Minor Issues: Fat-shamed as a kid, I raise my boys to be healthy

I spent my entire childhood as an obese and overweight child. By the time I turned 12, I had grown accustomed to constant teasing about being fat.

My nicknames included Chubby, Fatso, Fatty Bom Bom and the all-time favourite Fat Albert, adapted from a then popular children's television series, Fat Albert And The Cosby Kids.

I was overweight primarily because of an indulgent paternal grandmother, who looked after me during my first years of life. She and my late father left China with only the clothes on their back. Apparently, she had lost a child to malnutrition. So as the outlook improved for the family, she was constantly preoccupied with feeding them, especially her first grandson - me.

Between extra scoops of milk powder in my infant bottle and extra bowls of instant noodles, I was duly fattened up. My expanding girth and inches gave her much satisfaction, and I was happy to chomp along, until the teasing started when I entered primary school.

At the time, there was no concept of fat-shaming. It was normal to be body-shamed. Everyone did it. Relatives, friends, strangers and even teachers in school did not hesitate to tease me about being fat. This continued until my teens.

When I turned 15, I experienced a growth boost which allowed me to shoot up and consequently allowed the additional weight I was carrying to spread out.

Before my growth spurt, I was never fond of exercise. But after thinning out, I started to do more research about the deleterious effects of being overweight and realised the importance of matching calorie intake with calories burned through activity in order to lead a healthy life.

The discipline of healthy eating and exercise that started in my mid-teens has since become a part of my family's philosophy.

As we raised our two boys, my wife and I have tried to impart the importance of eating well and getting enough physical activity. We never intended to raise boys with six-packs and 1 per cent body fat. The simple goal was to raise healthy kids and spare them the fat-shaming I had experienced.

We started the boys on healthy eating when they were infants. From the time they weaned off milk to solids, they have been fed a steady diet of vegetables and fruit.

This went much easier with our elder son, R, now 19, who has always been a good eater and has been feeding himself since he was 18 months old. When he was a child, he loved peas and carrots and could not get enough of them.

Our younger son, S, now 16, is a fussy and slow eater. Mealtimes with him as an infant were torture. At the time, I was in a high-pressure job and my wife was in graduate school. So when my late mother-in-law, who was staying with us at the time in the United States, offered to take over feeding him, we readily agreed. My mother-in-law had a habit of eating a bowl of salad before each meal and after several weeks, she had S eating salads with her at mealtimes, even as a baby.

To promote healthy eating, we fill the house with clean and healthy food. While the kids were young, we never had any sodas in the fridge and banished chips from our shelves. Till today, they have never developed a chip or cracker habit between meals, which helps them to eat heartily during mealtimes.

Healthy eating is only half the battle won. It needs to be complemented with the discipline to get enough physical activity to burn off the calories taken in.

On the exercise front, playground time for our kids was an absolute imperative as they were growing up. My wife and I would often kick them out of the house at 5pm each day and tell them to return only at 7pm for dinner.

The kids were given free rein on how to spend their playground time. They were allowed to run, skate and cycle around our Housing Board neighbourhood. Sometimes they would explore the small hillock nearby.

We were fortunate to have a playground aunty patrol, made up of a group of geriatric women who would hang around the playground between 5pm to 7pm each day, watching the world go by. They entertained themselves by commenting on the mischief that the kids would get into.

As parents returned from work each day, they would swing by the playground to pick up the kids and check in with the aunty patrol. The knowledge that the aunty patrol would be quick to report any shenanigans served to keep the kids out of trouble on most days.

Our boys' habit for regular exercise today can be traced to that daily playground ritual established when they were kids. We kept up the ritual all year round, even during exam times, believing that some physical activity each day was important, if only to help them fall asleep more easily at bedtime.

As they have outgrown the playground, we have tried to take them for walks or runs. To make things more exciting, we allow them to use their in-line skates during these jaunts.

Even today, when playground time comes around, the habit of doing some daily exercise kicks in and inevitably someone will ask: "What are we doing this evening?"

Since the pandemic, our family's daily dose of evening activity has morphed into a time for high-intensity interval training workouts. These fat-burning workouts are intense and usually last only about 20 minutes.

Source: The Straits Times