Sep
24
A Parent’s Options…
Filed Under Parents Info
So Mom And Dad, When It Comes To Childhood Obesity You Have Several Options To Choose From In Order To Help Your Kids Avoid Obesity Forever!
So you’re a parent with two young kids, twins in fact named Jason and Jennifer, age four and five respectively. Both are happy and healthy kids that you’ve raised with careful tender love, care, and affection. But you’ve been reading about what they’re now calling the epidemic in childhood obesity, how the problem has increased over 300% in the last two decades, and how obesity is threatening to bypass tobacco as the number one preventable cause of death in the US today.
You fear now that Jason’s and Jennifer’s affinity for fast food and computerized video games is going to result in the kids becoming obese and suffering from all the problems that go hand in hand with kids being overweight/obese. You absolutely don’t want them to be subjected to that kind of treatment from peers, who we all know can be extremely mean even at a very young age.
Being a pro-active parent you begin to search the available literature on how to prevent childhood obesity before it begins. You go to the library, the book store, the internet and what do you find? Here’s a brief potpourri of the prescriptions that are currently out there on the market for you to choose from.
* You can depend on your doctor and the AMA (American Medical Association) to become inspired with the idea that losing weight is primarily a function of changing lifestyles and habits that lead to the problem in the first place. Basically they tell you that you have to reduce your kid’s calorie intake, and increase their physical activity level, and that habits and lifestyles are the culprits or the heroes when it comes to weight control in kids or adults. So make sure they get thirty to sixty minutes of active play every day, and cut the junk foods out of their diet… even though the television ads show and tell them how much fun (you deserve a break today) and delicious they are. The problem is they tell you to do it without telling how to motivate your kids to actually do it.
* You can depend on the Health Club to inspire your kids to increase their protein intake, decrease their carbohydrates, and design a circuit training (a combination of weights and aerobics) routine like their adult club members employ on a weekly basis. And the membership will run you about $49 per month, or $600 per year. But if it works, it’s worth it, right? But I suggest checking out their success rates before signing your kids up.
* You can depend on the Park District and sign your kids up to participate in a sport each summer, fall, winter, and spring. The hope is that your kids will get hooked on athletics, and in the process they burn all the excess calories running up and down the soccer field or the basketball court. They also have less time to vegetate on the TV or the computer if they’re participating in sports. But what if they prefer the cello?
* You can depend on the school that Jason and Jennifer both attend to eliminate the junk food in the vending machines and to teach a good Physical Education classes. After all it has a very good reputation in the neighborhood, so you could just place the fate of your kids in the hands of the school system and hope that they’ll learn all about being physically active and eating right. Yes you could do that…right?
It’s Up To You…
In short you could depend on the system and lots of other people and programs to help your kids avoid the modern, high tech obesity trap. Or you could take the bull by the horns yourself and teach your own kids to perform pull ups because you know that people who can pull their own weight are never obese, and people who are obese can never do pull ups. The ability to perform pull ups and the possibility of being obese are mutually exclusive, and are never found in the same person.
You know this from observing kids in gym class back when you were in school. It was always the relatively lean kids who could perform pull ups, and always the heavy kids who weighed to much to pull their own weight, and were inevitably embarrassed by any reference to the old pull up bar. So the choice is up to you. Do you depend on someone else, or do it yourself (pull your own weight) in about five minutes a week?
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.