The school sent home their BMI reports last week. These
reports inform parents of their child’s weight, height, and body mass index.
They also let us know where our kids fall on the scale of underweight to obese.
I’m assuming they also share this information with the government and that’s
how states track their childhood obesity rates.
When I was a kid, schools did something similar although BMI
had not been created. They did make us line up in the nurse’s office to be
measured and then checked our spines to make sure they were straight. I hated
this day. Well, actually that day never registered on my radar until after
third grade. Third grade was the year the doctor informed me that I was fat. It
was the year my mother started watching what I ate. It was the year that food
became an obsession. Prior to that, I didn’t have any real memory of what I ate
or whether it mattered.
When I look back on my childhood pictures, I did start to
look a little chubby around third grade. But I wonder now, if that isn’t
normal. Kids seem to begin to grow wider faster than they grow taller in the
years before puberty. I have to wonder whether my doctor did me a disservice by
labeling me. I wonder if I had been allowed to continue on my course, if my
weight wouldn’t have just leveled out on its own.
Instead, his pronouncement set me on course for a life time
of dieting and obsessive exercising, interspersed with periods of weight gain
in which I would throw in the towel and remind myself that I’ve always been fat.
More than that it gave me a new picture of myself: I was fat and therefore
according to our culture I was unattractive. That fact colored my adolescence
and undermined my confidence. These days my weight falls in the top of the
healthy weight on the BMI index, but that number does nothing for my mental and
emotional assumptions. I still feel fat. I think I probably always will.
