Nootopia

How to Help Your Overweight Child - A Guide

Look at your child. Go on, look at it. If you don’t have one, imagine yourself in 2022 with a mini version of you. Is your (real or imaginary future) child slightly porky? Are they referred to as “Mr Blimpy” at school? Do you have to drag out the inflatable swimming pool and hose them down because they don’t fit in the bath anymore? If so, you need some help! After all, YOU caused this. Who hands a child an entire cake and expects them to understand reasonable portion sizes? Jesus, you are a terrible person…But have no fear, because we can help you fix the untold damage you have caused in three easy steps! 

1) What goes in a child, stays in a child

All cheap paedophile jokes aside (even if they are inappropriately hilarious), children are pretty absorbent little creatures. If you feed them nothing but cake batter, they will develop the consistency of cake batter. If your child’s diet is a little unsavoury (fried confectionary is not a food group), try feeding them healthier alternatives such as bird seed or carrot mulch. However, if you’ve been feeding them nothing but sugar for most of their lives, they might object to tasting something that hasn’t been processed and squashed into brightly coloured wrapping. Here are some tips to help with this difficult transitory phase:

1) - Lace the initial carrot with sugar. That way you can trick your child into eating healthily without making them go cold turkey. Slowly reduce the sugar amount as the days go by. 

2) - Keep a Gillian McKeith cut-out in your front room and threaten the child using her cold, accusatory glare. Phrases such as “The McKeith will get you if you don’t eat your vegetables!” and “We eat carrots so we can see The McKeith at night. She comes to life and tries to steal your soul while you’re sleeping.” Will help the child understand that healthy food is good food! This will probably cripple the child psychologically in later years and ruin the chance of a stable relationship in the future, but hey, you don’t care about that! The child will be long gone by then, and then it’ll be their spouses’ problem, not yours! 

2 – Exercise 

A child is like a basketball – it’s supposed to bounce around and dive through hoops (the hoops of your expectations, am I right?!), not sit on a shelf and slowly deflate. By letting your child sit on a dusty old shelf (the sofa), YOU are personally responsible for your child’s fatness. In order to make up for years of terrible parenting, you should personally design and oversee your child’s fitness regime. Here are some ideas to get you started:

1) - Buy a punching bag and tape a picture of your child’s worst tormentor onto it. If you are not aware that your child actually is being bullied, then you’re an idiot! Your child is the size of a small whale, of course they’re being picked on! Work your child into a rage by mimicking the tormentor’s voice as your child pummels the punching bag. If possible, kidnap the actual tormentor and super glue them onto the punching bag! This will make your child feel much more secure and comfortable during this exercise, and it will also make you feel like a good parent again. Just be sure to scare the bully into silence afterwards, otherwise you may be coaching your child from your jail cell! Whoops! 

2) - Create a trail of small sweets leading from your house to the local gym, and watch your chubby Hansel or Gretel walk for miles! CAUTION: May be negated by the choice of sweet. Remember, whole Mars Bars are not classed as small. The treatsize ones aren’t either. 

3) - Sign your child up for a brief spell in the army. A simple tippex job will  alter the birth certificate and legal age requirement nonsense, and after that you can sit back and watch your child develop into a monstrous fighting machine! Who doesn’t want a child that knows the kill points on a human body? An idiot, thats who.

3 - Permanent lifestyle changes

Listen, changing daily habits isn’t easy for anyone, let alone a chubby child with the self-esteem of a skunk.  Not only do you have to feed your child the right things and exercise the child regularly, you also have to make sure that the fat goes away and STAYS away.  How can you do this with the minimum amount of effort? After all, you’ve already been through two steps of weight loss, why would you want to do any more? 

1) - In the days before you gave a crap, the only exercise your child got was waddling from the sofa to the kitchen table to shovel more mashed potatoes and gravy into its mouth.  Now that your child is beginning to lose weight, you can also change the journey to mealtimes! Glue a plate of hamburgers onto the back of your car (note: you may also have to glue the hamburgers onto the plate.  Gravity is a cruel mistress.) Drive into the forest and throw your child out into the wilderness, and drive just fast enough so that the child can never quite reach the plate of hamburgers.  Stop only when you feel that your child has worked hard enough for their dinner! 

2) - Treasure Hunt! Separate the child’s meal into bits and hide it inside the house/garden shed/garden/pond.  Tell the child that in order to eat, they must hunt for their meal! Don’t provide clues, as your child is already way too lazy.  Deliberately throw them off the scent by saying “cold” when they’re near a carrot stick and “hot” when they’re about to dip their hand into a tub of industrial solvent/rat trap.  Fun for all the family!

3) - FIGHT TO THE DEATH! If you are unfortunate enough to have two (or god forbid, more) fat children, then you really are pushing yourself to the limit.  It’s hard enough to get one child into shape, let alone more.  The solution to this is simple - stage an elaborate duel, and whittle it down until only one child is left standing.  The winning child not only wins a thin life, a better life, they also win your respect.  And just remember - get creative with it!