Too Heavy, Too Young

At 16, Lloyd Lamb already knows a thing or two about cruelty and loneliness. The Marion, Ind., 10th-grader is bright and outgoing. He plays golf and wrestles. He is also 5 ft. 8 in., weighs 200 lbs. and at times suffers the taunts of classmates. Lamb says he works hard to ignore them, but there are moments, he admits, when he gets "depressed and lonely."

There must be a lot of lonely kids in America these days, judging from the skyrocketing rates of childhood obesity. According to the latest federal figures, the percentage of youngsters ages 6 to 11 who...