STORY BYA woman and her teenage daughter recently visited Ladies Workout Express, a new Houston gym, to check out the facility. The grossly overweight daughter was not happy to be there, and before gym officials could fully explain the program, she and her mother stormed out without signing up.
"This girl had a chip on her shoulder," explains Carolyn Toups, spokeswoman for Ladies Workout Express. "She seemed to have a lot of anger."
Teens who can't manage their anger often have weight problems, a new study shows, and their inability to handle anger might even bring on serious medical conditions.
"Problems expressing anger can translate into poor eating habits and increased weight, which may lead to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease at a young age," reports Dr. William Mueller, professor of behavioral science at the University of Texas Health Science Center School of Public Health at Houston, who presented the study at an American Heart Association conference in San Francisco in March.
The study, Project Heartbeat, involved 680 African-American and white Houston children from ages 8-17, and is part of a long-term study of heart health in children. Project Heartbeat measures more than just body weight. It also does standardized "anger inventories," which gauge such things as how often subjects have aggressive attitudes and how often they find non-destructive ways to express anger.
The study bears out findings of a pilot study at the UT Health Science Center a decade ago that showed a strong link between teens' body weight and the way they handled anger, particularly in girls.
Mueller has done extensive research on obesity in children. In the past decade he has been particularly interested in children's emotional lives - how they handle such things as sadness and anger, for instance, and the effects on their cardiovascular systems.
"We know a lot about anger and blood pressure in the adult population but we know less about what happens with kids," he explains. "The important thing is that habits are formed early and however children express their anger tends to track into adulthood. The longer children use the dysfunctional form the more stress there is on the cardiovascular system."
In his work, Mueller is finding "a terrible epidemic of obesity, things just unheard of 20 years ago." And he's seeing kids with type 2 diabetes — the type associated with obesity which used to occur only in adults — developing in children as young as 12 or 14.
His findings are backed up by research from the National Institutes of Health, which reports that the number of overweight children has doubled in the last two to three decades. That breaks down to one in every five kids. The increase is in both children and adolescents, in all age, race and gender groups. Overweight kids have a 70 percent chance of becoming overweight adults.
Major causes of obesity in children are the same as those for adults: eating too much and moving around too little. Almost half of children from 8-16 years old watch three to five hours of television a day, according to NIH figures. Daily activities such as walking to school, physical education classes, and after-school activities have been replaced with a sedentary lifestyle in front of the TV, computer or video game.
In one local response to childhood obesity, the Ladies Workout Express gym (Houston), at 2621 S. Shepherd, is offering a free "FitTeen Program" this summer for middle school and high school girls. Just opened in April, the gym features interval circuit training equipment providing a complete workout in 30 minutes. Girls will be taught good eating habits along with the safest, most effective exercise program for weight loss.
Mueller agrees that exercise is important in curbing childhood obesity. He himself is partial to biking, and although he has no weight problem he has been riding a bicycle to work for years - a 16-mile round trip from his home in the Heights to the medical center.
But he thinks his study on obesity in children also has an important emotional component, which is more difficult to get a handle on than exercise and diet.
"It's just harder to be a child today than when I was young," says Mueller, who is 62. He notes that there are so many more people than ever before, more traffic - particularly in Houston - and more pressure on kids to survive in an increasingly competitive, materialistic society.
Mueller doesn't pretend to have answers to the problem, but he thinks we need to look at the broader sociological picture, or "just changing society in some way . . . building more parks, making bike lanes on the streets, increasing safety in neighborhoods."
In short, concludes Mueller, "I think we just have to take a more holistic view of kids' health."
UPDATED: 5-10-2004
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Dr. William Mueller is a professor of behavioral science at the UT School of Public Health.
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