Helping Our Kids to Better Health
This is a call to all parents! Moms and Dads need to take the right steps to get their kids to exercise, eat right, and have a healthy lifestyle. But this may not be that easy to do. A journal showed it in the New England Journal of Medicine that the current generation of children in America may not grow as old as their parents they may have shorter life expectancies. This is due to rising prevalence and severity of obesity in kids could lead to complications and diseases like heart disease, kidney failure, diabetes, and cancer. The only way to help our kids to better health throughout their lives is to create a healthy habit for them while they are still young. What kid chooses broccoli over ice cream? It only takes 21 days, (just three weeks) to create a new habit for kids. Since your kids know when to brush their teeth and when it is time for bed every day, why not teach them how to make good food choices and how to stay physically active?
To make these healthy choices work and help your kids maintain better health, you will have to lead by example. Your kids watch every action of yours, and they will learn most of their habits from you. Your kids will see everything you do as a standard acceptable behavior; an example is when you are sitting on the couch at night and having a bowl of ice cream.
So, to control your health and that of your kids, it's important to take control of your habits. The first thing is to create good habits and get rid of the bad ones. To do this, you can to keep a food journal for a few days or weeks in your house. You might have to eat takeout like two or three times when you don't feel like cooking every weekend, or you reach for that bag of chips beside you when hunger strikes in the afternoon.
If the above is the bad habits you have identified, then it will be easier to change them and create new ones. Why not just replace the chips with some almonds or fruit? You can also limit the number of times you go out to order for meals and always find time to make meals ahead of time so that you can easily reheat them or eat them cold when hunger strikes.
You can follow the same process with your exercise habits. Even though you have a gym membership, do you always make use of it? What time do you go to the gym? You may do some exercises in the morning before going to work and find it difficult to do after work when you find it hard to motivate yourself. Why not make it a habit of going to the gym same time every day on the same days of every week. Your kids will make this their habits too when they watch you doing the same thing every day.
Moreover, you should stay away from fad diets and quick fixes. The result might show faster but won't last long. You are not "getting in shape" or "going on a diet;" you are just making a lifestyle change. This is not just a healthier choice that will benefit you but a better health choice for your family too. The focus should not just be on losing weight but on being healthy and strong (this is what you want your kids to learn from you). Your kids will follow your lead when they see you skipping dessert, going out for a jog, and avoiding processed junk food and see this as desirable behavior.
So, whats the catch here? If you are not so worried about making a healthy lifestyle change for yourself, you should think about the health of your kids and do it for them. But one sure thing is that you will be making your health better while you are trying to help your kids. Even if those kids are just living with you, they will follow every single step you take. Why not take a right healthy step to help boost the health of these kids?