Supersize Kids (C4): THE C4 campaign to draw attention to children's bad eating habits, and improve them, continues. After Jamie Oliver exposed unhealthy school dinners, we faced the obvious results, Supersize Kids.

Bethany is six years old and weighs six stone. She is classed as clinically obese. Helen is 16 and weighs nearly 24 stone. She's been told she'll be dead by 20 if she doesn't do something about her condition. Her mother Julia weighs 21 stone. Both are having major surgery - stomach stapling - in a bid to be thin.

This seems drastic action, but more understandable when you learn that Bethany's mother Lisa has been waiting a year for an appointment to talk to a NHS dietician.

Ah, I hear you saying, surely Lisa can introduce a healthier eating regime by herself rather than let her daughter tuck into her favourite foods of potatoes and chocolate mousse (not together, hopefully)? This seemed to be beyond her. "Kids have pretty much what they ask for," she said, adding that "no six-year-old is going to eat a plate of steamed vegetables".

Parents need educating as much as their children. Julia stubbornly insisted that her and Helen's being overweight was because of a "fat gene" rather than the crisps, chocolate and milkshakes that her daughter consumed non-stop.

Julia and Helen went to Belgium for their operations because the NHS won't perform stomach stapling on children under 18. Martin, Julia's ex-husband and Helen's father, was alarmed, feeling that a change of lifestyle was all that was needed.

Astutely, he said that the "problem is this house - she won't get thin here". Stop eating fat things was his advice, as Julia insisted: "You are what you eat".

The operation means that the pair will never be able to eat more than a few spoonfuls of food at a time. Four months later, Helen has lost five stone as well as feeling more confident and healthier.

Her mother was unrepentant at choosing surgery over diet, insisting she'd done the right thing: "I did save her life this year but that's what I had to do."

Bethany has seen a dietician, with her mother admitting (and not before time) that "we've given her far too much".

There was a sensible voice coming from all the surplus fat. It belonged to Naomi, a 22-year-old who lost eight stone through diet and exercise.

Her problem was that the excess skin didn't disappear along with the fat. She was spending £10,000 having a body lift - the removal of a seven-inch band of excess skin from her stomach and back - and breast implants.

"You don't think when you're a child it's going to make you look like that," she said, reflecting on her former fat self. It's a message that came too late for Helen and Bethany.

Published: ??/??/2004