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Body image around health and weight (young people)
Body image is a person’s idea of what they look like. It’s like a picture we have in our mind of what we think other...
Weight and size matter because they can affect a person’s health and wellbeing now and later in life. Most children are weighed at school so that doctors can help them and their parents ensure that they are a healthy weight. Here we will talk about what young people and their parents said about the Body Mass Index or BMI which is a measure used by doctors for deciding if someone is a healthy weight.
The body mass index is a calculation of body fat that takes into account your age, weight and height. The result is given as a number. For adults the BMI categories are:
Some people think that Body Mass Index (BMI) is not a good way of deciding if a person is overweight or obese. It is especially difficult to say if a child or young person is overweight or obese because they are still growing and each child grows at a different rate. Most of the young people we talked to accepted the BMI as a measure, as long as it was only used in a medical sense (by doctors or other health professionals). Many felt unhappy about the words used with the BMI and didn’t like to think of themselves as being ‘obese’.
Among the people we spoke to, there was a lot of confusion about how BMI is measured in adults and children. A few people said they think that BMI is not a good way of measuring whether a person is overweight. Some young people understood it and said they accepted they were ‘obese’ but others rejected their BMI measurement.
Some young people said they knew they were morbidly obese and they found the use of those words scary and worrying. Several found the labels discouraged them from losing weight; they wondered why they would bother just to get from ‘morbidly obese’ to ‘obese’.
Most parents preferred to focus on their child’s good points. They didn’t want to damage their son or daughter’s self-confidence even when they knew s/he had become much larger than their friends and siblings. Not everyone felt like this; one mother said she believed children and their parents needed to be ‘shocked’ into taking drastic action over eating, exercise and health.
Body image is a person’s idea of what they look like. It’s like a picture we have in our mind of what we think other...
There are many health problems that can affect an overweight young person including: Asthma Arthritis Deformity of the lower legs (Blount's disease) Sleep apnoea (a...