Dances With Fat schreibt über eine Studie, in der schon Zehnjährige angeben, sich den Finger in den Hals zu stecken, um abzunehmen. Die Studie schließt mit der oberschlauen Bemerkung, man müsse den Kindern beibringen, dass Kotzen keine gute Idee zur Gewichtskontrolle sei.

„It’s not about how much vomiting is encouraged or discouraged for weight control. It’s how much weight control is encouraged or discouraged. (…)

I’m pretty sure that kids don’t think that vomiting is a good idea. I think that we’ve created a world where kids actually think that making themselves vomit is somehow healthier than being fat because they’ve been convinced that unhealthy behaviors will lead to health if they make you thin. (If that’s true then we should be passing out cocaine with school lunches.) Or they no longer care about being healthy, they just want to look like Mrs. Obama says they should so she’ll stop trying to convince everyone to bully them. And that’s a problem. A huge problem. But luckily, an easily correctable one.

The solution that I propose is to be for healthy children, not against obese ones. It’s easy to do: Be for access to affordable healthy food, for access to movement that they enjoy (maybe different PE classes for kids who are athletic and kids who would rather play Dance Revolution), be for the mental health that is only possible when kids are not constantly stigmatized by society because of their size, or terrified of being stigmatized by society if their size changes.”