Opinion
I’m glad she told me I was fat. Otherwise, I’d be dead
Jenna Price
Columnist and academicI was a fat kid who became an obese adult. Ran in the family. I was 19 when Dad died and 26 when I lost my mum. My sister died at 57. I can categorically say (because doctors told me) obesity had a stake in each grave.
I am not dead. Yet.
But getting to here hasn’t been easy. And if a nurse had walked into my school and said to my family, “Here’s how you can all live a healthier life”, I doubt I’d have lost three-fifths of my immediate family by the time I was in my 40s. My younger brother was fat, now he runs. I hate him*.
It’s not fat shaming to say being overweight is a serious life risk.
That’s why I haven’t joined the chorus of those decrying the Australian College of Nurses’ plan to send a nurse into every school. The response to the idea of nurses marching into schools to weigh kids has been utterly pathetic, a hysterical overreaction to an idea that isn’t yet fully formed. It’s not fat shaming to say being overweight is a serious life risk. It’s life-affirming.
About one in four kids in Australia is overweight. If we don’t do anything about it, experts predict it will be one in two. If you are overweight as a kid, you are 10 times more likely to be overweight as an adult. And sure, kids are cute and pinchable when they are young and chubby, but it’s what comes next which should be making us worry.
Heart disease (Dad). Cancer (Mum). Type-2 diabetes (my mum and my sister). It was just after my sister died that my GP decided to have the tough conversation. In the words of the immortal Bob Dylan, not dark yet but it’s getting there. Made me get on the scales. Made me face up to the facts.
Was it fat shaming to tell me I was morbidly obese? It would have been more of a shame if she’d let me go my own way. I worry we are becoming so fearful of fat shaming we won’t confront the seriousness of our heavy epidemic. Nobody wants a world where kids are ashamed of their bodies – but we do want a world where those bodies can live and breathe and exercise and throw their grandchildren in the air.
In our fear of fat shaming, in a desire to be accepting of people who are fat, we’ve lost the way. Of course, we have to take care of people’s feelings about their bodies. We can’t have another generation of kids starving themselves to death to match some ugly vision of beauty. But we also have to face up to the fact that for most of us, being fat isn’t good for us. It isn’t safe. And it shortens our lifespans.
So when I spoke to Karen Grace, national director of professional practice at the Australian College of Nurses shortly after the story on nurses in schools, she’d had a pretty tough day. The idea was divisive. Images were being conjured up of kids in the playground queuing to get on scales, being trussed and measured like turkeys.
That’s not what’s going to happen. And it’s not only weighing and measuring. (I’m only 150 centimetres. Not much can be done about that.) It will also be eyes and ears and bumps-a-daisy. It will be the kind of attention kids used to be able to get from their GPs, in the days when seeing a GP was possible.
Now Dr Nick Fuller is not nearly as enthusiastic as I am (and let me just say here his team at the University of Sydney devised the incredible Live Life Well program, which led to me losing 57 kilograms, so I know he knows what he’s talking about).
He says it’s important not to take weight out of context, to embed our knowledge of what we weigh into education about healthy eating and a healthier life
“If we start fixating on weight, we are reacting to the problem,” he says. Fuller, whose book Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids, is so lovely, so kind to parents you could cry, wants parents to help kids (and themselves) get how to be healthy. You can be healthy at any weight, he says. I wasn’t and plenty aren’t – but he says it’s possible. Don’t put kids on diets. Instead, take a long hard look at your family’s habits. Believe me, you will need support to do that.
I’m a lot healthier now than when I weighed 125 kilograms. I’ve kept most of my weight off, although it turns out that to do that, you have to be much more active than this lazybones was prepared to be. I hate step counters and wall squats with a raging passion.
But I had help, I had an entire army around me to help me fight the battle, and a nurse might have been the first one to help me see the light. Because of Nick Fuller, because of his team, it’s not dark yet.
*Not really
Lifeline 13 11 14
Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist.