Having lived that I damned well know what it does.

Being overweight and then obese was the *whole* focus of my life from the time I was about 3 and put on speed -- at half an adult dose -- to lose weight through college and beyond. It quit being the focus of my life when I became morbidly obese and *that* was the focus.

We didn't have junk food in the house, and I didn't eat it outside the house. I was active. At the ripe old age of 8 I developed acanthosis nigricans (now linked to insulin resistance and being called an epidemic among children) which resulted in regular humiliation and beatings because I was "dirty". Why did I get acne? Because I was fat and dirty. I wore double knit polyester to school from the 7th grade on because the only clothes that fit were made from it. My friends wore jeans. I went to 4 obesity specialists before the age of 12. Of the 4, 3 stated emphatically that I was sneaking food somewhere, which resulted in more beatings for lying and eating off my diet even though I never was sneaking food.

I was called every name in the book at school. At home they finally decided that since diets didn't work perhaps humiliation would, my father then told on a regular basis that I was "two axe handles across the butt." My mother used to grab the fat lumps and rolls on me and tell me it was disgusting. My sisters were encouraged to make fun of me. This wasn't done to be cruel, it was done for motivation as all other motivation had failed.

I lived somewhere between trying to be invisible and bursting with anger at school. And I remember quite distinctly the after effects of school weighings with the kids wanting to know if I broke the scales, guessing my weight (want humiliation, have kids tease you saying they bet you weighed 80 pounds when in fact you weighed 103 in the 4th grade), naming the fat kids at the school and guessing which one weighed the most and a barrage of fat-name calling.

The reason I oppose this bill is that I know both what it means to be fat your whole life and how school weighings impacted me. God love my parents, they honestly tried everything they knew might work to save me from being a fat kid, even things that were vastly more destructive than anything a person outside my family said or did. When I was 32 they offered to pay for a gastric bypass.

It took 20 years of being away from my parents, and several years of therapy, to get over exactly how angry I was at them. They *died* before the anger went away. You want to know what that feels like?

The hell of it is that if they had simply decided at some point that they had done everything they could, and I was doing everything I could, and just accepted that me being a fat kid wasn't a failure on their part or mine then I could have had the one and only thing that would have helped the whole situation: a home where I could come after school and get love and comforting after having had horrible things said to me.

So how is weighing kids going to prevent any of that from happening? How successful are we adults at weight loss? How successful do we honestly think kids are going to be at it under the current view of why they are overweight?

As an aside, I left out the worst parts. Some things I still cannot write.

nevermind,

we must agree to disagree