Baby Fat is Not Phat

First Lady Michelle Obama launched her initiative to combat childhood obesity.  The First Lady is no better spokeswoman to lead this charge.  She was (and still is) a working mother to beautiful Sasha and Malia.  She knows the difficulty in trying to put food on the table that the kids will actually eat and the difficulty of making the best food choices on the run.

But will African American mothers get it? 

Denene Millner over at My Brown Baby and author of The Sistah’s Rules asks a similar question.  Are African American mothers listening?

I didn’t appreciate my pediatrician’s words—at all—and I’m sure my face made that clear, seeing as I suck at hiding my emotions. Basically, she said my then-5-year-old Mari “is at the 95th percentile, which makes her just shy of clinically obese.” She’ll need more exercise and less macaroni and cheese, the doctor added—I thought a little too glibly. As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t anything wrong with our diet, the girl got plenty of exercise chasing her little sister, and while she was a little thicker than her bony friends, she was hardly fat. Clearly, our pediatrician was seeing something Nick and I did not.

But after we got back home and mumbled a few cuss words in her honor and tried to convince ourselves she didn’t know what she was talking about, we let her pronouncement marinate for a few days. And then we took a good, hard look at our daughter and how the entire family ate and the bottom-line numbers that told our story: We were all “phat”—cute and shapely and pleasantly thick, you know, like how we like it—but just a couple servings of pancakes, peach cobbler, and yes, my 11-cheese macaroni and cheese away from being “fat.” And the truth of it was that all of us—not just Mari—needed a health makeover.

Can you hear Michelle Obama Now?

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! has an ambitious but important goal: to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity within a generation. Let’s Move will give parents the support they need, provide healthier food in schools, help our kids to be more physically active, and make healthy, affordable food available in every part of our country.

Have You Read?

• Childhood Obesity
• Michelle in Her Own Words