Youth and Children Obesity!

Is there anything that could be considered, youth obesity in children?  Many of our children are gaining weight rapidly because they are eating foods that are highly caloric, and in addition, they are not burning those calories off with adequate exercise. 

We have changed a lot over the years, into a society of convenience.  We no longer even have to leave the house if we don’t want to.  We can pick up the phone and order pizza, or any other number of high calorie take out foods.  Note, you don’t often see salad delivery!  Take out food, convenience food, processed food, these are all laden with calories and unnecessary ingredients that do us more harm than good.

Learning to sustain ourselves on these types of foods is a very bad choice.  Even worse, we are teaching our children that it is okay to eat out of the box, instead of turning to fresher food solutions with nutritional value.

The youth obesity solution is to change entirely the way that we eat including what we eat and portion sizes.  Often, going out to eat at a restaurant means that you are given a super sized portion that is far too much food for the average person.  This is not even taking into consideration the option of going to a full serve buffet.  A person can load up a plate, consume everything on it and then return for seconds or thirds.  A family can go to this type of restaurant and eat a weeks’ worth of food, collectively, in just one sitting.

We really need to rein ourselves in and take a good look at our lifestyles and our eating habits.  We are teaching our children that when you are hungry, you eat.  That in itself is not the problem.  The problem is that we are choosing foods that are very unhealthy for us, while containing no real nutritional value.  The youth obesity solution is to show our children how to eat in a more healthy way and also to be physically active.

with our modern lifestyle is not only the amount and type of food we consume, but also the lack of activity that we do on a daily basis.  Many of us will eat and then retreat to the living room couch to watch television for the rest of the evening.  A better choice would be to, collectively, as a family, get out for a walk after dinner.  This allows us to spend time together as a family and to help to burn off and process the dinner we recently consumed.

Books on childhood obesity.