Obesity

[screenman]

Quote from the Lincolnshire Echo newspaper,


"He also believes his administration must now make significant inroads into the problem of child obesity.
Ours is one of the worst counties in the country for the issue, with almost one in three leaving primary school either overweight or obese.
"We have worked hard to tackle obesity levels but we can only go so far with telling people how to live their lives. If the money was available then we would definitely support the building of more health facilities and leisure centres across Lincolnshire. "There are simply not as many as there should be," he said."

How on earth they hope to do anything with that problem around here I have not a clue, fat lazy parents who think their obese kids only have puppy fat on them, or are just cuddly. Without realising what long term damage they could be doing.

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[MarkF]

What is it with Lincolnshire? I rode around the coast last summer, Skeggy, Ingoldmells, Mablethorpe, the coast is rammed with fatso's on mobility scooters, never seen anything like it!

 

[tyred]

Parents pass their bad eating habits on to their children imo. It was the case for me personally and even years later and with a strong desire to be fitter in recent years, diet is something I still struggle with.

Something I have noted many times while cycling on the Antrim coast road "area of outstanding natural beauty" is that I often stop at places where there is car parking to take photos or admire the view and more often than not, there will be a car there with fat parents shovelling chips down the throat of their fat kids; they will then proceed to throw the chip wrappings out the window rather than walk 10 yards to the bin. I really feel sorry for those kids as they are being brought up to eat rubbish and take no exercise and simply won't know any better unless they make a real effort to change their lives later on. The parents don't mean any harm but are in fact doing their children a serious amount of damage.

 

[vernon]

One only has to look at some of the foodstuffs on sale to see why some folk are obese in Lincolnshire.

I am far from svelte but even I was suprised by a whole bunch of shops/cafes near Lincoln Station selling fat burgers, roast ham shanks, belly pork, and other fatty wares.

Gainsbourough has a similar collection of epicurian delights.

 

[hobbitonabike]

Nutrition should be taught in ALL schools alongside different types of activity so those who are not sport orientated learn how to make activity part of their lifestyle. Too often kids are put off keeping active as this is defined as sport in schools and not all kids are sporty. I make an effort to make sure my kids are kept healthy and active and it infuriates me when other parents fill their kids with junk, don't do anything active with them and let them have whatever they want.

 

[fossyant]

What is it with Lincolnshire? I rode around the coast last summer, Skeggy, Ingoldmells, Mablethorpe, the coast is rammed with fatso's on mobility scooters, never seen anything like it!

Wait till you get to the US. They also have 4x4 sized mobility scooters.

The sheer numbers in Disney was crazy, and most of the users were just fat. We saw one couple, in matching 4x4 style scooters, drive from the hotel, through the car park , and pulled up next to their SUV. Both got out, and then climbed UP into the truck. WTF no disability, just lazy and fat.

 

[fossyant]

There is a lad at our Secondary that is huge. He was about twice the size of the kids when in primary, and why his mum hasn't controlled his eating ? You can see him gasping for breath at the slightest exertion. Facially he looks like he's been inflated to 100 PSI. The parents need shooting.

 

[User169]

Feckless fatties!!

 

[Fnaar]

What is it with Lincolnshire? I rode around the coast last summer, Skeggy, Ingoldmells, Mablethorpe, the coast is rammed with fatso's on mobility scooters, never seen anything like it!

Maybe there was some kind of mobility-scooter-rally going on
Actually, there ARE more and more of them about. I'm always shocked when I see people my age on them (50s)... all they probably need* is a nudge in the right direction diet-wise, and a bicycle. But many choose to ride the mobility-scooter to hell

*(needed...I guess for some there are serious conditions that are irreversible)

 

[tyred]

Nutrition should be taught in ALL schools alongside different types of activity so those who are not sport orientated learn how to make activity part of their lifestyle. Too often kids are put off keeping active as this is defined as sport in schools and not all kids are sporty. I make an effort to make sure my kids are kept healthy and active and it infuriates me when other parents fill their kids with junk, don't do anything active with them and let them have whatever they want.

I hated PE at school. All football, hockey, etc. I am absolutely not competitive and team sports like these have never appealled to me and I grew to hate PE and by definition all sports. I was always th elast to be picked for teams as I was rubbish, probably due to a genuine lack of interest in kicking a bag of wind around a muddy field in shorts in January while being pelted with hailstones. It put me off any kind of sport for years to come. I was labelled as a lazy lump by the PE teachers.

Yet I have always been happy to walk all over the side of a mountain or in recent years cycle 100+ miles per week. I believe it is important to help people find an activity they enjoy and encourage them to do it rather than force them to take part in games in which they have no interest.

 

[pplpilot]

I hated PE at school. All football, hockey, etc. I am absolutely not competitive and team sports like these have never appealled to me and I grew to hate PE and by definition all sports. I was always th elast to be picked for teams as I was rubbish, probably due to a genuine lack of interest in kicking a bag of wind around a muddy field in shorts in January while being pelted with hailstones. It put me off any kind of sport for years to come. I was labelled as a lazy lump by the PE teachers.

Yet I have always been happy to walk all over the side of a mountain or in recent years cycle 100+ miles per week. I believe it is important to help people find an activity they enjoy and encourage them to do it rather than force them to take part in games in which they have no interest.

I was EXACTLY the same, with all the other lessons/subjects too, I hated school, left without a single qualification. It was only when I left I put myself through college/uni to do the stuff I wanted to do and the stuff I was interested in. I'm not for a split second saying I'm right, in fact I had a terrible attitude towards school.

 

[Davidc]

It's not just Lincolnshire, I see it here and everywhere else I go. Not just in the UK either.

I agree with EbonyWillow above, that we need to emphasise exercise not just sport. I'm greatly in favour of children being encouraged into sports and adults into continuing with them, but there are many people like me who aren't turned on by most competitive sports

Shame the quotation in the first post doesn't include cycling in its activity list. A BMX and skateboard track wouldn't go amiss.

Might help if our irresponsible tabloid press encouraged parents to get their children playing outside, rather than scaring them into forcing the children to stay indoors wrapped in cotton wool on the entirely false basis that the outside world is too dangerous to enter.

 

[vernon]

It's all well and good having a go at the parents but if they don't have the knowledge to recognise that obesity is not a healthy option then expecting them to bring about change is futile.

Parents don't force their children to stay indoors. Anecdotally an individual can claim that parents adopt such restrictive behaviour but from my point of view as someone who deals with 1400 kids per year in a high school, very few kids are cocooned by their parents.

However, console and computer games combined with social media facilitate interaction while being inactive. A sizeable proportion of the kids in my school turn up bleary eyed in the few days after the new release of a blockbuster game having induged in saturation gameplay overnight.

I don't have a solution and if one exists it will not bring about instant change. Patterns of behaviour that lead to obesity can be deeply embedded in a community and a short sharp shock solution is unlikely to yields results. A long term plan with support packages with be expensive - who should fund it?

 

[tyred]

It's all well and good having a go at the parents but if they don't have the knowledge to recognise that obesity is not a healthy option then expecting them to bring about change is futile.

I agree with what you say but find it hard to believe that people in the developed west are ignorant of the dangers of being overweight in this day and age. The information is everywhere. All bus stops and phone boxes around where I work have huge big posters showing a photo of a belly and the information that the waist measurement should be no more than 37" for a man and 32" for a woman for the past few weeks. You can't miss these things surely? Like tobacco health warnings, it's entirely up to the individual what they do with this information but, still, you can't not be aware of it.

 

[ColinJ]

It had been very quiet here for a number of years, in my little cobbled back street, but I've noticed an increase in noise over the past year or so. This has been due to an until recently unfamiliar activity - children playing outdoors! A group of them have got together and are doing the kind of stuff I did when I were a lad - running around dressed as knights and waving wooden swords, playing football/tennis/basketball, racing their bikes, rollerskating, or just generally running about screaming and being young, demented and happy!

The noise can be a bit of a pain, and I'm not keen on the football slamming against my kitchen window from time to time, but it is good to see them enjoying themselves.

One of the factors is that their parents are happy to let them out of their sight. There isn't much traffic on these backstreets, and what traffic there is moves slowly and can be heard a long way off because of the cobbles, so playing in the street is safe. The parents also seem to trust the rest of us not to be perverts and kidnappers, despite this being a small town which has an unsolved murder of a teenager from years back.

I must admit that I have to restrain myself whenever that ball hits my window though ... I don't want to end up like the old bloke who used to scream at the child me and confiscate my football whenever it went over the wall into his garden!