How to help your child maintain healthy body weight
Reaching and maintaining a healthy weight is important for overall health and can also help you prevent your child from suffering from many diseases and conditions.
If your child becomes overweight or obese, they are always at a higher risk of developing serious health complications. Some of the conditions associated with this are heart disease, stroke, diabetes and high blood pressure.
There is also the risk of developing breathing problems like asthma or sleep apnea, or joint problems, gallstones, fatty liver disease or heartburn.
Therefore, maintaining a healthy weight is important: It helps you lower the risk of your child developing these problems, also helps them feel good about themselves, and gives them more energy to enjoy life. This is because obesity in children is also linked to psychological problems such as anxiety or depression and societal problems like bullying.
Here are some of the things to do to ensure you child maintains the required body weight to avoid this health related complications:
Move more
Walking more helps fight weight gain. As a parent if your child attends a school near to where you reside its always best to walk the child to school. Doing this will help burn cholesterols helping the child in metabolism. Walking is also a good way to exercise your muscles.
Check on the diet
Diet is key when it comes to maintaining healthy weight. For this reason, it’s important to keep track of what your kids consume. Ideally, kids should have a balanced diet and ensuring that veggies are present with every meal as they tend to be low on calories.
It is also important to cultivate in your kids a good relationship with food. This includes teaching them to monitor how their emotions affect their consumption of food, which could be a sign of emotional eating. If left unchecked, it could lead to obesity.
Keep the sugar-laden snacks at bay
Once you introduce your kids to snacks that are high in sugar content such as sodas, crisps, corn puffs etc, it can be hard to restrict them from them altogether. However, you have to be cautious about how much junk they consume as it can be a slippery slope to obesity. You could alternatively go for healthier options instead of processed snacks so that your kids have something to snack on between meals. These include nuts, fruits and yoghurt.
Featured Image: American Heart Association
