I am lined up in the hallway of my elementary school with my entire class. At the head of the line there is a scale and a nurse ready to weigh us. About 10 feet away from her, another woman sits waiting with a list of our names. As each child is weighed, the nurse calls out the number, nice and loud, to the recording secretary.
At age 8, I was 5-foot-2 and weighed 148 pounds. I probably wouldn't remember that, except that these numbers were announced in a voice that carried in front of my entire class, thus doubling the misery I already felt as a fat kid and giving my tormenters new ammunition for the teasing they practiced daily.
Sadly, things are only getting worse for fat and even normal-weight kids. Public health officials proclaim a war on the obesity epidemic, and they carry it out with relish but not always with common sense. The latest salvo is the issuance of Body Mass Index report cards to schoolchildren. According to the New York Times, several states with money to spare have started handing out obesity report cards, tucked not-so-discreetly inside regular report cards.
At the same time, many of these schools continue to serve sugar- and fat-laden lunches. This echoes our culture's confusion about food, reflected so vividly in the covers of women's magazines touting weight-loss diets and rich dessert recipes simultaneously. No wonder kids - and adults - are confused. No wonder they're eating too much of the wrong things. And yes, there are health consequences that need to be addressed.
But treating and preventing obesity are difficult and complex matters. As they react to statistics about fat children and related health consequences, public health officials need to remember another epidemic, that of eating disorders. According to the Eating Disorders Coalition, 13 percent of girls in high school purge their food and 40 percent of 9-year-old girls have dieted. The Coalition and other health organizations cite socio-cultural pressures, such as media and entertainment messages, as risk factors in developing anorexia and bulimia, both of which are deadly diseases.
If you've ever known someone battling those illnesses, you know how very difficult and entrenched they can be. Listen to an anorexic or bulimic talk about her body - and yes, most are female - and you'll hear unmistakable echoes of our everyday media diet: Your body's not acceptable. You're fat. You're ugly. You are of no value unless you are thin, and you can't be thin enough.
Well-meaning school officials are adding to these messages by sending home obesity report cards. Their effects include normal-weight girls refusing to eat and parents reacting with anger to schools' intrusion into the private matter of what they feed their children. Did school officials really think that parents of overweight children didn't already know about their kids' weight? Is the increase in childhood obesity occurring because parents are oblivious to one of the most obvious phenomena in the world?
While the health problems related to obesity are serious and demand addressing, it is frightening to think of what might happen as public health authorities join forces, deliberately or otherwise, with our thinness-obsessed entertainment and fashion industries.
Obesity report cards are instruments of shame, not of healing.
Send kids home with a good vegetable soup recipe, but don't send a piece of paper that only compounds the problem. Having my weight yelled out in front of my classmates didn't help me lose pounds, and obesity report cards won't do it for today's children, either.
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* CONNIE CLARK writes about current events and ideas from a moral perspective. Clark, an Episcopal priest and chaplain in Evanston, Wyo., welcomes comments at chaplconnie@yahoo.com. You may also comment at religioneditor@sltrib.com.
