Recent News: Documentary on Obese Teenager

Documentary focuses on teenager as it looks at national childhood obesity crisis

Pam LeBlanc, Fit City

When Ashley Castoreno was a baby, her parents put Big Red soda in her bottle to quiet her. Growing up, she never learned to bike or swim. At school, someone once taped a sign on her back that said, "Don't feed the cow."

By the time she was a senior in high school, Castoreno was more than 100 pounds overweight — and typical of a growing segment of American children.

But in the past year and a half, Castoreno, now 20, has shed weight, gotten hooked on running and traveled to Washington, D.C., to tell legislators what it's like to grow up obese and why it's important to keep physical education in the classroom.

Her story is featured in a new documentary by first-time Austin filmmaker Jen Ohlson, a former Austin sports reporter and author of the coffee-table book "Every Town Needs a Trail."

Ohlson founded the nonprofit PE3: Mind, Body, Spirit in 2009 with the goal of improving physical education in public schools. One way to do that, she decided, was to tell the story of childhood obesity by focusing on one student.

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