Pixee Doesn't Have A Witty Title For You

Post by Michael Carr: twitter.com/MrMike_62/status/931598887986565120

One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.

There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”

My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”

To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”

By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.

After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”

Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.

When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.

Is

Real

She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.

Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.” 

I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.

1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).

You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.

She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.

And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!

2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.

Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.

My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:

SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.

She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:

If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.

FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!

You’re ignorant and fatphobic and have no clue what you’re talking about. Go read @bigfatscience if you want the studies, they keep track better than we do these days.

Weight talk is dangerous and causes all kinds of mental health problems, including but not limited to eating disorders. Dieting in childhood damages the metabolism and makes kids MORE likely to grow up fat, not LESS.

When administering anesthesia is basically the only time I can think of that definitely considers weight, and there are so many other factors that go into determining dosage there (drug interactions, conditions/disorders, food consumption)

And of course, metabolism, which is different for everyone. Weight gain can be an indicator of a slow metabolism just as never gaining weight can be an indicator of a very fast metabolism (I have a friend who was doing everything he could to hit 100lbs and half the time he would binge, he’d end up losing a pound rather than gaining).

Here’s the counter intuitive part, because society likes to view us fat people as if we consume more of everything - more space so we should pay for it, more fabric so our clothes should cost more, more food, more everything. But so many factors go into administering anesthesia that my morbidly obese father might take less drugs to make it through a procedure than an incredibly thin, fit person who has a ridiculously fast metabolism. He might take more than someone still fat but smaller than him who has a very slow metabolism. 

And it depends on how it gets metabolized. If it goes through the liver, there are a lot of precautions that need to be taken as metabolizing means storing in fat. Liver disorders can seriously slow this down. Kidney disorders can also slow this down as the liver often tries to metabolize fat soluble substances so they don’t get stored/build up.

In fact, how your kidneys and liver work is by far more important and not at all indicated by your weight.

Want to collaborate on a Google Doc with Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Dickinson, Dickens and Poe? 

Click here. Start typing. Enjoy the hilarity. 

aND FYODOR DOSTOYVESKY ADDED ‘ I do not wish to make myself a laughing-stock before these idle listeners.”

I made Emily Dickinson and Charles Dickens fight

Shakespeare helped me insult Poe

The real Turnabout Intruder in this episode is that McCoy’s being a hardass about science and logic while Spock is hooked on a feeling

Fanfic authors come to me,

Don’t get a canon otp,

The Archive is in front of me,

Okay, so here’s the deal.  Tali loves the fridge.  I don’t know why, but every single time we open it, she bolts for it and jumps in.  She crawls into the back of the fridge and nestles int the smallest little corner she can.  Now naturally, my biggest fear has been that I’ll close the fridge without knowing she’s in there.  And of course, today I went to go grab my Brita filter to pour myself some water.  I wasn’t really watching the fridge, and I just opened and closed it really quickly to put the Brita back while I was looking somewhere else.  And then I looked around and realized that Tali had been in the kitchen, and now she was nowhere in sight.  So immediately, I throw open the fridge door, and there is is, hanging out in the back, content as can be.