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We all want our kids to be fit and healthy, but with the fast lifestyle which most of us lead these days, helping kids stay healthy seems to be a tough job.
With childhood obesity reaching alarming levels, it is time we take a look our kids’ life and don’t let them become victims of obesity-related diseases such as diabetes, kidney problems, heart attacks, stroke, hypertension, etc.
Even if your kid is not obese but eating junk foods, you should still read this article because if he continues with his present lifestyle, it is only a matter of time before he would be displaying a big fat belly like his peers.
Teaching our kids the advantages of following healthy eating habits can help control childhood obesity to an extent. In this article I will offer you four simple eating tips which have worked wonders for my own kids. I am sure you would find them equally helpful.
1. Don’t let them have soda: Soda is probably the number one enemy of your kid, in that it would make him gain by leaps and bounds. The only way to control your kid’s soda intake is to find alternative ways to quench his thirst.
Water of course is the best medicine, but children are not always willing to drink plain water. So what would you do? Well, you could add low-fat or low-calorie flavors into water to make it tasty. Just be sure to check the calorie and fat contents of the flavors you use.
Further, you can also add a tablespoonful of sugar in water to make it sweet. Children often drink soda mainly because of its sweet taste, but once they find a good alternative in ‘sugary-water’, it would be easy to prod them to dump soda for good.
Remember that a can of soda contains an equivalent of several tablespoonfuls of sugar; if you could substitute that with just one or two tablespoonfuls of sugar, don’t you think it is a better and healthier option?
2. Be an example: Preaching the rules of healthy eating to your kids is of no use if you don’t follow them yourself. Remember that kids would pick up a bad habit from you quicker than a good one. If you wish to keep your kids healthy, you would also need to lead a healthy lifestyle.
3. Educate your kids well: There are several ways to do this. Say, when you shop for grocery, teach your kids how to pick up healthy foods and snacks for themselves, how to identify the high-calorie and sugary foods, etc.
4. Throw the junk foods out of your home: It is also important that you clean your kitchen cupboards as well as refrigerator of all the junk foods and stock them with healthier alternatives instead, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, etc. If you keep only healthy foods at home at all times, your kids are less likely to stray than otherwise.
When you have your meals, you should not only eat healthy foods yourself, but also show them how much you enjoy eating those foods. If you have a habit of munching on a packet of chips or popcorn while watching your favorite movie, you should substitute it with apples or carrots; if you really need to eat popcorn, cook them at home using low-calorie oil or margarine instead of butter.
Theoretically, you could get adequate protein from a strictly vegetarian diet, but practically it would be extremely difficult. For one thing, it would require the eating of huge amounts of food. Most vegetarian diets make excellent use of eggs, milk, and cheese, and to that extent are only partly vegetarian.
Animal proteins are stressed in your reducing diet for another reason. Recent knowledge indicates that Vitamin A is not always well absorbed in the form in which it occurs in green plants. Such plants, normally rated as excellent sources of the vitamin, contain it in yellow pigments of which the chief is carotene.
This does not become the vitamin until it is altered in your liver. It has been found that some persons absorb as little as 5% of available carotene; hence, though their food contains plenty of Vitamin A units, they derive no benefit from it.
Animal foods, however, eggs, butter, liver, milk, cheese contain the true vitamin. The animal has done all the work of converting the carotene into Vitamin A, saving you the trouble.
That this is no trifling virtue is indicated by the belief of many authorities that Vitamin A is likely to be deficient in many reducing diets. There is a natural tendency to cut down on milk, butter, and cream relatively rich in Vitamin because these contain considerable amounts of fat.
There is real danger in eliminating all dairy products from a self-chosen weight loss diet. One man did just that and got his case reported in medical records. His skin became dry and rough; his hair grew brittle, lost its luster, and also lost its anchorage, starting to fall out.
His dry skin tormented him with its itchiness. When he finally went to a doctor, he was promptly placed on a rational diet and his symptoms cleared up with Vitamin A concentrates.
Still another reason why reducers should be liberal in their use of animal products is found in the recent discovery that mineral oil interferes with the absorption of vegetable carotene in the intestine.
Because it has no caloric value, mineral oil is a popular ingredient of salad dressings used by dieters. This is good sense because salad dressings can be very high in calories.
An excellent green salad, crammed with enough carotene to make several thousand units of Vitamin A, has its potency in this respect dangerously lowered by mineral oil dressings. True Vitamin A, from concentrates or animal foods, is not particularly affected by mineral oil.
The minimum amount of protein that you can get along on reasonably well can be roughly figured at slightly less than 2 calories per pound of ideal . This amount, however, will merely take care of your replacement needs and won’t have time to jump on the backs of other calories to spur them into action.
It is only surplus protein calories that stimulate the specific dynamic action we have been talking about. That is why your reducing diets provide a generous surplus.