I’ve lost some weight recently

Homeschool News & Views

Issue 45, November 16, 2007

From Homeschool Helpers

Greetings. This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers.

I’ve lost some weight recently.

Fifteen pounds.

I was pretty pudgy at five feet eleven inches tall and 220 pounds. My dad had weighed 220, but he was 3 inches taller than me. I have a stocky frame, and I put on the weight on all over, not just on my belly. So that means I had not only a fat belly but fat arms and fat legs, too.

A couple of years ago I thought I had lost fifteen pounds. We had a digital scale in the bathroom and I would weigh on it every day. I don’t know exactly why I weighed on it every day, since I wasn’t really on any serious campaign to lose weight, but about every day I got on the scale just before I showered.

The scale said the same thing every day.

“Ouch!”

Now I was always trying to lose weight without ever really trying, if you know what I mean. I would talk about it, and insist that I needed to lose a few pounds. I exercised regularly, playing basketball or tennis once or twice a week, and jogged sometimes. I tried to cut down on my eating somewhat. I remember when I first got married in my mid-twenties, I could happily put away two Burger King Whoppers, a large fry and a big drink. Now on a rare occasion – when they’re on sale -- I might eat only one Whopper, with no fries and only water to drink. Yet I still weigh way more than I did then.

So for years I tried to lose weight without ever really trying.

Therefore I never lost weight. Every decade I would put on another ten pounds.

One morning, though, my digital scale dipped below 220, by a couple of pounds. That was a little unusual. I hadn’t done anything different in my life style, hadn’t exercised more or eaten less, but the digital scale definitely dipped below 220. Interesting.

A few days later the digital scale said I had lost a couple more pounds. Now that was worth noting. It seemed that a trend was being established. For decades my weight had been in a slow uptrend, a long bull market, with me looking more and more like a bull. The digital scale was telling me that my weight was finally in a bear market.

I began to let the family know that I was on a successful campaign to lose a few pounds.

A little more time passed and the digital scale dropped below 215. A few more days passed and I was pushing down on 210.

I had now lost more weight than I had at any time since getting married. My walk was lighter. I was more comfortable doing things. I could feel the difference from dropping those ten pounds.

By this time I began to let others outside the immediate family know what was going on with me, if they couldn’t see the difference themselves. Dropping ten pounds was a big deal. I didn’t know exactly how I had done it -- it hadn’t been all that difficult -- but I kept doing the same thing.

A little later the digital scale gave me a morning reading of 205. 205 and I really felt alive! I let just about everybody I saw know how well I was doing at losing weight, whether or not they asked, which, of course, they never did. But I told them, anyway.

One day I was in the farm supply store buying some feed. The people who ran the store had faced a battle with weight themselves, so I let them know how well I was doing at losing weight, down from 220 to 205 in just a few weeks, the pounds just melting away morning by morning.

The owner of the feed store told me to come in the next room and they would put me up on the digital cattle scale. Looking back, I guess that should be a worrisome sign, if somebody offers to weigh you on a cattle scale. But I knew what my digital scale at home had told me, morning after morning, and I could certainly see and feel the difference in my body. He and I walked into the next room. I stepped up on the long digital cattle scale. Instantly big red electronic numbers popped up in front of my face.

220!

The feed store owner, the most amiable country guy you could ever meet, said, amiably, “You ain’t lost as much weight as you thought you had.”

Oh, for a picture of my face at that moment.

My weight had not been going down. The battery in my electronic digital scale had been going down. Every day it got weaker and weaker, and every day it registered my weight a little lower.

Of course, there was no reason for me to lose weight, because I hadn’t really been trying very hard to lose weight. And if you don’t really try hard to do things, then nothing really gets done. You don’t lose weight unless you are sick or unless you make an urgent effort to do it.

You don’t actually get anything done unless you make an urgent effort.

Homeschooling has many benefits. We homeschooled for over a quarter century, and we were as convicted as anybody about homeschooling. Once we began researching the field a little deeper, even we were surprised by all the amazing benefits of homeschooling. And I am going to tell you one benefit of homeschooling which you probably haven’t thought of.

Most homeschool students are not fat.

From the website kidshealth.org:

“The percentage of overweight children in the United States is growing at an alarming rate. On the whole, kids are spending less time exercising and more time in front of the TV, computer, or video-game console. And today's busy families have fewer free moments to prepare nutritious, home-cooked meals, day in and day out.”

For whatever reasons, the people of the United States are gaining weight like crazy. There is a fear that global warming will cause the oceans to rise, covering the coastal cities. There is also the fear that all the extra weight we are putting on will cause the country to sink.

The US lifestyle tends to make people fat. Even when immigrants come into the country, they pick it up. If Orientals, who are usually very thin, move into the US, by the next generation they are like everybody else.

This is a tremendous health problem for the nation, causing a diabetes epidemic, along with high blood pressure, heart attacks and cancer.

Even the kids in the country are putting on weight like crazy. That will be a heavy burden on their lives.

A study in New Hampshire in 2004 measured fitness levels. In that study, 88% of children met the minimum fitness level when they first began school. Only 47% of children in their second year of school met the minimum fitness levels with the same tests. By the age of ten, when an aerobic capacity and recovery test was given, only 22% of the children in New Hampshire achieved minimum fitness levels. As the students age, the percentage of children achieving these minimum levels keeps falling.

That study found that before kids go to institutional school, almost all of them are fit. Once they go to institutional school, they immediately become less fit, which also would mean fatter. The more years they are in school, they less fit they are. Finally, some of them barely fit in their desks.

I don’t have any official stats on how skinny homeschool kids are. I know, though, that we have had activities with hundreds of these teens over the last decade, and it is the rare homeschool kid who is overweight. Whereas in the general population, we see a lot of overweight kids.

Isn’t that interesting?

Why would public school kids be less fit the longer they are in school?

Well, that may be pretty simple. The more you sit, the less you’re fit.

Before kids get into school, they burn energy. Once they get into school, they burn time.

Public school students sit for six or seven hours a day. It’s commonly accepted today that the only way to learn is by sitting and listening or reading. Before the modern age, most learning was acquired by doing, not just by listening to somebody talk about doing.

Homeschoolers have periods when they sit and read and listen, but they also have much more time where they are actively doing something. I certainly believe that they probably learn just as much from the time they are up and doing something as from the time they are sitting and listening or reading, officially doing “schoolwork.”

Once homeschoolers become adults, they tend to be much more active than public school grads. They’re more involved in church, more involved in their communities, and from my personal experience, they are much more likely to start their own businesses.

I think they do more as adults because they were used to doing things in their schooling. They don’t just sit.

So what do public school kids do, after they have been sitting in class all day?

A study says that 62% of them watch 3 or more hours of TV or vdeos per day. That’s a bunch of kids watching a bunch of television. 62%! A large majority – emphasis on large -- of the kids who sit all day also sit all night. And what do people do when they watch TV? They eat. And gain weight.

Another study says that only 3% of homeschool kids watch that same amount of TV. 62% for public school students to 3% for homeschool students. What are the homeschool students doing while the public school kids are watching TV? Well, they’re doing something, I’ll guarantee you that.

I read again from the website kidshealth.org:

…today’s busy families have fewer free moments to prepare nutritious, home-cooked meals...” First of all, most kids at school load up on junk food, pop and candy. Then these families who live in what James Dobson calls routine panic often eat food which is not home cooked, which is factory processed or fast food and not so nutritious. On the other hand, most homeschool families have opted out of the ultra busy lifestyle to focus on higher things. They trade money for time, luxuries for life, and gold for God. And included in that deal are meals cooked by a real mother, which are much healthier than factory processed or fast food.

Also apparently less fattening.

There is a big campaign on in the country now to stop the obesity epidemic among kids. This is a very serious matter, as many of these overweight young people either have diabetes or will get diabetes as a result of their lifestyle. A few schools are beginning to send notes home with the students telling the parents that their kids are calorically challenged. There are expensive weight loss camps to send overweight kids to. There was a TV show where basketball star Shaquille O’Neal had workouts with heavy kids to get them to lose weight.

This is a heavy problem and it’s gaining weight. And just like the drug problem, the teen sex problem, and the academic problem, the homeschool family lifestyle avoids the problem. Homeschool kids are not nearly as overweight as public school kids.

I said I had lost fifteen pounds. No, it wasn’t the scale this time. I will never again go by a deceiving digital scale. Back to the old style for me. This time it was a couple of bouts of illness that did it.

Last summer I got an internal infection and had a fever for four days. That totally wiped out my appetite. For about a week I ate almost nothing. Each day I would have a boiled egg in the morning and some cold grapes the rest of the day.

I dropped ten pounds.

A few months later the infection recurred, but I got rid of it quicker. That time I only lost five pounds.

All those years I had been saying I needed to lose weight, yet I never did. I just didn’t get serious enough. With those infections I discovered that if I really cut back on my eating, those pounds will melt away, like having a digital scale with a bad battery. I never lost weight through the years because I didn’t try hard enough. I just wasn’t urgent about it.

A lot of Christian parents would like to homeschool, but they don’t ever get urgent enough to really do it. With homosexuals taking over the public schools, now is the time to get urgent. You can do it, parents. Just make a real urgent effort.

Those fifteen pounds I dropped have stayed off. I’m keeping that weight off, too, so that every Monday night we can play basketball with all those skinny homeschool kids.