Please Stop Trying to Shrink the Kids

• Are you worried your child is gaining weight?

• Have you been wondering whether you should help your child lose weight?

• Googling “safe weight loss for kids”?

Then perhaps you may want to hear about Kurbo, the Weight Watchers app launched in August 2019 as a weight-loss program for children and teens ages 8 to 17.

Kurbo used a green light, yellow light, red light system to indicate which foods kids could eat freely and which they should limit. Children need nourishing diets that include healthy fats, yet the app put foods like peanut butter, nuts, hummus, and whole milk in the red category.

Think about what that teaches a child.

Foods that can provide protein, fat, energy, calcium, and other nutrients are suddenly marked with the same visual signal we use for stop, danger, and don’t.

Not surprisingly, the backlash was immediate.

When Eating Programs Start Teaching Kids to Fear Food

Eating-disorder organizations, dietitians, physicians, parents, and advocates warned that asking children as young as eight to track food and pursue weight loss could contribute to disordered eating, poor body image, and a lifetime of weight cycling. Two U.S. senators even called on Weight Watchers to pull the app from the marketplace.

I would go further.

Even with “proper guidance,” asking children to monitor, limit, and categorize food in order to change their body size can itself create problems with eating.

Of course parents want their children to be healthy. And when a child is living in a larger body, parents can be frightened by everything they have been told about weight and health.

But helping a child become healthier is not the same thing as helping a child become thinner.

Children are growing. Their bodies change at different rates and in different ways. Turning food into a tool for manipulating body size can interfere with the very thing we are supposedly trying to protect: their physical and psychological well-being.

And Kurbo did eventually disappear.

In 2022, WW announced that it was shutting the program down, saying that children and families had unique needs the company was not best suited to meet. Earlier that year, WW and Kurbo had also reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that the app had collected children’s personal information without proper parental consent.

So yes—the app is gone.

The thinking behind it is not.

Of course parents want their children to be healthy. And when a child is living in a larger body, parents can be frightened by everything they have been told about weight and health.

But a child’s health cannot be reduced to the size of their body. And trying to make a child thinner can create problems of its own.

Before You’re Impressed by a Weight-Loss Statistic

WW promoted Kurbo with research showing that 84% of child users had a reduction in BMI percentile after 21 weeks.

Sounds impressive.

But a lower BMI percentile is not necessarily the same thing as losing weight. Over five months, a child can simply grow taller—and growth spurts happen.

And then there’s another question worth asking whenever you hear a weight-loss success statistic: Who was still there at the end?

Weight-loss studies often lose participants along the way. If the people who are struggling, regaining weight, or simply fed up are more likely to drop out, the people left in the study can make the program look far more successful than it really was.

Kurbo itself had substantial attrition in later research. In one six-month study, half the adolescents dropped out.

So when you hear an impressive weight-loss statistic, here are a few questions worth asking before you’re impressed:

• How many people started the study?

• How many finished?

• What happened to the people who dropped out?

• How long were participants followed after the program ended?

• Was the reported change actual weight loss, or a change in BMI or BMI percentile?

• If it’s a study on children, how much did those kids grow during the study, and how much of the BMI change could simply reflect getting taller?

• And what happened to their eating and body image? Among the people counted as weight-loss “successes,” did the intervention create or worsen food preoccupation, restrictive eating, binge eating, body dissatisfaction, or other eating problems?

• And what about the people who dropped out or never lost weight—did they leave with those same problems, only without the “successful” weight outcome?

Because a lower number on the scale does not tell you what it cost someone to get there.

What Are We Teaching Kids, Exactly?

One of my colleagues weighed in, and rather than reinvent the wheel, I am posting her on point comment here for you to read. This is from Jessica Setnick, a Registered Dietitian and eating disorder specialist:

I was staying out of the whole child weight loss app mess until I had time to investigate it myself. Well now that I have, it's such a PR nightmare that I'm fascinated by how it ever got greenlighted (pun intended).

First of all, this is such an obvious money grab. Only the affluent could ever afford the fee, so there is no way this is a "public health" issue as claimed.

Second, is there anyone anywhere who thinks the solution to anything is for kids to spend MORE time on their screens? Without adult supervision? CHATTING WITH STRANGERS???? (Parents are explicitly barred from getting involved.) That should have been enough, but sadly there's more absurdity lurking on the website.

The "coaches" are recent college graduates with no healthcare experience, but we are assured that they will "pick up on signs of disordered eating or unhealthy weight loss." And do what? Celebrate? Disordered eating and unhealthy weight loss are THE WHOLE POINT OF THE PROGRAM. Shouldn't we be working on PREVENTING disordered eating rather than causing and then detecting it?

I couldn’t agree more.

Back in the 80s, it was called dieting. Now it is called “eating healthy,” but the underlying goal is often the same—to monitor and control food intake in order to manipulate body size.

Kids who come to our office with disordered eating are usually trying very hard to “eat healthy.” When I ask what that means, I hear some version of: “I avoid junk food and eat healthy food.”

And when I dig a little deeper, “junk food” frequently turns out to mean higher-calorie foods, while “healthy food” means lower-calorie foods. Just like the Kurbo app.

This is not a harmless distinction.

It can leave children frightened of food, disconnected from hunger and fullness, preoccupied with eating, dissatisfied with their bodies, and struggling to manage the very behaviors the intervention was supposedly designed to improve.

Jessica’s alternative was strikingly simple: kids need food security, safety, supportive adults, meaningful ways to engage with the world, and far more attention to how they feel than to how they look.

That sounds a lot more like health to me.

Kurbo Is Gone. The Thinking Isn’t.

Kurbo is gone.

Good.

But the thinking that created it is still very much alive.

We still praise children for eating less. We still treat smaller bodies as healthier bodies. We still hand kids food rules and call them “healthy habits,” then are surprised when food becomes complicated.

Children do not need an app teaching them to approach certain foods as if they’ve just come to a red light:

Stop. Danger. Don’t go there.

They need enough food. They need to know and experience that their bodies have their own systems for regulating hunger, fullness, and food intake. They need trustworthy adults who model taking good care of themselves, including eating in ways that are responsive to their own bodies. They need permission to grow into the bodies they were meant to have. And they need a world that is far less interested in shrinking them.

That would be a pretty good place to start.

For more on helping children grow up with a healthy relationship with food and their bodies:

Kathy Kater
Kater’s work focuses on preventing body-image and eating problems before they begin.

• Real Kids Come in All Sizes

• BodyImageHealth.org — resources on body image, eating, and weight concerns in children

Ellyn Satter
Satter’s work on the Division of Responsibility in Feeding helps parents support children’s ability to regulate their own eating.

• Your Child’s Weight: Helping Without Harming

• Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family

• Ellyn Satter Institute — practical guidance on feeding children and supporting trust around eating

Also, check out resources on this site at Kids, Eating and Weight.