Chances are, you recognize that schoolyard chant. Maybe you were the target, or maybe it was someone else. It doesn’t really matter now, does it?

Except, perhaps, for the lifelong damage such taunting can do to a developing self-esteem.

Which is one of the reasons parents in the Denver Public School District are outraged over the administration’s notices concerning childhood obesity. As part of their effort to improve students’ health, the school system is now noting a child’s BMI on health evaluation forms. If the child is overweight, the notice clearly says so.

Then the child is given the notice to take home to their parents.

“The part that upset her the most as she started reading it, there it stated that she was overweight and she started to cry saying, ‘Mom, that school tells me I’m fat.’ So, it was very heart wrenching,” said Flaurette Martinez.

Her daughter Isabel was sent home from the Centennial K-8 School on Monday with the health notice.

As Martinez points out, anyone could have found that notice had her daughter dropped or misplaced it. With kids being the way they are, Isabel’s future on the low-end of the schoolyard social pecking order would have been sealed. Granted, it’s possible such peer pressure could, in fact, lead Isabel to lose weight, but it’s equally probable that it could also lead to an eating disorder.

Besides, aren’t schools supposed to be doing their best to reduce bullying? Are fat kids “fair game” if such pressure might lead to improved physical health (at the possible expense of their emotional well-being)?

The school district states that it feels compelled to provide such information to parents to help improve student health. In the administration’s opinion, sending that data home with the child in a sealed envelope is sufficient.

You know, because kids would never open a sealed envelope that someone else dropped.

/contempt

I wrote earlier about just how few calories are burned per hour whilst sitting at the computer. At the time, I hoped my body would comprehend the link between the minimal calories burned and the number of calories it seems to demand.

No such luck.

I’ve reached the point where even two “slimming shakes” per day and one dinner that doesn’t make my husband scream still surpass the number of calories I expend in any given day. That’s not likely to change, either, since so much of my time is spent online.

As a result, I’m giving serious thought to begging my doctor for some kind of surgery. Not the traumatic, bariatric kind. I find that too invasive and too risky. But a little rubber band that tells my stomach to stop demanding so much food that, really, I don’t need and won’t burn off?

That’s sounding awfully good to me. Better yet: I’d actually need to gain weight before qualifying.

Actually being able to eat for a few months without stressing over every calorie — just so I could get my weight up to qualify before I could get a surgery to help me lose that weight and then some — sounds kind of like heaven to me.

In the 10 years that I’ve known him, my husband’s weight has never deviated by more than 5 pounds. Not once. Not even with a nightly routine of eating a half-gallon of ice cream topped with hot fudge sauce and a quarter cup of brown sugar. (Really.) Not during the holiday season when he washes his ice cream down with a quart of store-bought eggnog.

Not once.

Not more than 5 pounds.

You can imagine how incredibly jealous this makes me. Some nights, when he’s snoring particularly loudly, I sit up in bed and plan on ways I’m going to spend the huge life insurance payout I’ll get after those lunchtime double-cheeseburgers with bacon and his nightly post-meal snacking combine to clog up those arteries… just as I’ve always told him would happen.

Last week, he stood on the scale and discovered he’s somehow gained 11 pounds. He claims he has no idea how this happened, and I know better than to suggest perhaps it has to do with his meat-and-sugar diet.

I know, I know: I should be worried about his health, but there’s only so much nagging a wife can do. If the man won’t eat vegetables and give up ice cream, there’s not much I can do about it.

Except grin.

Yeah, I’m enjoying it. Does that make me awful?

Not long ago, I found myself in the middle of reading a newspaper article about some new diet supplement that’s supposed to be an all-natural way to effortlessly lose weight.

Riiiight, I figured, and my BS-detector went into hyper drive. The byline, Universal Media Syndicate, sounded legitimate enough but the language was so over-the-top that I just couldn’t understand how something so as amazing as they described wasn’t being discussed 24/7 on every news and radio station.

Sure enough, it’s a paid advertisement in the form of a news “article”, only it’s not being run under that handy little “Paid advertisement” blurb that magazines and newspapers usually use. Apparently, I’m not the only one to have had a problem with the way this supplement, Apatrim, is being marketed.

Apatrim, according to the story, is a “newly released diet pill” which contains an extract of Caralluma Fimbriata, a cactus-like plant widely grown in India where it is eaten as a vegetable and used as an ingredient in curries and chutneys.

What we can confirm is that Caralluma Fimbriata, like the South African “succulent” plant Hoodia Gordonii, has indeed been chewed for many years by Indian tribesmen during long hunts to suppress appetite and enhance endurance.

But from there, the breathless weight-loss claims for Apatrim not only become more suspect, but seem likely to ultimately involve its distributor, PatentHEALTH, LLC , with the judicial system.

I started to rant about this marketing method to my husband, who replied that it’s not much different from getting paid to review sites and products on blogs, something at which I’m making some decent money each month.

But the difference, as I explained to VH, is that I’m not making money by selling a product — like the makers of Apatrim are attempting to do with their disguised ads. I make money by writing about a site or product, regardless of whether anyone buys it. A fine distinction, perhaps, but the latter doesn’t involve hoodwinking people into taking any action whatsoever.

At any rate, the point is that even with a highly-refined BS detector, the Chubby Mommy within me still wants to believe in a magic weight loss pill, despite experience proving otherwise. Repeatedly. Even the Alli I’m taking has been far less effective than hyped, and if it weren’t for Janet giving me her starter pack I probably wouldn’t be taking it still, having decided that it’s simply not worth it.

Which is why, I’m pleased to say, I just finished a 30-minute stint on my exercise bike, and the only “magic pill” I’ll be taking today is an aspirin. Make that two. Having used some muscles this week that have been neglected far too long, I ache just about everywhere.

Thanks to a migraine, my only exercise yesterday involved shaking a few Excedrin out of the bottle. I figure I burned less than a calorie at that, but fortunately the accompanying nausea meant I only ate a bowl of oatmeal (and even that didn’t stay down).

I feel much better this morning, though. No, I haven’t put in time on my exercise bike yet, but I did squeeze in a little yoga.

Funny how my morning “Snap, crackle and pop” has nothing to do with breakfast cereal and everything to do with aging joints. Next thing you know I’ll be dying my hair that odd shade of blue and having out with the other 4 p.m. dinner-eating, slot-machine loving golf apparel ladies.

Great.

I had an appointment early this morning, which meant that I was up, showered and out the door while my husband and son were still fast asleep. It also meant that by the time I came home, they were both waking up at the same time. So I left my husband to find breakfast for the two of them while I went to dust off my exercise bike.

Have I ever told you that I ride my exercise bike while laying down? No, really! It hurts my back to ride the normal way, and my butt gets so sore after a few minutes that I seldom stay on it for long. Then one day as I moaned about how I wish I’d bought a recumbent bike instead, my husband pointed out that I could simply lay on the floor and put my feet on the pedals, solving both problems at the same time.

Sure, it looks funny, but it makes riding the thing pain-free. Plus if I prop my head and shoulders on a few pillows I can actually read books while I pedal. On more energetic days, I can even do crunches or use hand-weights while “riding”, making my workout time that much more effective.

Today, I didn’t have that kind of pep, so I turned on the TV to catch some Headline News. When my husband came in to give me a kiss before heading off to work, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to take a quick break and see how long I’d been at it.

My goodness 45-minutes can fly by when you’re too busy watching TV to notice you’re exercising!

So that’s Day 1’s workout toward that sleek new shape I want to have by my 10th anniversary in July. Just 299 or so more to go!

Next July, my husband and I will be celebrating our 10th anniversary, and this time, we’re going to do it in style.

We’ve never really been big on exchanging anniversary gifts. For our first anniversary — the paper one — we exchanged Tom Clancy novels. On our second anniversary, the Cotton one, we picked up a 2-pack of “His” and “Her” hand towels at the dime store.

New parents by our third year of marriage, we were both too tired to bother thinking up any way to celebrate the Leather anniversary. Instead, we agreed we’d just celebrate the really big ones: ten, twenty and so on.

So, with our tenth anniversary approaching, I’ve got my heart set on a romantic cruise. Unfortunately, since none of our extended family members are up to watching our son for four days and three nights, we’ll probably wind up on one of those family cruises that offers some kind of kids’ camp while parents get blotto poolside or in one of the ships 24/7 bars.

I can’t remember the last time I wore a bathing suit in public. I sure know that there’s no amount of booze that’ll talk me into wearing one at this point.

But ten months is quite a long time, diet-wise, even if I do want to ultimately lose 35 pounds. That’s less than a pound a week, actually, and that seems like it ought to be quite doable.

So, to hell with my hatred of exercise. I may never like it, but if it’ll help me get into the kind of slinky black bathing suit designed to be seen in — without ever touching water — then I’ll do it.

Starting tomorrow. I swear.