Your kid's weight

-
With all the attention kids' weight issues and childhood obesity are getting these days, it can be hard to maintain your perspective. How can you move past self-blame to take action if your child is overweight? How can you help your child make healthy changes without making her feel judged or hurting her self-esteem? And how do you help her realize that, because she is overweight now, she will have to be thoughtful about how she eats and moves -- but she can do it? Here are eight ideas to improve your child's health. 1. Shift the Focus Off Your Kid's Weight, On Lifestyle "Most overweight children feel ashamed of their size," says Michelle Van Beek, MD, a pediatrician at Sanford Children's Clinic in Sioux Falls, S.D. And low self-esteem about their bodies does not help kids make healthy choices. How you communicate your feelings about your kid's weight to her -- as well as any concerns about your own weight -- may have a profound effect on your child. A small study that surveyed parents of fourth and fifth graders showed that the more frequently parents made comments to their child about the child's weight, the more it seemed to have a negative impact of how the children felt about their bodies. Parents' attitudes about their own weight also seemed to affect their kids' body images. Girls, in particular, seemed to be deeply affected by how parents felt about themselves. Girls whose parents regularly complained about their own weight or were concerned with thinness were unhappier with their bodies and more prone to going on unhealthy diets. "If the only thing Mom talks about is weight, the child can easily get the message that his value depends on whether or not he loses enough of it," says Van Beek. To help you find a more healthy perspective about kids' weight, Van Beek recommends shifting the focus from weight -- yours as well as your child's -- to lifestyle choices that help improve your family's overall health: mind, body, and spirit. To help your child learn healthy skills and behaviors, make a family project out of it. Involve children in making healthy recipes. Brainstorm ways to be physically active as a family. Doing healthy activities together works better than watching numbers on a scale -- and builds better self-esteem. Of course, if you struggle with your own weight and self-esteem issues, this may feel like a lot to ask. If you feel hopeless about your child's weight, childhood obesity in general, or even your own weight, you may not feel equipped to provide your child the tools she needs to develop healthy habits and improved self-esteem. Yet, your experience can be instructional -- and even inspirational -- for your child, if she's old enough to understand. If you've struggled with feelings of isolation and loneliness because of your weight, tell her what it was like for you. Share your current struggles and successes. Hearing that you hit bumps in the road and how you handle them will help your child know she can also keep going when she stumbles. The time you spend with your child, sharing stories and listening to her as she deals with child weight issues will help her feel important and loved -- key ingredients to healthy self-esteem. I'll continue talking about children's weight next time, this is a subject that requires more than one post.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's the Mediterranean Diet?

-
Image
The Mediterranean diet is based on the traditional foods eaten by people living in the Mediterranean region, especially Greece. It's loaded with healthy foods and research findings suggest following this diet may help reduce some of the risk factors for heart disease.  According to the Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust, the Mediterranean diet was introduced in 1993 by Oldways, Harvard School of Public Health and the World Health Organization.  The diet includes: Olives and olive oil Whole grains, mostly in bread and cereal rather than pasta Very little red meat Fish and seafood Some cheese, but less milk Lots of vegetables and fruit Plenty of legumes and nuts A little red wine The Mediterranean diet is high in fiber and antioxidants from vegetables, legumes and nuts, far greater than the typical Western diet, and low in saturated fat. Very little red meat is eaten in this region, and milk consumption is limited as well, exc...
Read more

Changing Your Life To Lose Weight

-
Image
I can let you in on the ultimate secret for successfully making a change in your life. A century’s worth of psychological research reveals an interesting paradox in who we are. On the one hand, once we reach adulthood our basic personalities remain unchanged for the rest of our lives. We keep doing the same things—and feeling the same ways—over and over. But, on the other hand, every day we change our behavior drastically in response to different environments. Most of us are one person at work, for example, and another person at home. It is easier to change our environment than to change ourselves. So, if you want to change yourself, change your environment. Said differently: Whenever possible, don’t try to fight temptations – avoid them! The easiest way to make a change in your life is to modify the world around you in ways that will naturally drive you toward making, and maintaining, the change you want. There are many ways to change your environment, but let’s focus...
Read more

Cancer and High Protein Diets

-
On the Fox TV Network the other night, one of the big stories was about high protein diets. A new study has shown a link between the over consumption of animal protein and how it can stimulate the growth of cancer cells. It seems we all have cancer cells but they don’t normally grow, unless we consume too much animal fat, dairy or fats from processed foods. Before I continue I want to explain about the link to cancer. After all, Man has been eating red meat for millions of years, right. That's true but todays red meat is not the same. Most red meat that we buy in the supermarket comes from Steers that have been raised in feed lots on a grain diet that is full of hormones and other chemicals that shorten the growing time and put more fat on the animal. These hormones and other chemicals stay in the meat and what you're buying will contain the chemicals that the animal ate. Normally a grass feed Steer that lives on the range in big herds will take 18 to 20 months to grow to ...
Read more