‘It’s No Fun to Be Heavy; Kids Laugh’ : Children Taught to Eat Properly and Exercise

It isn’t your typical weight loss group because no one is all that much overweight. And they only range in age from 11 to 14.

In fact, the goal for the six boys and five girls isn’t so much aimed at losing all their excess weight during the eight-session course but rather “to learn lifetime eating and exercise habits to take control of their bodies,” said group leader Rebecca Smith, a registered dietitian.

Smith, who recently finished a similar Weight Busters course for children 8 to 10 and is planning to start a class for adolescent girls in July, teaches the weekly 1 1/2-hour sessions with three other registered dietitians in the basement of the sponsoring Childrens Hospital of Orange County. The program costs $100 per child.

Besides classroom sessions to learn what kind of food they should be eating, the children are put through a series of aerobic exercises and other active movements to help trim their bodies.

“It’s important to me to feel skinny,” volunteered Andrea Bent, 12, following a half-hour aerobics exercise period. And Scott Donnell, 11, who had just returned from a mile run outside the building, moaned and said, “It’s no fun when you’re heavy. Kids laugh at you.”

Habits for a Lifetime

Whatever reasons they give, Smith says, “the goal for these kids is not to lose all their excess weight during the course, but to learn proper eating and exercise habits that will be with them for a lifetime.” Most of the children are about 15 pounds overweight.

She said many adults fight a weight problem all their life, “so the older the kid gets, the harder it is to change. It’s a lot easier to start when you’re a child.”

But that life style change for the youngsters must include parental involvement, added Smith, who said health statistics show that children with two overweight parents have an 80% chance of being overweight themselves.

One overweight parent brings the odds down to 40%, and if neither parent is particularly overweight, the odds drop to 7%.

‘Great Imitators’

“Children are great imitators,” Smith said. “That’s why if parents exercise, the children exercise. If parents are always eating, the chidren will do the same.”

To Penny Saltzman of Huntington Harbour, her own battle with weight was reason enough to suggest to daughter Samantha, 12, that she join the program.

“I wanted her to understand nutrition and to accept the responsibility of keeping herself fit,” she said, “and that may translate to other things for her later in life.”

But she added, “I don’t know, maybe we’re too preoccupied with the way we look in today’s society.,”

Overweight youngsters sometimes get that way from such real world unhappiness as divorce in a family, believes Connie Loughrey, a marriage and child counselor who holds rap sessions with the youngsters and then with their parents midway through the course.

“You can’t minimize the pain of a younger person who is growing up with a lot of pressures,” she said, “so my goal is to have them acknowledge sadness and unhappiness and then try to solve their problems in another way than eating.”

The key, she added, is to get them to feel good about themselves.

But that is sometimes difficult, said Smith, especially in Southern California, where skinny is in with the bathing-suit-and-shorts crowd and practically all advertising is aimed at slim, trim and fit persons.

And children in their teen-age and preteen years who don’t fit into that group often are depressed or disturbed because of it, according to Dr. Marsali Hansen, a pediatric psychologist at the hospital.

“At that age kids are really aware of what their peers are thinking and what is socially acceptable in that group,” she said, pointing out that some of the chubbier children don’t have many friends, “and that’s distressing.”

Talk Encouraged

Hansen said that besides teaching proper nutrition and exercise patterns, she sees the course as an avenue to encourage children to talk about their weight problem, a method to keep them from being isolated and withdrawn.

“Children have a tendency not to talk about their weight, so, in addition to giving them good nutritional and exercise habits, the course gets them to talk about themselves and that’s neat,” she said.

Margaret Feletic of Seal Beach, whose son Mike, 12, is enrolled in the course, contends that “a lot of times when mothers say something to their children it doesn’t make the same impression as when someone else says it. That’s one of the benefits of the course.”

Straight talk about nutrition and exercise is what Smith offers. “This is something you’ll always be doing to keep in shape,” she was saying to the class that was selecting an exercise program. “Pick one you like that sounds like fun because you’re going to use it for a long time.”