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June 30, 2005
Inside and Out
Back from vacation at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Maggie Wang of Caustic Musings says that you’d be a fitness dork . . .
. . . if you had seen the endless masses of flabtastic American physiques on hideous display in tiny scraps of Lycra and Spandex on that beach. Going to a popular tourist beach for vacation is even better than a trip to Wal-Mart for solidifying one’s commitment to eating healthy and exercising regularly. The number of chubby children I saw was just plain wrong. Parents can make their own choices about diet and exercise, but there’s no excuse for letting your kids start out life overweight or even obese. It’s setting them up for all kinds of social cruelty when they get to junior high or high school as far as I’m concerned, not to mention all of the possible health issues that come with being out of shape at such an early age.
Parents get away with hurting their children on the inside in a way they’d never get away with hurting them on the outside. A couple of years ago Madelyne Toogood made national headlines after she was caught on videotape hitting her child in a parking lot; she plead guilty to felony battery. But when 13 year old Christina Corrigan died of congestive heart failure in 1996 weighing 680 pounds, her mother was convicted of only a misdemeanor – and not for nutritional abuse. It was for what they found on the outside of the child’s body – bedsores – not her weight. The prosecutor had brought felony charges, but he stressed that even those were “based on the condition of the child's body, not the size of the child's body," And this is how the the defense attorney summed things up: "This is a case about fat prejudice. It's absolutely about that, a prejudice we don't even know we have.”
Posted by Kristen at June 30, 2005 02:55 PM