Dear Anonymous, yeah I get the feeling genetics play a real big, if not the entire part in being at or shifting one’s weight. I’ve seen it in myself and others.
At I can get in great tone by exercise. Yet other women, who really exercise more consistently than I, their bodies do not seem to respond much at all. I’ve seen my mother, maintain a Calista Flockhart shape, by perhaps walking the dog, keeping the house pleasant, and the occasional horse back ride and plenty of reading. She in no way ate small!
I’ve seen women eat like the tiniest of meals, low fat meals, while dieting, for months. And they did not loose weight. I switched to a lunch salad one summer, just felt like it. Seemed I did not loose any weight. And my salad dressing is a good strong squeeze of lemon juice.
Heredity many be all. Diets to loose weight don’t seem to be it. Exercise only works for some of us. Then again I’m speaking of my self, who thinks a well toned, energetic size 10 is perfect. I kind of get the feeling the General Public feels a size ten is a bit too heavy.
TO THE ROTUND
YIKES! Enlighten me! When, roughly, does puberty start? Diets to loose weight at age 7 are normal??? Actually my daughter started with the fat questions a few years ago, so I’m assuming, (GULP), that’s not puberty related…
Her fear of being a bad person because she hates the taste of most vegetables and fruit: That was this last school year. Direct result, so it seemed, of the school’s one week drive to get children to eat X many vegetables and Y many servings of fruit a day for a week.
Her concerns about me being on the large side, has been intermittent over many years now. Couldn’t be puberty related.
But can it be that she’s not interested in eating because of fear of fat. She may have a spare ounce. But I doubt it. Probably not. Pizza still rules! OK I’m still scared.
You really felt you needed to loose weight at 7? Did anyone ever mention all the years of still to grow you had in front of you at 7? Did you hide dieting from your parents? You mentioned diets you were put on. Had doctors failed to realize all that growing? And the sheer calories and nutrition, and rest, not stress, a body might prefer to do that with? Hey I’m in no way a doctor, or in any way medically trained but what is going on here?
Sorry. I’m aghast and confused. OK I’m in shock 7!?!
What’s the best way to explain the futility of this sort of dieting to a 7 year old?
Puberty is, of course, a highly individual process. But, in general, the female body starts to ramp up for it a few years before the onset of menstruation. I started my period when I was 11 - at 7 my body was beginning to add a little bit of weight and my hormone levels were starting to shift.
ReplyDeleteAnd, really, I promise you it wasn't me who thought I needed to lose weight. When fat kids are put on diets, at least for the first diet, it is because their parents have decided the kid needs to lose weight. My mother had been fat (and cycles back and forth between very fat and very thin every 5-10 years or so) and was terrified of me being fat. She was far more worried about me being fat than about me needing to keep growing.
And that was where I learned that a) my body was abnormal and b) I wasn't worth as much as a thin child. My peers added to that in later years, but the very first message I received - and that many kids who grow up fat receive - came from my family members.
When fat kids are put on diets, at least for the first diet, it is because their parents have decided the kid needs to lose weight.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to have to disagree with you there. As I explained in a comment to the original post that mentioned my having started dieting at age 7 that was then ruthlessly eaten by The Internets before it was posted and broke my spirit enough to prevent me from recreating it (whew!) was that the diet at age 7 was totally my own idea.
All the other kids had standard New Year's Resolutions, while mine was "I resolve to go on a diet." I still remember what the bulletin board with all our resolutions looked like in the second grade classroom.
There's no doubt that I learned to diet from my parents--my dad did Diet Center and lost close to a hundred pounds when I was five or six...I still hate zweiback toast--but my parents were never the ones pushing me to diet. I knew that there was something "wrong" with me and that I needed to "fix" it.
I think that my mom and dad did get a lot of pressure from doctors to try to make me smaller. One even triedto put me on hormones to stunt my growth because he feared I would be "too tall". Bizarre. (There's another promising supermodel career down the drain.)
Overall, though, I was a mad perfectionist and desperate for approval from society at large. If gastric bypass had been widely available when I was a teenager, I would have begged my parents for it. I don't blame them and I don't even blame myself, but I do blame all that dieting and body manipulation for f*cking up my metabolism and making me as big as I am today.
err, "What I explained..." Even I got lost in that sentence.
ReplyDelete