What to do about childhood obesity

Today's material living standards have greatly improved, and many families have only one child. If you don't pay attention to your child's daily diet, it can easily lead to obesity in the child. Moderate obesity is fine, but excessive obesity will have a great impact on children's health and must be controlled in time. So, what should we do about childhood obesity? Let’s take a closer look below.

1. Don’t diet

Some adults will borrow adult weight loss methods for children, such as asking children to go on a diet, skip dinner, etc. But don't do this, as it will cause children to miss out on the nutrients they need and will be detrimental to their normal growth and development. Therefore, never use dieting to make your child lose weight.

2. Change your eating habits

However, we can slowly help children lose weight by changing their eating habits. For example, before eating, we can let the child drink a glass of water first, so that the child will feel full and will not eat too much during the meal. You can also give your child soup before meals, but if the soup is too greasy, it will not help your child lose weight.

3. Change your diet

Generally speaking, overweight children like to eat high-fat, high-sugar foods, such as meat and fish, potato chips, biscuits, juice, soda water, cola and other carbonated drinks. This dietary structure must be changed. Change your child's habit of drinking juice by letting them eat fresh fruits directly, because the sugar content in juice is too high and it lacks fiber, which is not conducive to intestinal motility. Carbonated drinks are rich in sugar, which is very detrimental to children's weight loss. Also, if your child is overweight, give him skim milk instead of whole milk. One cup of whole milk has 150 calories and 8 grams of fat, while skim milk has 90 calories and 0 grams of fat. Therefore, drinking skim milk is a suitable choice if you are overweight. Biscuits, desserts, etc. are also not conducive to children's weight loss, so if children want to eat snacks, you can let them replace them with fresh fruits.

4. Change your lifestyle

The golden saying for weight loss, “control your mouth and move your legs,” also applies to children. We can't stop our children from eating, but we must encourage them to move their legs. In fact, we can move our legs in many details of life. For example, if the destination is not far away, we can set off early and arrive there by walking instead of taking public transportation or driving. After dinner every day, you can take your children for a walk, and make sure they don’t sit down within half an hour after dinner. Don’t eat midnight snacks every night and go to bed early. These are all viable healthy lifestyle choices.

5. Parents should set a good example

Just imagine, if you eat cookies or cakes when you are hungry, how can we ask children to eat fruits when they are hungry. If you eat midnight snacks when you are hungry at night, how do you ask your children not to follow you? If you sit on the sofa after dinner every day, how can your child be willing to go for a walk on his own initiative? If you don’t do morning exercises every day, how can you ask your children to run every day?