A Day in the Life of an Obese Teen

Oct. 27, 2003 -- -- Ali Schmidt, an outgoing, attractive 15-year-old from the Bronx, N.Y., usually looks forward to going to school. But when she showed up at Connecticut's Stratford High School for two days in September, it was a different story.

"Basically, walking down the halls was like walking into hell. I felt pain that was excruciating," she said after the miserable day.

Schmidt found herself the object of ridicule: some kids laughed at her behind her back, others made mean comments.

The reason? She was fat. At least she looked fat. In fact, she was participating in an experiment for ABCNEWS designed to capture a glimpse of the emotional and psychological impact obesity has on adolescents.

Schmidt is a slim, 5-foot-7-inch athletic girl. But for the ABCNEWS special Fat Like Me, airing tonight at 8 p.m. ET, she agreed to wear a "fat suit" that would make her look obese.

Using the same makeup and special effects that were used to make Gwyneth Paltrow look obese in the film Shallow Hal, Ali was packed with padding and layered with latex, so that she looked as though she weighed close to 200 pounds.

She found that kids she normally might expect to be friends with ridiculed her after one glance. "They're just complete jerks to you. … I wanted them to realize that I wasn't actually who I appeared to be," she said.

A single day of life as an obese teen was enough for Ali to develop a new sensitivity to the plight of her overweight peers. "Fatness," she said, "is just something that's made fun of. … People don't go, 'Ha ha, you're white,' or 'Ha ha you're black,' but they see a fat person and they think that they have the right to laugh at them."

Sadly, Ali's daylong experiment is an everyday reality for the nearly 10 million American kids who are obese. "I'm like the prey: people come after me because I'm fat," said 14-year-old Jon Marks, describing his experience at school. Third-grade student, Erik Destito, said, "Kids call me fatboy, fatso."

In the past 20 years, the percentage of overweight children in America has doubled. Among teens it has tripled.