So What do we do About Fat Kids?

This is happening in my town. The child weighs 200 and should weigh 60. He has sleep apnea. He was taken from the home a while before thi**** the newswire and he is now losing weight. They worked with the mother since last year on this. That failure does not make it less controversial. We have a special pediatric clinic that deals with obese children. It includes their families. It doesn't always work.

Put yourself in that boy's shoes. Knowing what you know now about your own childhood, if you weighed three times as much as anyone else in your class what kind of a childhood would you have had? What kind of psychic scars? To have sleep apnea at his age yet? If this child were to have a stroke or heart attack or blow out a knee, it would be too late to help him.

Unless you were super morbidly obese at his age, more than three times average weight, I'm not sure any of us really knows what the family has been through in the last year. I think we can be certain he would weight even more without this drastic intervention.

It's not about the kids.  It's about educating the parents.

The parents that don't give a ****well not much you can do.

Yes, it's about educating the parents. But who is educating them? Dieticisnas and doctors who still believe that dietary fat intake is evil and that it's ALL about calories in vs. calories out? That exercising will greatly improve weight loss? We need to fix these health and weight loss myths in the medical community before anyone is even able to teach the parents correctly!

Actually, the last thing you want to give someone who is still growing is a malabsorptive surgery.

I would not give WLS to a kid but I think once you are through puberty and meet the criteria, then go for it... especially since the criteria includes a pysch eval to make sure you understand what you are getting into.

As a formally fat since age 3. I only wish I could have had surgery long ago before I hit 240 by 6th grade. My body feels the effects of being obese till 23 years old (surgery at 22 years old). Neither of my sisters have a weight issue. Mine truely was a medical problem not over eating.