This week the Baltimore Sun reported that first lady Michelle Obama was at Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles, to announce that Major League Baseball was joining her campaign to get kids to eat healthier and to exercise at least an hour a day.
“The truth is that lots of kids just are not getting healthy foods and they’re not getting enough exercise,” she told a group of about 40 children brought to the park Tuesday morning to listen to her pitch and participate in a baseball clinic led by major leaguers.
The newpaper also reporter that Obama returned that evening to participate in the first-pitch ceremony with two of the kids, “…then watched the game against the Tampa Bay Rays from one of the private suites — far, presumably, from the Left Field Club Picnic Perch, home of the all-you-can-eat-for-one-price section of the park.”
The next day, Dr. Lizbeth Binks, a clinical psychologist in Baltimire who specializes in PTSD, disaster, trauma and abuse, sent this letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun (reprinted with Dr. Bink’s permission).
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Ballpark wrong place to fight obesity
By Lizbeth T. Binks, Ph.D.
So the First Lady was at Camden Yards, in partnership with Major League Baseball, to fight childhood obesity. Who thought that one up?
There are controversies: about whether obesity per se should be the focus, or health and healthy living; about how much the war on obesity is really a war on the obese, reflecting all kinds of cultural bias, prejudice, and oppressions; about how – once there is consensus on what the problems and solutions actually are – to help children, in particular, without destroying their joy in their own bodies, stigmatizing them, or promoting eating disorders.
I can’t think of a worse place than the ballpark to act this out.
We go to baseball games to relax, to feel camaraderie and national pride and a sense of belonging, to forget our cares and channel them into root root rooting. We are all the same tribe – or at most, two tribes – and it’s all usually fun and friendly and spirit building.
If you are a fat kid, you can no longer count on that. [private_membership circle] You have total strangers staring at you (maybe laughing at you?) while the First Lady speaks. And you can’t eat. Because there aren’t that many “healthy” foods at the ballpark. Maybe we should have national lists of “good” and “bad” foods and public places can’t serve any “bad” ones. Let’s think about that one. Or maybe we should have times and places where exactly what we eat doesn’t matter, as long as we are trying to eat healthy most of the time and trying to be healthy all of the time. But for now, it’s a moot point, because there aren’t a lot of nice, healthy foods at the ballpark.
And here’s the hypocrisy of it all, and the finger pointing at our enduring national tolerance for weight stigma: nobody has ever gone to a baseball game and been told by a famous person to stop drinking so much or gambling or wearing that outrageous hairstyle. We don’t even get mild warnings about wearing enough sunscreen or going to the ballgame instead of church on Sunday. You can talk on your cell phone. You just don’t get “yelled at” at a baseball game.
So the fat kids sit frozen though the rest of the game, arms locked at sides, eyes straight ahead but not seeing, shamed, embarrassed and mortified. Nope, they don’t belong at a baseball game any more.
Is this really what Major League Baseball wants for the sport that is often said in the same sentence with motherhood and apple pie? How about the Orioles? Do they need more reasons for people to stay home? Great idea.
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Ellen Shuman is a Life Coach who specializes in emotional and binge eating issues. She is the founder of A Weigh Out & Acoria Eating Disorder Treatment, Vice President of the Binge Eating Disorder Association (BEDA), and Co-Chair of the Academy for Eating Disorders Special Interest Group on “Health at Every Size”, ellen@aweighout.com [/private_membership circle]
