As Sally Roberts’s 14-year-old son changed his top for football practice, she was shocked to see his stomach hanging over the waistband of his shorts. ‘I’d noticed he’d been getting chubbier in the face, but I hadn’t dared say anything in case it gave him a complex,’ says Sally, a 45-year-old legal secretary from London.
But after bouts of lockdown and class bubble isolations spent in front of a screen, combined with months of restrictions on his group sports, his weight gain had become glaringly obvious. ‘My husband came back from watching our son train and said he couldn’t keep up with the others,’ Sally says. ‘It felt like a criticism of how I’ve fed him since Covid.