So when I spoke to Karen Grace, national director of professional practice at the Australian College of Nurses shortly after the story on nurses in schools, she’d had a pretty tough day. The idea was divisive. Images were being conjured up of kids in the playground queuing to get on scales, being trussed and measured like turkeys.
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That’s not what’s going to happen. And it’s not only weighing and measuring. (I’m only 150 centimetres. Not much can be done about that.) It will also be eyes and ears and bumps-a-daisy. It will be the kind of attention kids used to be able to get from their GPs, in the days when seeing a GP was possible.
Now Dr Nick Fuller is not nearly as enthusiastic as I am (and let me just say here his team at the University of Sydney devised the incredible Live Life Well program, which led to me losing 57 kilograms, so I know he knows what he’s talking about).
He says it’s important not to take weight out of context, to embed our knowledge of what we weigh into education about healthy eating and a healthier life
“If we start fixating on weight, we are reacting to the problem,” he says. Fuller, whose book Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids, is so lovely, so kind to parents you could cry, wants parents to help kids (and themselves) get how to be healthy. You can be healthy at any weight, he says. I wasn’t and plenty aren’t – but he says it’s possible. Don’t put kids on diets. Instead, take a long hard look at your family’s habits. Believe me, you will need support to do that.
I’m a lot healthier now than when I weighed 125 kilograms. I’ve kept most of my weight off, although it turns out that to do that, you have to be much more active than this lazybones was prepared to be. I hate step counters and wall squats with a raging passion.
But I had help, I had an entire army around me to help me fight the battle, and a nurse might have been the first one to help me see the light. Because of Nick Fuller, because of his team, it’s not dark yet.
*Not really
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