Being Fat and Lazy is Hurting Our Families

This is a great idea. I started working a gym/ physical therapy practice, so I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. Three immediate thoughts: 1) Food Day is October 24 (www.foodday.org) . Promoting something like this in conjunction with the excercise thing would be awesome.2) Check out Katy Widrick if you haven’t already. She’s a rockin’ producer/ fitness blogger. She started something called Fitbloggin. Plus she has great blog/ networking advice as well. Get in her network, and that would help this project for sure.

Thirdly, check out joke #2 from this past weekend’s Weekend Update: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/weekend-update-favorites-10-15-11/1362552

Your article makes one huge, fatal mistake.

Being fat does not mean someone is lazy, doesn’t exercise and they are causing their kid to be fat.

I personally am literally double my ideal body weight. Yet I eat healthy and exercise very regularly. I unfortunately suffer from health problems. I have not one, but THREE medical conditions that cause weight gain – I take medication for three other conditions where the medication is known to cause massive weight gain is most individuals – and while I used to manage it by being a fitness fanatic, doing intense training several hours a day, six days a week, after a series of serious injuries, for several years I was lucky if I could just walk some days – in fact there were several times where I was bedbound after surgery for months. Only in the last three years have I been able to exercise again.

It’s not a matter of being lazy – I love my exercise. Deep down, beneath the broken body, I am mentally that fitness freak I used to be. It kills me inside being so limited by what I can’t do. That feeling inside of me has led me to finally say, forget the consequences, I’m returning to exercise. So I know go to the gym several times a week and have returnedto taekwondo. I still have serious health problems- in fact my health is still getting worse. I break and tear things easily – in two years of returning to sport, I’ve broken bones, dislocated joints, and torn ligaments over and over.

Yet, on the days I can stand (even when walking is a struggle), I push on with the exercise. Just because I have a BMI that puts me in the morbidly obese range, does not mean that I am lazy. Even when I have bad turns in my health that prevent me from exercising for a month or two, this is not being “lazy” – this is accepting that to keep pushing my body when it is like this, could very well kill me.

Finally, just because a parent is fat, doesn’t mean a child will be. In my case, it is quite the opposite. My daughter is stick thin. In fact, she is so close to the bottom of the normal weight range, that I frequently have to try to feed her more than I eat (she’s 10 years old), simply to stop her being underweight.

My exercise limitations have never stopped her. She trains in taekwondo with me, her school is very pro-active in sport, and I take her to learn sport outside of school – soccer in winter, cricket in summer, as well as swimming whenever we find time to get to the pool. In fact, we’ve had to cut back on her sport (she was doing gymnastics training two lessons of two hours each every week) simply because the poor kid was too exhausted.

While some kids need to start doing exercise, other kids have to be made sure they are not doing too much.

And while IN GENERAL it may be that fat parents are lazy parents, and lazy parents have kids who don’t exercise and are overweight, be VERY careful not to generalise.

Because you do get people like me who are fat through no fault of their own, who are former fitness fanatics but can’t be anymore due to health conditions but who would love to be again, and whose kids are healthy, toned, athletic because they are raised by what you believe in regards in fitness NOT by what your broken body has turned out like.

Being fat myself doesn’t m

Dustin,

Great post and I love what you’re doing for couples and families. I think it is hard to eat healthy and exercise when your partner is doing something different. I would love to see more programs aimed at working with the whole couple/family system. I think it’s much easier to stick with something when your partner/family is helping you and not tempting you back to your old unhealthy ways.

Hi Dustin,

Thank you for this great opportunity. This is a great idea and I would like to try out your program.

Thanks
Krishna