Weight Loss Guru


Helping Kids Lose Weight

Helping Kids Lose Weight Fast:

     So what is the quick and easy answer in helping kids to lose weight? Diet and exercise of course.

     Everyone knows that a healthy diet and regular exercise are the big answers to losing weight and staying at a healthy weight. We don't need a lot of new research looking into the causes of obesity. It isn't just fast food, or larger portion sizes, or increased inactivity, that are causing more kids and adults to be overweight. Nobody is going to find one single thing that they can easily change and make fewer people overweight. For most people, it is a combination of all of these things.

     Kids have a kind of built in way to get motivated - and that is through going to school each day. But instead of major changes at school to provide kids with healthy meals and regular exercise, they make very small steps, like banning soda and fruit drinks.

Big changes at school might help kids be more healthy though, including:

* real daily physical education requirements
* only offering healthy foods at school meals, without any unhealthy foods or snacks offered as an option for kids who don't want to eat healthy
* having fitness equipment available to all students and not just those participating in formal sports
* increasing the number of informal sports that kids can play, so that they don't have to be on the varsity basketball team to play basketball at school, for example

     Of all of these changes, the increased physical education requirements will likely be the most helpful. In addition to helping kids reach a healthy weight and avoid becoming overweight, regular exercise can help to build good habits that might last into adulthood.

     To be helpful, schools school institute a policy to meet the American Heart Association's recommendation that kids get 'at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity every day'.

     Unfortunately, even when schools make such requirements, there are often ways around them, like counting recess as physical education or counting non-fitness type electives as physical education.

     Why is more exercise at school important? Getting kids to exercise more after school can be hard, even if you can motivate them to do so. After limiting TV, video games and the internet, with homework and dinner, there still isn't a lot of time left over for most kids to get outside and be active. Making fitness a regular and daily class that kids have to go to makes it have a built in source of motivation.

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