The most famous of the many tales of my greed as a child was when I wriggled out of my high-chair onto the table in front of me, crawled across to where my six-year-old brother was sitting and nicked his custard pudding before he had a chance to grab it back.
All while my mother was standing at the stove, her back turned to us.
As he shouted with rage and she turned around, I scooped out the entire egg custard and immediately shoved it into my mouth triumphantly.
Susannah Frieze with her mother Juliet Jowitt who she says ‘wanted me to be the skinny kid she never was’
For years I thought the greedy part was that I had finished my pudding and scoffed his on top – but decades later my mother told me that, no, it was because I hadn’t had one and he had, so I took matters into my own grasping little hands.
‘But why weren’t we both given a pudding?’ I asked her then.
‘Because I could see you were already a greedy little girl,’ she said blithely, ‘whose endearing chubbiness was going to turn into fat unless we headed this off at the pass. So no puddings for you.’
I remember gaping at her. ‘But I wasn’t even two years old!’
No puddings, no toast at breakfast, a sweet from the sweet tin only on Sundays, whereas my skinny brother got to have one every evening: this was the rank unfairness of my childhood, all because my mother so badly wanted me to be the skinny kid she never was.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when she tricked me into going on a diet when I was only 11 years old.
I remember the family doctor – who had been primed by her – looking down at the scales that I was standing on and saying gravely, ‘Oh dear, seven stone. That’s too heavy for your age.’
I burned with shame, despite the fact that, as I found out much later, seven stone is an entirely acceptable weight for the sturdy little girl I was.
From then on, throughout my adolescence, I was put on endless diets and regimes: the grapefruit diet, the Scarsdale, the Beverly Hills, the Cambridge…
By the time I went to Oxford University, I never wanted to see another spoonful of cottage cheese or chew through a tough piece of Ryvita ever again.
Maddeningly for my mother, I was fat nonetheless. Yo-yo-ing miserably from a size 12 to 20 and back again throughout my teens and 20s, I stayed stuck in that mindset of thinking that, if I could just conquer my greed, I could lose weight. But it never worked for long.
Now 55 and a happy but undeniably curvaceous size 16, I look back on the first 40 years of my life as a pendulum swing between my battle against the flab and my need to eat my way through the self-hatred when I inevitably failed.
All of this past trauma came vividly to mind again last week, when I read news reports suggesting the weight-loss drug Saxenda – which you inject, like the diabetes drug Ozempic – is safe and effective for children as young as six.
Six! And yet undoubtedly my mother would have used a weight-loss injectable on me at that age – she has told me as much.
Talking about it with her while researching my book about women and weight, Fat, So?, she admitted, ‘I would always try to stop any daughter of mine from growing up fat. And it’s easier these days – I could just have done it with those clever Ozempic jabs.’
‘But why?’, I remember asking her, aghast. ‘I don’t think you can enjoy life properly without being thin – properly thin – with no lumps and bumps,’ was her bald response.
Researchers are hailing drugs like Saxenda as hugely powerful tools in the fight against childhood obesity. This latest study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed a slowing of weight gain, lowered body mass and improved health markers among children in the US with a starting BMI of 31. And, yes, we also have an obesity epidemic in the UK, with one in five children now classed as obese.
Experts like Professor Mark Hanson at Southampton University now recommend that public health policies for childhood obesity should be aimed at the under-fives, reasoning that, once obesity sets in, it can be hard to escape.
Some 60 to 85 per cent of heavily overweight children remain obese in adulthood.
But there’s an obvious elephant in the room. The parents.
Susannah, aged nine, with her mother
Six-year-old children do not go shopping for their own food. They may pester for sweet things, but we all know that parents choose what to feed their children. If that’s always large amounts of chicken nuggets, pizza and chips – if a child’s diet is drenched in the ultra-processed foods we now know are so bad for us – then they are highly likely to be larger in size than they should be.
It’s an undeniable problem, but should we really be fixing it by injecting drugs into children barely out of nursery school?
What these weight-loss drugs do, of course, is drastically restrict the appetite by mimicking the hormone the body naturally releases when we eat.
By sending ‘full up’ signals to the brain, we stop thinking about food, don’t feel hungry and so simply don’t eat. But as I know so well, forcing children to eat less – rather than eat healthily – is a disaster waiting to happen.
Being made to diet at the age of 11 made me fatter in the long run. . . because dieting as a pre-pubescent or adolescent interferes with your weight set point (the idea that the body has a natural weight range that it tries to maintain) before it is ready.
It scares your body into setting a basic metabolic rate that is on high alert for another ‘famine’ diet, meaning more calories are put straight into fat storage.
That’s why I know that a childhood Saxenda jab won’t work. In the short-term, yes, children will lose weight and be thin – even if they have to suffer the common side effects of vomiting and diarrhoea – but unless they stay on this costly treadmill of drugs for life, they won’t stay thin.
Indeed, they’ll be fatter than ever, because a regime like this will prime their bodies to store food as fat and make it far harder to lose it again naturally.
That’s what happened to me. In layman’s terms, due to my body’s response to food, the stodge of our school meals made me fatter than the skinny kid next to me eating exactly the same food. In fact, I’ve already seen it happen with Ozempic.
The daughter of a friend was given the drug at the age of 16. Financed by her mother, who couldn’t bear to see how miserable being overweight was making her, the drug seemed to work well for a couple of years. The key ingredient GLP-1 glutide did its job and reduced her appetite, meaning she lost a couple of stone and looked fantastic.
When she left home and went to university, however, she suddenly complained that Ozempic made her feel sick. She stopped injecting herself… and has now put on more weight than she lost, largely through eating pizza.
Putting a child onto an appetite-suppressant drug is clearly not suppressing the problem of why that child was overweight in the first place.
My mother’s obsession with weight loss made me fat. Her controlling my eating, bullying me into diets and fat-shaming was her version of injecting me with a weight-loss drug.
She needled me with horrifying stories of my Great Aunt Margaret who, when I knew her, was so fat, at over 20 stone, she couldn’t cross her arms and legs, but who, my mother insisted, had been thinner at my age than I was. ‘Yet look what she became! Do you want that? No? So get your hand out of those crisps!’
Even as I was hoodwinked into believing that I was doomed
to flab, I reacted by angrily comfort-eating stolen pieces of bread, toasted and buttered, spending my pocket money on chocolate and, most rebellious of all, pretending I didn’t care that I was fat to wind her up. I confused my head as well as my metabolism, stirring up defiance and self-hatred into a sugar-laced cocktail of psychological trauma.
Weight-loss drug Saxenda – which you inject, like the diabetes drug Ozempic – was recently said to be safe and effective for children as young as six
For my first 40 years, I secretly burned with shame about being fat. Even as I was educating myself by writing Fat, So? and delving into other research that probed the world of dieting, I would torture myself with what-ifs. I would look at my cousins, very similar to me in build as children, and think, what if I had grown up like them, not yo-yo dieting, not hating my body, but living a normal, active, moderately food-loving life? Would I be like them – not fashion-model slender, but beautifully average.
And isn’t that what we want for our children? That feeling of fitting in? Not the psychological effect of an obesity ‘fix’ that could cause lifelong damage: the black-and-white approach of a drug that brands into a child’s mind that there is something ‘wrong’ with them.
My mother truly believed that skinniness equalled happiness. She genuinely thought that by putting me on a diet as an 11-year-old child, she would help me fit into society as a thin person. It’s taken me most of my life to realise that ‘thin’ and ‘fat’ don’t have to represent the end points of the happiness scale.
In the past 15 years, I have fought to reclaim a balance of fitness, healthy eating (most of the time) and a hard-earned acceptance of who I am: mostly sexy and curvy, less often fat and flabby, but never thin.
My victory was in determining that the family obsession with thinness stopped with me.
I can look at my own children as proof that, when handled gently, our family ‘fat’ genes don’t need to be passed on.
Admittedly, when my children were little, they were fairly skinny – but I was famous among my friends for loathing processed food, being messianic about sugar being the devil and boringly strict about eating greens. And, yes, as soon as they were able, they sprinted to McDonald’s and finally had a Happy Meal. At the age of 23 and 21, they like pizza and chips and curry as much as any student – but they know that junk food is junk food and that good food is fresh and cooked from scratch.
My son and daughter – and my husband – would be the first to say that they don’t have perfect bodies, but all four of us are, more often than not, happy with the bodies we have. Don’t let’s create a generation of children who are not only impoverished but are unhappy with what they have been told to become.
And for heaven’s sake, don’t let’s medicate them just because we adults have strayed so far from what a healthy diet – and size – really looks like.