I was overweight, but because he kept saying it was fine, I never got the sense of urgency to do anything about it. The only thing that gave me the kick in the ass I needed was moving out of my parents' house and realizing I could barely walk up the stairs to my apartment.

My pediatrician told my mother point-blank that I was seriously overweight and needed to stop gaining, because my weight was over the 95th percentile and had to be brought back down either by growing taller while not gaining, or by losing. But then again, that was the mid-80s, when self-esteem wasn't quite lord and prince over health yet.

She didn't heed the warning, claiming "you're tall so it doesn't matter." Yes, being tall made it less of an issue, but not a total non-issue. And being overweight likely contributed to my reaching puberty so early that another month earlier would have warranted putting me on medication to delay development. The genetic cards were already stacked against me, and too much weight gain only made things worse.

Doctors need to be honest, even if it hurts. If they don't, the kids at school are going to be way, way worse, anyway, and if they think that telling parents that their child is obese will hurt self-esteem, they need to think about the teasing that it causes among other children. Penny wise and pound foolish (pun not intended).

I wasnt overweight as a kid, but mostly as a teenager. At 19 I lost all the extra pounds, but gained all of it back as an adult ( in my thirties).

I am grateful that my doctor was blunt and said it out loud...."you are almost at the morbid obesity level"....and that freaked me out.
I knew I was fat...but I had denied the fact that I was "that fat".

And like some others have said before, it is the parents responsability to take care of the kids health. Although sometimes kids do not listen to parents, sometimes if the doctor tells them "in a nice way"...kids can become aware of the problem.

Although kids already know they are fat....just remenber in school they get teased around for being fat, so they do know. And parents have to be responsible in the sense of telling them and reassuring kids. Help them loose the extra pounds..the healthy way.

My mom went to a specialist in Europe for a health problem. She walked in and he said, "I don't even need to examine you or hear about your problem to know that you desperately need to lose weight. We need to talk about this. Then we can address what you came here for."

I guess this is a sore subject for most people.  I think a lot of people with serious weight issues have had those issues for most of their lives.

We've been teased and taunted because of our size.  Our friends and family in order to calm us, and boost our esteem say "you're not fat!"

A lot of the time, they don't see us as fat.  Its hard to see what a person needs to change when you love them.

I think its important for honesty from doctors and nurses.  If my nurse practicioner had said to me when I was in their for my sciatic "losing weight would really help your back problem" it probably would've hit closer to home than the desire alone to be thin. 

This is how it always used to be: whatever you came in for, if you were fat or old, they blamed it on that.  I'm glad doctors have learned some tact.  Nothing wrong with mentioning it, of course -- but this idea that some (thin) doctors used to have that all they have to do is say, "Lose weight," and you'll do it, is all wrong.

Personally, I like fat doctors.  They understand much better what's going on.

(Not about weight, but about age -- my mother went in with a painful hand, and was told it was arthritis, and she had to expect that sort of thing at her age.  Years later, she found out during an x-ray that the hand had been broken.)