Just over a year ago, around the time of his ninth birthday, Zach Hewitt, a Surrey schoolboy, began doing a few exercises. The odd stomach crunch or bicep curl - nothing too extreme. Then one day he looked in the mirror and decided that he had to do much, much more: he had to get serious about fitness.
I saw that I was extremely fat compared with what I'd like to be and I ran out of puff a lot more than friends. I looked at myself and thought ‘I didn't used to look like this; I need to get into shape'. I try my hardest not to be fat because I'm scared of it.”
Getting in shape for Zach meant a gruelling daily schedule, which a year later he still maintains. According to his mother Nicci, a part-time graphic designer: “He gets up, has breakfast and goes to school. He comes home and goes straight out to the trampoline where he works out for 45 minutes. Even if it's raining, even in the depths of winter, he's out there. After a healthy supper, where he carefully watches what he eats, he will do additional exercises before bed: press-ups, sit-ups and stomach crunches.”
So how fat is Zach? The shocking truth is not at all, not by any stretch of any fattist imagination could he be described as fat. With his shirt off you see Zach's size for what it really is: spot on for a boy his age, a boy who's just turned 10 and still fits into his Year 8 or 9-sized clothes. Nicci says that he's has always been the same: “Zach's never been fat, he was cuddly as a toddler, but he's never been a fat child.”
So where has this misplaced belief that he is large come from and why is a normal-looking ten-year-old boy so “scared” of being fat? Andrew Hill, professor of medical psychology at Leeds University and an expert in eating disorders, says that 20 per cent of nine and ten-year-old girls claim that they are dieting to lose weight and twice that number say that they've tried it in the past.
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http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article4199128.eceSource: -
www.timesonline.co.uk
