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Big Girl

Thoughts on this? I'm not sure whether to cheer and give her a hug, or to shake her and shove a carrot stick in her mouth.

L

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Here, in the rural Southern Tioga School District (Pennsylvania), the schools distribute state-mandated Body Mass Index reports even as they continue to serve funnel cakes and pizza for breakfast. Some students have physical education for only half the school year, even though 34 percent of kindergartners were overweight or at risk for it.

Among children, teasing and weight have always gone together, but now, says Doris Sargent, principal of Mansfield’s elementary school, there are so many overweight children that “you can’t pick on everybody.”

Holly Berguson, the homecoming queen at North Penn Junior-Senior High School here, wears a size 20, a fact cited by her many admirers as proof of this community’s generous attitude toward weight, its proud indifference to the “Baywatch” bodies on television.

“I don’t care how big I am,” said Holly, 17, who is insulin resistant, a condition that often precedes Type 2 diabetes. “It’s not what you look like, it’s who you are.”

Her confidence about her body — she is a lifeguard and wears a bathing suit without embarrassment — says something about how the perception of childhood obesity has changed from earlier generations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/health/08obesity.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th

Labels: Current Events

posted by Lindsay @ 8:52 AM