Health Blog

By Penny Rosalie

You want to set a positive healthy example for your children. As parents we want to protect our children from harm and there is no difference with wanting to protect them from being overweight. It is important to teach them how to eat well and live life healthy and happy.

It is very upsetting when you see your child getting bigger by the week and out of control with eating. If obesity or weight problems run in the family you will need to learn how to break this cycle.

Who said it had to be meat and 3 veg?

Kids need to eat and there should be no strict format to it. Who cares if their dinner plate has roast meat, tomato, cheese and strawberries on it. This is great food for children and if that’s what they like it’s no sense giving them peas, carrots and broccoli if they detest them because they are not going to eat them and then that leads to tension at the dinner table. You also have a child leaving the table hungry. If they are hungry when they leave the table they are more liable to eat the wrong foods after dinner, eating snack foods like biscuits or chips.

So how can you make your kids want to be more active and how can you help them do this?

Easy! Choose an activity that’s fun and interactive. Walking to the park and playing there on the swings or activity bars, even playing ball at the park is usually something kids love to do.

A simple 20-30min walk together and chatting about each other’s day could be a start.

You don’t have to be a star sports player to swing a bat, toss or catch a ball. Go on a bike ride or walk while your son or daughter rides, maybe swimming?

Just get out and move!

All movement expends energy which helps their body burn fat.

It should always be about healthy alternatives.

Kids love colour and shapes. Even when they are older, if you make up a platter with fruit, cheese, vegetables and crackers they more often than not prefer to eat that rather than grabbing the same boring snack they go for from the cupboard. Give them a treat occasionally on their platter not every day and downsize like a mini piece of chocolate instead of the full size or a mini chocolate muffin. They won’t feel deprived of the naughty foods and you won’t have them telling you their friends get better food than they do!
More often than not we reward our children with food. You can reward your children with reading them their favourite story, a trip to their favourite park, colouring with them, playing games together and perhaps watching a movie together. There are lots of things your child will love to do besides eat.

It is important to communicate with your children when they are old enough to explain what the healthy choices are and why they should eat them. It’s important you educate them on the importance of having a healthy body.

Children have become much more sedentary particularly since the introduction of video games. They want to play their computing games and that’s fair enough however you can place a time limit on them with some additional requirements like, it can only be played once they have done their homework, spent a minimum of 30mins playing outside and have eaten something they like which is healthy. This tends to stop kids playing for hours and also snacking while they are playing.

Sometimes they may play for hours realising they haven’t eaten and then go to the cupboard and pig out on quick fast foods which are normally unhealthy. This is the wrong sort of food you don’t want them to have.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 4:13 am and is filed under Lose Weight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.