Recommended reading

If you read Norwegian, anyway. You should read this. Kari Jaquesson's blog post where she basically says that it's wrong to perform gastric bypass surgery on children. It's just fascinating to read the comments. She is spot on about how the media gives us such a one-sided view of ... everything. That may well be a big part of why so many people can apparently read a simple blog post and not actually manage to understand anything of what it says. It's fascinating. Jaquesson writes it's really difficult and commenters respond how can you say it's so easy!. What?

If you're nine years old and significantly overweight, then yeah, your parents are doing something wrong. At that age you don't decide what you eat. It's probably difficult for parents to accept that they are the ones who gave their child bad habits, but with little kids, where else does it come from? And it doesn't have to be about obesity. I myself am skinny, which is supposedly always a good thing - you can't be too rich or too thin, right? Well, if you get an extremely aggressive form of leukemia and then double sided pneumonia almost immediately after beginning your treatment, and as a result you drop 25 kilos in three weeks ... that's a situation where it's really not good to be ten kilos underweight. This actually happened to my second cousin, except fortunately she was in really good shape and not underweight, so she made it.

But I really was too thin, and I could never manage to put on weight, even though I ate normal healthy food and there was never any focusing on dieting and weight control at our house when I was growing up. I finally did put on the missing weight - when I moved out and starting eating most of my meals alone. I was very picky as a child - very picky - and there was a lot of focus on this during mealtimes and also partly when food was discussed. I was scolded sometimes for being such a finicky eater and I was always urged to sample new foods, to not be so difficult, etc. My father took this to an extreme by sometimes claiming that when I said I didn't like whatever it was (after tasting it and usually eating the full meal even though I didn't like it) this was something I was just saying to make myself interesting, and in fact I did like the food. IMO that's pretty disrespectful. Sorry, dad, if you read this. But that's just not right.

And I don't think it was too smart either, because as I say, while I was living with my parents and eating with them, I never managed to make the weight gain that I needed. But it didn't take long after I started living alone before I started putting on weight ... AND also started to be more experimental in both my cooking and my eating. So yeah, I totally agree that parents are an essential key to this problem. No matter how well-meaning they are.