Fit at Any Size

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But can overweight kids stay healthy with exercise alone as they age? The jury's still out. For adults, Cooper's theory has recently been challenged. A Harvard-affiliated study released in April showed that being active can lower but does not eliminate heart risks faced by heavy women. Assessing nearly 39,000 middle-aged women over a period of 11 years, researchers determined that the odds for developing heart disease were 54% higher in overweight active women and 87% higher in obese active women compared with normal-weight active women. Women who were normal weight but inactive faced only an 8% increase in risk. "If you're overweight or obese, you can't really get back to that lower risk entirely with physical activity alone," says lead author Dr. Amy Weinstein of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Doctors do know that obese kids nearly always bloom into obese adults. CDC epidemiologist David Freedman evaluated 30-plus years of data and found that of the children who technically qualified as obese, two-thirds grew up to be very obese adults. "Even down to the youngest ages that I've worked with, age 5, overweight kids have maybe a tenfold increased risk of becoming obese adults," Freedman says.

A report, published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, went further, comparing the medical records of 276,835 Danish citizens born between 1930 and 1976. In that data, scientists found a direct and linear correlation between a higher childhood weight and a greater chance of future heart disease. "Our study shows that even a few excess pounds can damage future health," says co-author Dr. Jennifer Baker of the Center for Health and Society at the Institute of Preventive Medicine in Copenhagen.

Amid all this back-and-forth, however, there is one point that everyone agrees on: exercise definitely improves a child's overall sense of well-being. Cooper, who invented aerobics a generation ago, has been testing the physical fitness of schoolchildren over the past decade and has consistently found that active kids do better academically, have fewer disciplinary issues and maintain better medical histories. "A child doesn't need to be a star athlete or a long-distance runner," Cooper says. "Even taking the stairs instead of an elevator has positive effects."

Parents leading by example will do the most to persuade kids to stop obsessing over weight and start getting fit. "Exercise has to stop being a daily chore," says Dana Schuster, president of the Association for Size Diversity and Health. "Make it about playing and fun again."

Actress KayCee Stroh, a by no means slender star of Disney's hit High School Musical, knows all about that. After gaining nearly 50 lb. following knee surgery, she could not lose the weight with exercise alone. So she turned to a longtime love, dancing. "Riding the elliptical just couldn't motivate me enough," she says. "Dancing was a way to trick myself into being active." Shortly after, Stroh answered a casting call for High School Musical, scoring her part over dozens of other actors. "I am not a size 2, never will be," she says. "I can just be me, and that confidence lets me stand out to directors."

For generations of chubby kids getting teased in school hallways, standing out was something very much to be avoided--at least, if it was because of their size. The idea that size can be not only a liability but also an asset is a true paradigm shift. Says Jennifer Berger, executive director of About Face, a San Francisco--based nonprofit that promotes size acceptance: "The word health has been made to mean skinny, and that has to change." That's especially so since the word happy was too often defined the same way. Blonsky herself admits middle-school classmates' heckling made her dislike her figure. Until, that is, she realized, "I could always keep up with the thin girls, anyway." Actually, she seems to have passed them by.