Overweight and Obesity Problems

It’s very normal for moms and dads to erect barriers to prevent them from enforcing eating rules in their children. Parents are used to feeding and nourishing their young and have great difficulties recognizing that their child is overeating. Doing something about it is even more difficult.

The latest US government statistics show that among the 335 million Americans 64% of the women and 74% from the males are generally overweight or obese. About 34% of kids and teens fall into these groups. That will imply that one of the 115 million American households, about 3/4 of them would have one or more adults overweight and maybe there are about 25-30 million American households with teens losing weight or teens and one or more overweight parents. This is actually the group of overeating Americans which are so difficult to achieve.

Body weight is second after height among the more important heritable factors. With one parent overweight the chances a child being overweight is 50%, and with two parents overweight it rises to 90% or even more.

All of this data provides evidence the children follows exactly the same path his or her parents. The parental eating patterns are reproduced in the child. Beginning to change this means that the mother and father need to recognize, that they need to slim down and that their kids or teens need to at least decelerate their weight gain. Because the average child or teen gains between 6-10 lbs. a year normally, often it’s just a matter of slowing down the load gain so that in a year or two they will arrive at an ordinary or close to normal weight.

Here is how parents, especially if they’re overweight, can start to assist their overeating child:

1. For the parent, find any on-line adult BMI calculator, put in your weight and height, should you BMI is 26 or greater you are overeating. A less complicated strategy is to measure your waist circumference, in a women a waist greater than 33 inches = overeating, inside a man the number is 37 inches or even more.

2. Measure each of your children’s waist. Add 17 to their current age. When the resulting number is greater than the waist circumference then he is overeating. Example, if his waist was more than 25 inches he is overeating (17 + 8 ys = 25, a normal 8 yr old should have a waist less than 25 inches.)

If your child exceeds this simple number he is not eating normal for his age. Although he might ‘t be overweight yet, you can just change the situation my creating a few simple changes: stop the fruit drinks or sodas, cut down on dairy, eliminate visits to junk food restaurants, or prepare better school lunches. Have an exergame (gaming and exercise, like Nintendo II or Dance Dance Revolution and play it together.