IN THE normal course of events, Sunday afternoons are when the bright, coffee-fuelled beginnings of the day give way to a lazy malaise. Fresh coffee is made, sugar is consumed in the fastest way possible, and our children are planted in front of the TV with the drug of their choice — waffles with maple syrup.
But this Sunday we are in the Growing Communities garden in Springfield Park, Hackney, shovelling an entire borough’s worth of muck on to a metal grate to filter the good compost from the not-quite-done. We have joined a group of parents and their children, who are raking, weeding, clearing vegetable beds, spreading compost and buying into the concept that gardening is the new keep fit.
These children are quite overweight. Some are obese. My child is just a bit lazy, and all of us are trying to think about the environment, about growing vegetables instead of growing fat, and working up a bit of a sweat in the process.
We are busy, not bored, and feel really good just for being outdoors. What is nice about gardening, rather than “games” or anything else that is officially considered calorie-burning and good for you, is that for a few hours you can see these children thinking about the world around them and not the world inside them — the world of being too big.
Though it seems alarmingly easy for children to get fat, we forget how hard it is for them to be fat. Helping children to feel better while slimming is part of the agenda of the Green Ground Zero programme, a conservation, nutrition and exercise plan for overweight and obese children in Hackney.
It is run by The British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV), which started Green Gyms for adults nine years ago. The Green Gyms offer regular sessions of conservation activities, and out of this idea came Green Ground Zero, a one-year programme for children that incorporates gardening and conservation work, camping holidays, learning about healthy lifestyles and nutrition, and individual mentoring to help children to achieve realistic weight loss and fitness goals.
The team leader, Ellie Mortimer, says: “Initially when people get in touch they are worried that it is like an American-style fat camp, but it’s not. We are concentrating on conservation, gardening and having fun rather than burning off calories.”
The idea is instantly appealing. Exercising through gardening and conservation work is a lot more useful than running nowhere fast on a treadmill, and done within a group it encourages the kind of team spirit and camaraderie that is alien to the typically overweight child, who might not thrive in a sports setting.
Deshan, 11, is here with his mother, Diane, who partly blames the enormous portions of Caribbean food that she used to serve up at home for his weight problem. She says: “I want him to get more active and lose weight because he is going up to secondary school and I am concerned about bullying.”
Deshan himself doesn’t find bullying a problem but wants to get fitter so he can play better rugby. “If I were more fit I’d have more ability — I could do more stuff like climb trees.”
Charlie, an 11-year-old girl, says: “The activities are really fun and don’t feel like exercise. I am also learning about eating better, not chips all the time and other fatty stuff, because I would like to lose a bit of weight.”
Charlie’s cheery, sensible attitude is at odds with the assumption that childhood obesity is perpetuated by greed and laziness. Yet children make even worse assumptions. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that six-year-olds labelled silhouettes of obese children as “lazy, dirty, stupid, ugly, cheats and liars”.
Tackling the problem of obesity in children is difficult, however. A Mintel report found that only 50 per cent of parents do anything about healthy eating, though most parents say that they try to encourage good dietary habits. The consensus is that children should not be ordered, chided, bribed, bullied or fat-camped into losing weight. “The idea,” says Dr Frankie Phillips, a dietician, “is to get children involved in exercise that isn’t conceived as exercise. We know that children like to be active, but they are put off in a competitive arena.” That, along with introducing healthier eating habits, needs to happen in a subtler, more organic way. And what is more organic than organic gardening?
After gardening, the Green Ground Zero children and their parents take a long walk around Hackney Marshes, examining trees and wildlife on the way. Nobody moans about the distance or the hilly bits, and the children often break into sprints spontaneously. When we pass a school sports field they line up, quite naturally, and race each other. It is the most heartening thing because they are having fun, and it seems doubtful that they have this kind of uninhibited enjoyment while taking exercise on their own school sports grounds.
BTCV: 020-8519 8275
MEND: www.mendprogramme.com
