The Wrong way to Attack Obesity

My first response to this ad was “what? You are a little girl. You don’t seem as you’re 13 or older?” Then your eyes stare into the girl’s weary eyes, your eyes move downward her bloated body, edited for a gloomy yet serious effect. Your eyes are automatically drawn to the bold red font that is hard to miss against the black and white edit; “WARNING…” I stared harder into the little girls eyes once more and BOOM! It hit me. This ad was a play on words, she really isn’t a “little” as in petite girl, she is obese and a” bigger than her age” girl. But, what really shocked me was this WAS a Stop Obesity campaign. This wasn’t the ever so frequent skinny is the best advertising ad; this was a Stop Obesity ad.

This ad is a part of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta campaign aimed to shock parents into action. Unhappy, ill-fated, bullied faced children are being used to have an impact on parents. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s goal is to first get parents aware their children are in fact obese.  Shame, shocking statistics, and scare tactics are all a part of this campaign to get some attention to this issue.

I have a few questions to ask though. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, why aren’t you advocating a healthy lifestyle for these children and parents? Offering solutions and changes to incorporate in the children’s lives to actually start seeing results in the state? Why attack the insecurity of obese children, the one insecurity that that society bashes everyday whether someone is obese or not. Why?

This ad presses obese kids to think their appearance is their parents fault. They will turn to to parents and ask why am I fat? All the blame is now on parents for not making their child look like a socially accepted “little girl”. Well Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, I also guess it’s the parents fault this child will get bullied everyday by another careless child for her big body. It’s the parent’s fault an obese child will loss less and less self-confidence because of the comments other “little girls” make about her. It’s the parents fault an obese child will take their life to no longer deal with society’s pressure to be that “little girl”. Reversing obesity should start with approaching the patients’ health, daily activity, and consumption, not their appearance and who is to blame for it.  

This ad is just doing more harm than good. The ad doesn’t focusing on ways to reverse obesity but rather adds to the social stigma of what everyone should look like. Yes the girl isn’t little in size; people may call her fat and big. But if she is obese, her main issue is having too much fat on her body. Overweight doesn’t necessarily equal obese. Obesity means having too much body fat. Targeting how to get rid of this fat should be the main objective of this company. Not size, shape or outward appearance of the child. Why degrade the size of a child because it’s not what all little girls look like? Look inward, fix the fat.