What the fuck is wrong with parents?

[TheBlueKoala]

Not fat shaming. Just pointing out the obvious: obesity is a serious health problem. So now we got WLI for adults who need medical assistance to eat less. But why are they giving shit to their children? You can't say it's because you can't resist it- not your body. I think it should be a reason for a safeguard alert when you have an obese 4 year old. SS should get involved just as if someone would be starving their child because it's parental neglect to serve your children shit and make them face a future of illnesses and eating disorders. AIBU?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jan/25/uk-gp-obese-children-research

My <now adult> children used to love making shortbread & biscuits for our work-men & used to hope that there would be some leftover.
Short bread is banned in our house, home made or shop bought. Refined sugar, white flour, low in fiber, protein, and micronutrients. It is so unhealthy I am shuddering reading your post. Flapjack would have been better for your dc and probably for the work men too.

I live in a pretty deprived area yet I don't actually see many fat and obese children. There are a few but not loads.

I just find this kind of reaction so OTT and ridiculous. Surely if the rest of your diet is ok, having shortbread from time to time, even with (shudder) white sugar, is fine.
Loved making shortbread with my gran, make it with my daughter now. We are both fine.

I can answer for my exh.

He was diagnosed with T2D about 10 years ago. His weight has yo-yo'd since as he's fluctuated between trying to lose the weight and reverse the T2D and not seeing why he should.

Our children are adults now so don't visit as often and are also in control of what they eat but, when they were younger, his diagnosis had the opposite effect to you'd expect.

He was, understandably, very upset at his diagnosis and spoke to me at length about it at the time (we'd split up by then).

He was very focused on sugar being a poison - "I've been literally poisoning my body!" "I'm not eating that shit anymore. I'm not being complicit in poisoning myself!"

But he still wanted to buy the crap he used to eat and so would buy it for the childen instead.

They only saw him EOW so they mostly ate with me but every time they came home from his, there were tales of absolutely appalling food they'd eaten and every time they came home with large tubs of Haribos or this Millions sweets. Everytime. I had to throw them out because my cupboards ended up looking lime the PTA cupboard the morning of a school disco!

Anyway, I did speak with him about it.

He explained that he was really resentful that he could no longer eat sugar or the sorts of food that he'd eaten before that contributed to his weight gain and T2D and that it made him happy to see his children enjoying it instead! In short, he was resentful that he could no longer 'treat' himself or have 'nice things' and so ate vicariously through them.

I pointed out to him that he was giving them the exact foods that had caused his illness and that, if he considered sugar to be a poison, then he was effectively choosing to poison them and encourage similar eating patterns in them that he was now rejecting; that he was setting them up for the same health problems. He disagreed and said he just wanted his kids to know he loved them.

He did take it on board a little but it only had a limited impact on how he chose to feed them. He equated really unhealthy foodstuffs with love.

I can't speak for anyone else though.

I completely agree with this.

One of my friends refuses to eat daal because, in his culture, it is poor people's food. It baffles him that its on restaurant menus in UK and that anyone would buy it because, in his family, it signified not having enough money or 'punishment' - he calls it 'punishment food' 😅

Yet daal is a healthy food that is also really cheap to make!

I had an Italian boyfriend once who taught me to make Italian 'peasant food'. All healthy and requiring minimal effort or work. And great as I was a single parent at the time on a lower income!

I work with a lot of schools and the healthy eating policies are ridiculous.

Children are allowed a piece of fruit or toast. Unfortunately, Fruit Winders also count as fruit in the majority of schools!

At primary school, my daughter had a single Dairy Milk minature from the Christmas Celebrations tub removed from her lunchbox. When I queried it, I was told she could have a Penguin or similar because it was a chocolate coated biscuits and had less chocolate on it. Except that a single Dairy Milk miniature has half the sugar and is less that half the calories of a Penguin.

Makes no sense.

😂 Seriously, banned just like drugs and porn? No fan of shortbread myself but in our house nothing gets "banned". You eat less of certain types of food (shortbread/sweets/crisps etc) but when you start treating it like narcotics it sounds like a case of orthorexia and is not ideal if you want your children to grow up with a healthy relationship to food.

People want to be friends with their children these days far too much. It’s ok for your kids to tell you they hate you when you say no in fact it means they feel secure. I just happened to have a very good friend who I had known since I was 19 who ended up being a psychologist and this was a very good piece of advice she gave me after I told her DS had said this to me.

The different times for children to eat has always baffled me @PoppyFleur our kids are all adults now but lost of my friends all had kids very close in age, we met one set of friends at ante natal classes. They all fed their kids earlier and different food. I didn’t even know it was a thing as my family never did this. But as adults one is a bit overweight, one is a vegan and one is a complete gym bunny and in to sport, the rest, nothing to note food or exercise wise.

As a child snacking was forbidden and my Mother told me eating in the street was common and not allowed. I’m 59 and by then those attitudes were falling by the wayside but my Mother had me when she was 41 so was raised by a woman who had attitudes more like my friends grandparents.

I have 3 children. One is overweight, one is underweight and my other is average weight for their height.
I don't do anything differently. They all eat the same main meals, all take similar packed lunch, all have access to snacks.
Strangely I would say my child who's overweight is the healthiest because she does an insane amount of exercise.
We do have chocolate and crisps as well as fruit, crackers and bread sticks but once the unhealthy stuff is gone I don't tend to replace it quickly.

Shuddering? You may have serious issues with food.

Yes, this idea that restricting junk food at all will lead to them developing eating disorders/cause obesity later in life, seems to have taken on a life of its own and become a handy excuse for people to not take any responsibility for their children’s diets.
I would love to know what sort of evidence it is based on. I am sure there are many people with eating problems who can look back at their childhood and see a plausible root cause in their parents’ weird or overly restrictive attitudes to food, but somehow it has jumped to it being not ok to tell a child to just eat a couple of biscuits rather than the whole pack, or say no you can’t have crisps now because it will be dinner in half an hour.

And this type of approach to food is just as bad as people who only provide UPF's.

Balance is so important.

I’m in 2 minds with this.

Going by my own personal experience, DC2 who is 16 has always been on the 99th percentile from 2 weeks old.

His whole childhood we were told he was morbidly obese, even tho he was head and shoulders above his peers.

He is now 6ft 4 and weighs over 20s he is a professional athlete, training several times a day, 6 days a week (plus midweek and weekend games) with under 10% body fat, he is an absolute beast of a kid.

The difference with him tho, you can visibly see he is NOT obese/over weight, however he would still be included in the obese statistics.

The BMI calculator isn’t fit for purpose, it doesn’t included a lot of anomalies,

BMI is useful data on a population level (ex. for research purposes), but not on an individual level to determine one's health. BMI doesn't account for things like body fat distribution so it isn't always an accurate determinant for how healthy someone is.

People are permissive and think restricting snacks and sweets is mean and horrible.

and that give an apple and vegetable sticks for a snack is akin to bullying.

low impulse control and ill disciplined with themselves and their children

“Generally eat the same”

the slight difference in snacking fizzy drinks or other things will be the margins where the weight gain is happening. As well possibly a lower motablism or less active life than their sibling. etc

and even more likely hiding treats in their room

It is not saying a quarter of kids are obese. It says a quarter of GPs have seen an overweight kid under 4.

So, say each GP has 100 kids under 4 on their books. If one of those kids is obese, then it makes the grade. However, only 1 in 4 GPs have a kid under 4 who is obese. That would be a quarter of 1 percent. 0.25 percent. 1 in 400. That is a very low number.

Stop the pearl clutching.

I really hoped that poster a parody, but who knows. I have one fat teen two skinny. The fat teen is by far the healthiest of the three. We all eat the same meals, the fat one, when they snack it’s raw veg (carrot, cucumber, pepper and lettuce, the skinny ones eat mainly chocolate, crisps and pizza. All 3 do lots of sport.

It’s genes that make the difference. The thin ones look just like me, my side of the family are all naturally thin. The fat child looks just like their dad. All of his family are overweight despite not seemingly eating much other than healthy food.

ThevGP is very unhelpful (try doing more sport, etc). I think that by the time they’re adults we’ll have isolated the gene causing the weight gain and have prescribed WLI to these people based on an actual genetic deficiency.

i used to get the shit ripped out of me at school as my parents never sent in cakes or sweets for the class for my birthday. they’d send me with big bags of satsumas or lychees. Meanwhile all the kids still scarfed them down.

made my own bread for a science project with sundried tomato and was accused of lying

I still love the smell of an old school health shop where you can scoop your own lentils 😅

£5 for strawberries? How many grams ?

id recommend trying your greengrocer or market. It’ll be half that. Especially if you plan on eating them pretty quickly.

or frozen berries and then low heat for 5 mins to drizzle on your yoghurt or granola.

£5 is madness

No one is FORCED to eat anything. Fresh fruit and vegetables are probably more easily accessible and cheaper than at any time in human history.

Both my children were overweight up to the age of 11 despite having relatively slim parents, home cooked mostly vegetarian meals and very limited sweets, chocs and cakes. They both did swimming, volleyball, rugby/netball and walked to school. At 11/12 as if by magic they both grew taller and lost lots of weight and both have been very slim and healthy since.
However, I don’t think parents should buy their kids junk food-it should be a very occasional thing, not daily.

This, especially for our autistic kids. They rely on junk or will not eat. Ive tried. If it wasnt available every where then they would never have tasted it and had their safe foods become shit foods. It is sickening. I had all the ideas and was healthy eating but they consistenly will not try new things. Eldest has arfid. Losing a lot weight, she relies on white bread with cheese and sugar treats to get some calories in!

You’re too angry about this. It’s giving eating disorder

an obese 4 year old is not a safeguarding concern in any way. Don’t be ridiculous.

As a former Registered Dietitian, I am worried by a lot of things about the general confusion around obesity and healthy eating. For instance, the idea that a child's weight is judged as excessive if it's on the 90th+ centile(which some people seem to be saying) Comparing children with others of similar age isn't a scientific way to judge their health because in an underweight population, an actually underweight child would be judged as fine and a healthy weight child as overweight. I thought the idea was to look at the height and weight and they should match (more or less) So if a child is on the 90th centile for weight but the 20th for height, they are overweight. Also children's growth and development doesn't necessarily follow a linear path. for instance, boys have their growth spurts later than girls, so many boys are 'short', sometimes until they are 16+. Girls' have their growth spurt earlier and also tend to be at their 'fattest' in early puberty but they normalise later, as long as their diet and lifestyle are suitable.
And while being nasty to people (adults and especially children) who are overweight, si-called 'fat shaming, is cruel and ineffective, so is denying that an obviously overweight person has a problem. People's value as humans is not dependent on their body shape, but pretending that someone with an unhealthy weight is 'fine' and denying them any help is wrong. Sadly, there is a lot of healthy eating advice doled out by people working in schools and horrifyingly, sometimes by medical personnel, which is incorrect and can be harmful. It's better if parents get their advice from properly qualified people and try to see the general message behind 'healthy eating' advice, rather than getting stuck on one particular detail.

It's not even as simple as saying it's cakes and biscuits. A pp stated ww2 generations didn't eat like that....... They most certainly did, but.... They were handmade and all meals were cooked from scratch with basic ingredients. They actually didn't have much fruit, certainly no juice. And constant snacking didn't exist. You don't need snacks. When I was a kid you disappeared for hours into the woods running around playing cowboys and Indians, with no food or drink. You came back for dinner because you were hungry and thirsty.

Stop snacking, stop feeding low quality fast food. Eat simply and well. Get out doors.