Alternatively, a story illustrating how far fitness and health are from the minds of high school students.
As a bit of background, I volunteer with a youth organization, and recently we've made a huge effort to get more people to show up our events. Today we saw that it had paid off as the particular group meeting today had a lot more people than usual. In particular, I notice in particular 3 somewhat fat tumblr-looking girls who are wearing way more and way nicer makeup than I'd expect. In fact, their entire outfits were a LOT nicer that I would expect from someone their size. Basically, think of the plastics from Mean Girls, except fat and with neon hair.
I'm going to be honest here: I am the daughter of a new money family, and I did go a bit overboard on my appearance in high school, but nowhere near this extreme. I saw one of them with a $40 lipstick in a $250 handbag, which just screams excessive. They weren't the only fat kids there unfortunately, but they certain stood out. Anyway, everything starts up as usual, and today I'm giving a quick talk on diet and exercise as a <redacted>, because I heard a lot of myths and inaccuracies about it. Basically all of the fat kids immediately buried themselves in their phones, but a few thinnner kids were actually listening. Everything goes as expected until I mention that "You should generally be lifting in addition to cardio". Suddenly all three fat plastics bolt upright and just look at me, and some of the other students are suddenly staring at them. I am caught off guard by this but continue.
When the parents arrive to pick everyone up I notice that the fat plastics all have very fat parents, but distinctly do not have rich looking parents. None of their parents have any expensive clothes, accessories, etc. like the kids do. They all drive off in heavily laden but otherwise normal cars.
After a bit of investigation, I find out that, on certain parts of tumblr, "lifting" refers to shoplifting, and that the reason everyone reacted that way was because the fat plastics had probably stolen everything they were wearing and bragged about it. The real kicker here is that their parents had somehow not noticed and had let them steal that much stuff without actually doing anything about. Furthermore, they were so entrenched in tumblr's shoplifting community that it was the first thing they thought of when they heard the term "lifting", and had apparently implanted that perception in so many other people's heads that they would also think of shoplifting before weightlifting (again, they did all this without their parents noticing it!). I'm just wondering how can we possibly live in a world where a) parents are so inattentive to their children that they can steal entire outfits well beyond what they could actually afford without it being noticed, and b) that weightlifting is so foreign that it isn't the first thing people think of when they hear "lifting".
TLDR: Fat girls show up expensive and entirely stolen outfits, had bragged about their activities to their friends so much everyone thought of shoplifting before weightlifting, and their parents somehow didn't have a clue that they stolen all this stuff despite having told their friends about it.
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[–] Shitlord2016 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
Good for you for trying to educate teenagers on weightloss and fitness. Hopefully someone learned something.