Well, thanks for telling me how to raise my child!
I'm not sure how I managed to avoid killing off my three children prior to this event. I'm still steamed about it, though.
I'm standing in line at Wal Mart earlier this week. My almost-5-year-old son has been very patient with a long line of errands during the day. He asks if he can have a coke. I tell him yes, as a treat (as a rule, I don't let my kids have a lot of cokes, they bounce off the walls). He goes to the cold case and pulls out a diet coke, which is the only kind that me or any of my kids drink, none of us can even stand the taste of regular soft drinks anymore.
From behind me I hear, "OMG, you're not going to let him drink a DIET COKE, are you???"
I turn and there's a woman in line behind me with a horrified look on her face. I just raised my eyebrows at her, unsure whether she was seriously asking me this or not. She begins to lecture me at some length about the evils of nutrisweet. She says it's poisonous. I manage to interject that I believe that sugar is poisonous, and she actually makes the following statement: "Oh, sugar is a health food compared to artificial sweeteners!" She goes on to explain that she is a certified nutritionist (and may I just add that in my world, there's not much that carries with it less credibility than that particular distinction). So she KNOWS what she's talking about!
Okay, I have to admit, my diplomacy failed me here. The woman in question was, quite literally, almost as wide as she was tall. She was not a tad overweight, she was obese. Perhaps morbidly obese. So I'm standing there listening to this lecture, and I'm looking pointedly at her midsection. When she finally stopped to take a breath, without moving my eyes from her midsection, I asked her what exactly she would recommend as an effective weight control measure in place of artificial sweeteners. I may have had a sarcastic expression on my face. I can't recall.
In any case, once I explained to her that I have 3 children, this one's my youngest, and they're all still alive and well despite my nutritional shortcomings, she decamped to find another line to stand in (where, presumably, the mothers weren't so fundamentally deficient).
I'm not sure what pisses me off the most about this episode. I don't like people who offer parenting advice to strangers. If I want to permit my children to juggle flamethrowers, it's noneya. Secondly I am thoroughly aware that too much aspartame is not a good thing. Too much ANYTHING is not a good thing. But if I am going to permit my child to have a soft drink, it is darn well not going to be a sugar-stuffed cherry vanilla dr pepper. It will be diet, and there's an end to it. I don't let them drink capri suns or other sugar-stuffed "healthy for kids" drinks either.
But the number one thing that torques me off about this is probably un-pc and I apologize in advance if it offends anyone: How DARE you, as an extremely overweight person, presume to prattle to anyone about your qualifications in the nutrition field??? That's like an illiterate doing ads for hooked on phonics. You have taken none of your knowledge and actually put it into action for yourself, so IMO, you have exactly zero credibility. You obviously don't believe what you're saying to the extent that you've been able to implement it (or worse yet, you have, and look where it's gotten you), so why should I?
I am not down on the extremely obese, please do not misunderstand. I know that there are many who are in this category who HAVE educated themselves and are making progress. It's not the fact that she was that big that offends me - it's the shoving her "credentials" down my throat.
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