I’m a “big” guy. Ok, let’s get real, “big” is a euphemism for fat. I’ve been overweight all my life. I’ve lost fifty pounds or more 4 or 5 times in my life. As of today, I’ve lost 75 lbs. and counting on my current diet. One time I lost 86 pounds and my weight dropped to the top of the “recommended” weight for my height. BTW, I’ve always said I’m too short for my weight. Right now, my ideal height would be 7’ 10”.
Even when I was doing triathlons, 10K races and ran a marathon, I was too heavy.
I was heavy in childhood. I wore clothes for the “husky” boy. Later in life I felt that my mom (God rest her soul) contributed to this because her way of cooking produced just enough for dinner and you gobbled up everything, always wanting more.
But, like many of you, I was pretty active as a child. Not in sports but I was a “free range kid,” meaning that on nice days when there wasn’t school, my mom would kick me out after breakfast and tell me to be home for lunch and dinner. I rode my bike all over creation, walked to the creek nearby looking for box turtles, crayfish and salamanders. When I was 11 or 12, I shoveled snow, mowed lawns and had a paper route where I rode a big balloon tire bike with lots of baskets to hold all the papers. Oh, and when there was school, I walked a mile home from school. My mom may have taken pity on me if there was bad weather, but that was rare.
Well, times have changed.
Nowadays kids sit home playing Xbox and Nintendo games. Hopscotch, tag, hide and seek, jump rope and all the other “old fashioned” games of our childhood are long forgotten. Little Bobby can’t walk to school or even to the bus stop. Bobby won’t ride the yukky bus – mom has to drive him. There are 10-year-old kids who have mastered the Minecraft video game but don’t know how to ride a bicycle.
It used to be that parents waited for kids to outgrow their youthful obesity (I’m still waiting). Now, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has declared that “waiting doesn’t work.”
As a result, the AAP is advocating drug therapies and bariatric surgery for kids as young as age 12. A report, published in the AAP’s journal Pediatrics on January 9, defines obesity as a "complex and often persistent chronic disease" that affects the health of over 14.4 million children and adolescents, making it one of the most common pediatric chronic diseases in the United States.
Combine overweight, inactive children with society’s desire for a quick fix (“there’s a pill for that”) and you get the latest in medical excess. No personal responsibility required. No thoughts of what surgery might do to a child long-term.
So, instead of dieting or increasing activity to resolve kids’ obesity problems, medicine will use expensive and invasive surgeries and medicines to cure the problem.
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“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”
- MICHELANGELO
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Now That the Bird Feeders Are Out for the Winter, Squirrels Are on a Mission Impossible!
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Ten foot two inches my ideal height & weight!!!
Your not alone, but. What is a creek, we had a crick near us