By Kate Lyman

"I need to lose weight," Kayla was saying. Another second-grade girl chimed in, "So do I. I'm way too fat."

My students' conversation shocked me. Distracted from my hallway responsibility of monitoring the noise level at the water fountains, I listened in more closely. Linda, a third-grade girl who is thin to the point of looking unhealthy, grabbed a piece of paper from Kayla. "I'm the one who needs this." "No, I need it!" insisted Rhonda.

The hotly contested paper turned out to contain the name of an exercise video that my second- and third-grade class had seen in gym class. The gym teacher later assured me that the student teacher had stressed that the exercises were for health and fitness, not weight loss. However, the girls were convinced that the video would help them lose weight and were frantic to get hold of it.

Issues of women and body image are certainly not new to me. I thought back to when I was a teenager struggling to make my body match the proportions of the models in Seventeen magazine. I had learned that the average model was 5'9" and 110 pounds. I was the ideal 5'9", but even on a close-to-starvation diet of 900 calories a day I could not get my weight down to 110 pounds.

But that was in the 1960s. Hadn't girls liberated themselves from such regimens, I asked myself? And even back in the 1960s, it wasn't until high school that I remembered my classmates living on coffee and oranges. Seven-and eight-year-olds ate all the cake and candy and potato chips that they could get their hands on.