The town of Somerville, MA, spent a year and $1.5 million in grant money working to change everyone’s eating and exercise habits, in an effort to curb childhood obesity. It was a resounding success! After a year, the kids ended up… about 1 lb. thinner than kids in the control groups (from neighboring towns)! And the control groups had very different socioeconomic and racial make-ups! And growing children experience natural weight fluctuations all the time! But hey, go Somerville! Stamp that childhood obesity right out!
Sandy:
While this massive program, which they hope to replicate across the country, was focused on weight, there was no attempt to determine if it made a lick of difference in the school children’s health. Parents and the public might also ask if these incredible resources could have been directed in areas that might have a greater importance in bettering the children’s futures. While the school year was absorbed in diet and exercise, the average reading test scores among Somerville kids are 15.4% below state average, and their math test scores are a whopping 26% below those of kids in the rest of the state.
That was my favorite part of her excellent article, but you should read the whole thing.
What really burns my ass (other than a flame a little under 3 feet high) is that everything the town of Somerville did–changing school cafeteria options, making the town more pedestrian-friendly, expanding recreational physical activity options–is a fucking great idea, yet it’s framed in such an ugly, stupid way. Instead of saying they wanted to make changes to improve citizens’ health, they made it all about combating fat, all about–as the AP article puts it–a whole city going on a diet.
When are we going to clue in and separate fat from healthy eating and exercise? Obviously, when the net result of this initiative was that the average kid ended up not gaining one pound s/he might have otherwise been expected to gain, this was a piss-poor “childhood obesity” intervention. (I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but DIETS DON’T WORK.) But it was still a great idea for improving both public health and citizens’ enjoyment of their town, and a lot of Somervillians are probably better off for it…
Except, of course, for the kids who grew fatter anyway and were assumed to have “cheated,” the fat parents who were undoubtedly suspected (if not outright accused) of failing to love their children enough to conform, the kids who ended up underweight because their city government taught them how to have an eating disorder.
Oh, and the kids who can’t read. They’re probably not better off.
Huh. I live in Somerville, MA, and I never heard about this. Of course, I don’t have kids in school. In the mornings I walk past a school and see kids doing exercises with a gym-teacher type person. I thought it looked like fun, but now it seems kind of sinister.
Yeah, that’s what kills me. It WOULD be fun if they promoted it as, you know, fun, instead of as a crusade against fat.
I am SO going to wave that JFS post in front of anyone who bemoans that people (and especially kids) are fat because of “obesiogenic” environments. In fact, I feel like silk screening it onto both sides of a floor-length T-shirt and WEARING the damn thing. One pound! At the cost of kids not being able to read or add, not to mention all that food and body neurosis in the making. And that’s not even taking ethnic or socioeconomic factors into account. I’d call them “fatheads,” but I don’t want to be part of the problem.
Nothing like putting the spotlight of a nation upon your town so that those residents who didn’t lose weight and conform to culturally enforced and often unattainable body ideals are held up to national scrutiny as either “cheaters” or “failures.”
I used to live in Somerville. Go Davis Square.
OK, someone help me. This is the home of Tufts University, with mighty Harvard one stop away on the Red Line and mighty MIT just across the Charles.
Now, with all this purportedly ancillary extracurricular attention being paid to teh eeevils of obesity, how come the kids can’t read again?
All cabinet members are required to have an above average VO2 max. All Children are Left Behind.
Jeeeeeeeeez.
Meowzer – what goes on the shirt again? “Obesiogenic”? I want one in hot pink. And – modest though I generally am – I’m going to wear it SKINtight.
No wonder I hated gym class as a kid. And if the instructors then had given any sort of damn about the kids that weren’t their prize athletes, and taught the rest of us how to use the weight room too, I might not have bad knees today. (I’d still have congenital patellar problems, but my quads would probably be much stronger.) Because I would have learned about yoga much earlier.
/rant
I cannot fucking believe that I’m thinking back on my P.E. teachers of a quarter century ago and realizing how “enlightened” they were.
Yeah, they talked about fat occasionally but not as this HUGE CATASTROPHE. They understood that there were about a hundred different dimensions to health and physical education – like being fit, being strong, having endurance, being fast, being agile, being skilled with your body, learning a sport, learning teamwork and just getting some fresh air and exercise.
They never singled out the fat kids or lectured about the horrors of fat. And if we fat kids didn’t like P.E. it was only because we didn’t like drawing our attention to our bodies, and maybe what the other kids were going to say…I never worried about my p.e. teacher making me feel like shit for being on the chunky side.
I feel like sending them flowers now.
God it’s like entering the dark ages. These poor kids, they’re going to be so screwed up when they emerge on the other side of this.
1 pound eh? It’s easy to laugh, but by jingo, that’s not going to stop me.
I’m in agreement that it was a good idea for a bad reason. But it is just as wrong to generalize in the other direction also. saying that diets don’t work is like quiting smoking wont prevent cancer.
I don’t have a buhdonkadonk butt inspite of eating right I have one because I love pizza and sweets, I was thin when I was younger and ate what I wanted, now I cant do that anymore to the same result. I have dieted and they have worked, the reason I am thick now is because I did not STAY on the diet.
I believe people should respect me as I am but twisting the facts just makes people throw their hands up. Now you say you can be healthy and fat at the same time, well my doctor says I’m very healthy as far as my heart and blood pressure and cholesterol but if I’m so health why can I run as fast as I before I gained my weight back? or why can I still do cartwheels? or standing flips, I was actually less healthy internally
When I was able to do those things(I was a smoker then).
But Gordita, why didn’t you stay on the diet? Probably for the same reason most people don’t — because most diets are unpalatable and impossible for most people to stick to long term without having to restructure their lives completely as though they were recovering meth addicts. It’s damned difficult to avoid everything you love to eat forever, which is what’s required of “sticking to a diet,” and nobody should be expected to do so in order to be treated like a decent human being.
If we lived in a world where only “diet” food was available, that would be one thing. Then it would be easy to “stick to diets,” because we’d have no other choice. But it’s completely bogus for us as a society to make “nondiet” foods freely available and affordable for sale and then bash people for purchasing and consuming them. It’s like locking people up in rooms with comfortable mattesses and nice soft bedding when they haven’t slept in 72 hours and then expecting them not to crawl into bed and go to sleep.
Thanks, Meowzer.
Gordita, saying that diets don’t work is more like saying that the side effects are barely tolerable,or, despite trying, I have failed to sustain a state of anorexia. Your immune system keeps you healthy by fighting off germs and such, the body fights dieting just as strongly, that is why they do not work, they are ill-conceived. There may conceivably be a non invasive, sustainable way of losing weight, dieting isn’t it.
As for your lack of flips and cartwheels, could be to do with what causes or facilitates weight gain in the first place, or the weight itself, this physical change may mean that you have to relearn some things you took for granted, but this has not so far as I know been implicated in longevity or lack of it. Why don’t you test yourself and find out if you can re-gain your flips? Here’s hoping you do!
Point is that I was on a diet for awhile and gained none of it back until I went off of it, now granted it was during the summer when the kids were at their fathers out of state, and it got hard to cook two meals every night once they got back.
But Gordita, you’re still missing two points.
1) Most diets are not meant to be lifetime eating plans. They work for short-term weight loss, but people eventually must go off them, in which case, the vast majority will gain the weight back. “Going off” a diet isn’t a reason to blame yourself. People aren’t meant to live on 1200 calories a day permanently.
2) For many people, even if they do make that permanent “lifestyle change” instead of “going on a diet,” their weight will plateau at a certain range, which may still be above a “healthy” BMI, let alone above their goal weight. They can be eating and exercising exactly the same as while they were losing weight, but the weight loss stops, because their metabolism changes.
Obviously, tons of people–including me and probably most of the readers here–are living proof that diets work in the short term. What we’re saying is, that’s irrelevant, because 5 years down the road, nearly all dieters have gained it all back. And it simply can’t be that 95% of people who have the discipline, “willpower,” and commitment to their own health to diet in the first place just fall off the wagon and become lazy gluttons. For many of us, this is something our bodies do naturally, not the result of poor choices.
Liz Curtis Higgs, in One Size Fits All and Other Fables, said that for two solid years after she plateaued at 160 pounds (25 pounds over her goal), she followed a Weight Watchers diet assiduously, and could not get her weight to budge below that level. I have known women who ate 1200 calories a day and exercised multiple hours a day for years and couldn’t lose more than the 15 pounds that came off in the first few months.
So it has to be more than people “cheating” or loving their goodies too much that makes diets ineffective for most people. Ultimately, your body decides what it wants to weigh. Your brain doesn’t have all that much input in the long run, unless you are one of those rare people (I gather Hillary Clinton is one of them) who has both militaristic self-discipline AND the favorable metabolism to keep weight off. (And I’m sure Sen. Clinton has plenty of help when it comes to making sure she “sticks to her diet,” too.)
One thing we SA folks always have to fight is the idea that people (women especially) should be happy to go hungry forever, to eat less and less and less and work out more and more and more, if that’s what it takes to be accepted. I hear women all the time, who have plenty of money to feed themselves well, saying, “I’m always hungry.” Don’t you think there’s something not quite right about that? I do.