Both parents and our schools should educate our youth from day 1 of kindergarten through the last day of high school about the importance of making healthy choices and the health consequences of making bad choices. Encourage activity throughout the day - again, both parents and educators should be doing this. Take stretching or walking breaks during the school day. Make PE mandatory more than once/week. Go on family bike rides, evening walks, and weekend hikes.
I realize there's the argument about low-income and single mothers who have a hard time making ends meet, much less encouraging/enforcing a healthy lifestyle. I feel for those children - they're going to have a hard enough time rising above what they were born into. This is an area where, instead of the government telling anyone what they can or cannot watch or eat, the government {or whomever is in charge of curriculum and education} should be pushing more healthy living education to these kids. Eventually, the hope is that the lack of "customers" {children} purchasing unhealthy foods will lessen the advertising and poor cafeteria foods.
I speak from my own experiences, both with the way I was raised and now how I raise my child. Someday I plan on elaborating on my whole life of weight struggles, but I'll give you a little synopsis here to support where I'm coming from:
Growing up in my middle-class family with two working parents, we always had the sugary-sweet cartoon character cereals and we ate a lot of processed foods, especially because that was what was on sale and was quick to cook, or what my parents had coupons for {and my mom wasn't exactly an awesome cook - sorry mom!}. I often ate school lunches {pizza, hamburgers, pancake day!}, and of course I never chose the vegetables! To top it off, we drank diet soda - yes, "better" than sugar-filled regular soda, but horrible for a child! I cringe when I think of what went into my young body. Exercise wasn't really emphasized in our house either... it was sporadic and never anything we did as a family. Neither of my parents were heavy, but they were both unhealthy in their own ways. Needless to say, my outlook on nutrition and exercise started out pretty badly. I didn't begin to turn my bad habits around until my teen/young adult years when I began to read and become interested in diet and exercise. I educated myself on what I should/shouldn't be eating and doing... and I continue to do that daily, because I still have a lot of nature and nurture to fight!
As a parent, I struggle with feeding my very picky child healthy foods. I feel that I've done well enough - he loves almost all varieties of fresh fruit and yogurt, and he has never had soda nor a lot of juice - but I know I've fallen victim to convenience foods for him, and that I haven't pushed vegetables on him enough {Vic and I are working on that}. We also limit not only the amount of TV that he watches, but also what channels he watches. We stick with Nick Jr. because they do not have any advertising. I know as he gets older, this will change, but hopefully we will have instilled some good habits in him.
One area where I feel we do an excellent job is with exercise. We are both very active, and Valentino has caught the bug for sure.
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| About 7 months old and riding in our bike trailer! |
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| Doing push-ups on the lawn at North Hills. |
I hope to update tomorrow with what I've been up to lately. Until then... your thoughts on childhood obesity?
