Mmmm tricky one - who doesn't occasionally go to the food court and indulge in some oh so good maccas chips and yes I might have slipped my daughter a few chips on occasion. Thing is, the rest of the time she eats a wonderfully balanced and healthy diet as we can give her, and as she grows up, we hope to instil in her that moderation and eating a well balanced and healthy variety of foods is just life. Occasionally indulging in junk is a choice you can make as long as it's not your way of life.

Having said all that, there are times that I wonder what people think and realise that my own judgments in the past were a bit the similar, now I've realised that you can't judge a whole family, overweight or not by what you see on one occasion in a food court.

As a teacher, yes there are many kids who do not eat well, and whose parents simply do not know or understand what healthy eating is, but one of the even larger issues to me is inacitivty of these kids. We do something called K-A -Day, the kids run(or walk) 2 laps of the school on most days. Some of the kids will be huffing and puffing after running 100 metres and will have to walk the rest of the way...Where we used to run and ride our bikes, shoot hoops, play chasey etc. these kids are much more inactive due to computers, TV's etc... Another teacher and I were also commenting just recently on how many of our kids also come in from their run and tell us they don't feel well, that they are breathing too fast and think something is wrong!!!! They don't realise that it is normal to feel that way when you do exercise.

Anyway I'm going to slink off my soapbox too now and say that it is way too big an issue to judge over what is potentially an isolated incident, however, obesity in children is definately a big one and the answer isn't so simple.