Posted 9:07 AM by Blah blah

How Being Fat Affects Your Life

This is sad. They say that fat kids are as unhappy as those with cancer. We must be very careful how we influence someone's self-image. And boys too, as well as girls! Especially in Asia, and for Asians, where most people are much skinnier on average than in the U.S., the social shame of being overweight is that much more oppressive.

Study Cites Pervasive Effects of Obesity in Children (Washington Post): "The quality of life for severely obese children and adolescents is roughly equivalent to that of pediatric cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, according to a new study. The research compared very overweight children to ones who were healthy and others who had cancer, and found that obesity colored nearly the entire spectrum of physical, social and emotional activities. Most very overweight children have at least one medical complication and miss four times as much school as normal-weight children. They're also more likely to report feeling socially isolated even though they aren't clinically depressed or anxious, which most of them aren't."