Always the Fat Kid: The Truth About the Enduring Effects of Childhood Obesity - Hardcover

Warren, Jacob C.; Smalley, K. Bryant

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230341772 ISBN 13: 9780230341777

Verlag: Macmillan Education, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Childhood obesity in the United States has tripled in a generation.But while debates continue over the content of school lunches and the dangers of fast food, we are just beginning to recognize the full extent of the long-term physical, psychological, and social problems that overweight children will endure throughout their lives. Most dramatically, children today have a shorter life expectancy than their parents, something never beforeseen in the course of human history. They will face more chronic illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes that will further burden our healthcare system. Here, authors Jacob Warren and K. Bryant Smalley examine the full effects of childhood obesity and offer the provocative message that being overweight in youth is not a disease but the result of poor lifestyle choices. Theirs is a clarion call for parents to have "the talk" with their kids, which medical professionals say is a harder topicto addressthan sex or drugs. Urgent, timely, and authoritative, Always the Fat Kid delivers a message our society can no longer ignore.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jacob C. Warren, PhD and K. Bryant Smalley, PhD, PsyD are the co-executive directors of the Rural Health Research Institute at Georgia Southern University. They have published numerous scientific articles on health behaviors, social influences on mental health, and the impact of obesity on children.

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Always the Fat Kid

The Truth About the Enduring Effects of Childhood Obesity

By Jacob C. Warren, K. Bryant Smalley

Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © 2013 Jacob C. Warren and K. Bryant Smalley
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-230-34177-7

Contents

Preface, 
INTRODUCTION The Secret Word Is "Fat", 
ONE The Battle of the Bulge: By Numbers, 
TWO Obesity Is a Behavior, Part One: Oodles of Calories, 
THREE Obesity Is a Behavior, Part Two: Get Moving!, 
FOUR It's Not Just a Little Baby Fat: Physical Impact in Childhood, 
FIVE Once Fat, Always Fat: Physical Impact in Adulthood, 
SIX Fat Brain: Mental Health Impact in Childhood, 
SEVEN In a Fat State of Mind: Mental Health Impact in Adulthood, 
EIGHT "Does This Make Me Look Fat?": Body Image, 
TEN I Love You, I Hate You: Relationship with Food, 
INTERLUDE The Result: The Fat Kid Syndrome, 
ELEVEN What Can We Do?, 
RESOURCE GUIDE Where Do We Go From Here?, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Battle of the Bulge

By Numbers

Chances of a child being struck by lightning: 1 out of 1,000,000

Chances of a child being in a car accident: 4 out of 100

Chances of a child graduating from college: 30 out of 100

Chances of a child becoming fat: 33 out of 100

Chances of a fat child becoming a fat adult: 80 out of 100

Think for a moment about these odds, and the amount of time and energy we put into either preventing or encouraging those outcomes. We ticket parents who do not have their children in seatbelts, and have extensive school-zone speed limit laws to protect them from motor vehicle injury. We have entire national systems in place to encourage education and support our children in attaining a college education, even putting a significant portion of our tax money into it — in essence mandating that it is our civic duty. In some states, we even pay for college to help as many students as possible to receive a college diploma. But we do very little to prevent childhood obesity, the most likely of these outcomes.

We have certainly arrived at the point where our children are experiencing near-irreparable harm as a generation, but we did not get to this point overnight. The causes of the continuous shift toward weight gain are deep rooted and incredibly complex, but much of the problem has come from a history of ignoring both the presence of the issue and its long-term impact.

THE WORST-KEPT SECRET IN AMERICA

Why has the seemingly innocuous bathroom scale become our enemy? It is always there in your bathroom, just waiting for you to call on it. It always tells you the truth, no matter how much you don't want to hear it. And it never, ever, tells someone else your secret weight. But we've become so weight sensitive that we want to hide from the scale — if we don't know our own weight, then we can't get upset about what it is. In essence, we can keep our weight secret even from ourselves.

About that "secret," though — weight is not secret. It is one of the most obvious and plainly visible facts about ourselves, no matter how hard we might try to mask it in dark colors, vertical stripes, or multiple pairs of Spanx. And by masking it, not talking about it, pretending it's not there, we have created an environment of weight ignorance. And weight is like a wild animal — you should never turn your back on it.

In the case of our children, we have most definitely turned our backs on the beast. The weight of our children has slowly progressed to the point of being a true public health crisis. Many researchers saw the problems coming years ago, but we were either unable or unwilling to consider the fact that we were truly harming our children — that it wasn't just a little extra weight, but something that was going to have a dramatic and systemic impact. The cumulative health effects are so pronounced that obesity is quite literally taking years off children's lives, and that represents an ultimate failure on our part as a society.

To help frame the rest of our discourse, let's first take a look at definitions of fatness for children. You may be surprised at how complex these definitions are, but as we move through this book it will help give us a vocabulary for both describing weight and for seeing what role misperceptions and simple semantics have had in sustaining our children's weight problems.

MEASURING FAT

So how do we actually determine if someone is or is not fat? In general, most methods separate individuals into four groups: underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese. For our purposes, the two levels of "fat" are, of course, overweight and obese. In scientific terms, being "overweight" means that an individual is at increased risk for health-related complications because of their elevated body weight. People in this range are generally no more than 35 pounds overweight. Individuals past this range are considered "obese," meaning that they are at high risk for health-related complications (particularly diabetes and a variety of heart diseases) due to elevated levels of body fat. At the high end of obesity lies "morbid obesity," which indicates an individual is at severe risk for health-related complications and, more often than not, already has one or more medical conditions directly related to their weight.

There is no precise way to determine the exact point at which someone transitions from being normal weight to being overweight, or from overweight to obese. Weight is a continuum, and a person's "ideal weight" is as individual to them as a fingerprint. Unfortunately, the lack of a universal "cutoff" allows people to somewhat ignore the problem until it becomes extreme.

Much of the difficulty in classifying people by their weight comes from the fact that when looking at health, we cannot simply consider an individual's weight by itself; other factors, such as height and body composition (amount of muscle vs. fat), are essential in determining a person's ideal weight. Defining obesity is a tricky concept in general because of this, and countless methods ranging from newfangled "impedance machines" (which estimate your body fat by sending a jolt of electricity through your body) to submersion tanks (which determine your body volume and by proxy the amount of fat in your body by seeing how much water you displace when you are submerged in a tank) have been invented in an attempt to clarify the topic. As these methods are obviously not suitable for widespread use, a more simplistic method had to emerge. The main consideration with weight is that a method of determining if someone is overweight must be able to say that for a given height, that individual has too much weight. As a result, the most common method of measuring the appropriateness of weight is the body mass index (which is calculated directly from an individual's height and weight alone).

BODY MASS INDEX

Estimating what portion of an individual's weight is attributable to fat has been a target of science for over 150 years, long before obesity was perceived as a threat to the health of the population. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Adolphe Quetelet proposed what was then referred to as the "Quetelet Index," which was a simple ratio of a person's weight in kilograms to their height in meters squared. This method was among the first to attempt to take the individual's height into account when determining a "normal" weight....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Macmillan Education
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0230341772
• ISBN 13: 9780230341777
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland