overweight children

Childhood obesity is in the newspapers. The numbers are up. Is to miss you?

By: Nan Andrews Amish

Physical education classes are unfunded in many public schools, ineffective in many others. Fat is the ultimate legal bias. Kids make fun of anyone different, and fat boy is fair game. God help the fat kid in shorts, where the fat can hang out for all to see. The thugs will take aim and they won’t give up.
Children spend hours in front of computers and their neighborhoods are not safe.

Here are some strategies for raising strong, healthy, mentally and emotionally stable children.

emotionally

1. Acknowledge that you know it hurts when children make fun of them for their appearance. Help them develop emotional intelligence by acknowledging how they feel and help them develop empathy for other people who are different and who they also make fun of.

2. Acknowledge that you know there are kids who eat worse than them and who don’t struggle with weight. The message is that you appreciate that it may not be fair and that getting healthy isn’t easy and it’s not necessarily their fault, but they are still responsible for doing what they can to control it. Watching a skinny minny eat cookies, milkshakes, sandwiches, and chips and never gain a pound is disheartening while eating lettuce, carrots, and lean chicken or tuna.

Food and Diet
3. If the child is eating a lot of junk food, see if you can change these habits. Junk food plays against kids, because processed white sugar, processed white flour, and food additives are DESIGNED to be addictive and DESIGNED to increase appetite. Deprivation is not the key, but making wise food choices helps. Give them messages like their body is their temple, they need to treat it right. Offer metaphors like putting bacon in a sports car. No, they would put the best fuel they could afford. Bodies are like that.

4. Invite overweight children to shop with you and teach them to read labels. Ask them to become experts, so that they have the tools to choose wisely or waste, but understand the meaning of waste.

5. Invite (rather than force or punish) overweight kids to try various foods that might help them eat less junk. For example, fresh fruits. A burrito with filling protein like beans, instead of totally empty calories. Nuts instead of chips. Little carrots, even.

working out
6. For most overweight kids, the best way to help them is to speed up their metabolism. Exercise is the best way to do this. Fit kids are less intimidated. Strong and fit kids are rarely bullied. Fit, confident, strong children with exceptional physical ability are never intimidated. If the child has rhythm, make him dance, t’ai chi, akido. If they have two left feet, have them try kickboxing or wrestling. If you like team stuff, soccer is great and there are teams available for all abilities and all genders. If they’re particularly “round” and have a lot of soft baby fat, try swimming, they’ll float better than any of their skinnier friends. Weightlifting for children can be a victory.

7. Martial arts are always a win. Build discipline, muscle, aerobic capacity and confidence. Choose according to the child’s abilities, or try what your friends or geographical location have available. Children who know martial arts know how to breathe, they know how to concentrate, they have both internal and external strength. They are not intimidated.

8. Health is the best revenge. So take every opportunity to be active with your child. Walk to the video store. Take a walk with them to talk about what’s going on at school. Put on some music and dance. Have exercise options in the house, such as trampolines, swings for the little ones, jungle gyms, etc.
Special programs

9. If your child is very overweight, consider summer camps designed to do all of the above with many other children struggling with the same thing. Not all camps are the same, so check them out. But an 8-year-old who spends 4 weeks healthy and active over the summer, loses just 10 pounds and grows 2 inches, has a great way to start back to school in the fall. They are stronger, leaner, more confident, tanned and have met tons of new friends.

10. If your child is very overweight, consider working with a naturopath, homeopath, or holistic nutritionist. Why holistic? Oftentimes, kids who struggle with more than a few pounds have other things going on that, if not addressed, will make this an uphill battle. They may be deficient in a nutrient. Vitamin C is a common deficiency among children who crave sugar, for example children who like salt are often lacking in potassium. Children who have received many antibiotics may not have a good intestinal flora and need acidophilus, bifid. Children who seem to be eating all the time and are always hungry may have something more serious. Sugar addictions, wheat allergies, prediabetes, or even a parasite.

11. If you have an overweight child and you have other children who are not in the same space, it is helpful to have a family meeting where the whole family decides how they will help each other address EACH of the family member’s problems . Mentioning the problems of the fat kid is humiliating, but if the family helps one child master spelling and another child with food, everything balances out and breeds a family (team) spirit. If the family decides that to help the child who struggles with food there will be no Oreos in the house, the support is strong.
give them a head start

12. Go organic. Skip the specials at Costco and Walmart. Children who are overweight are sensitive to things that other children are not. Organic food will have fewer additives, fewer hormones (designed to help cattle and chicken GAIN weight), fewer foods that are genetically modified to be allergenic as well, fewer chemicals to create immune responses. Organic produce also tastes better, and it might be less difficult to get a child to eat melt-in-the-mouth cherry tomatoes than tomatoes that taste like cardboard.

13. Develop other strengths of children. If they are good at spelling, encourage them to compete in the spelling bee. If they are musically inclined, find places for them to sing, play. If computers or video games are their thing, help them become very good at these skills, so they’ll be confident from these other perspectives.

14. Be empathic with their appearance. Appreciate that a plea from an overweight child to “blend in” or “fit in” is more charged than the plea from a child who has a more conventional appearance. Help them choose clothes that fit well and really fit well. Make sure they have clothes that they can move around in and that are not uncomfortable. (I knew a teen who hated walking until she got some shorts and pants that didn’t chafe her, for example. Then she walked everywhere, because the pants didn’t cut a hole in her thigh!) Make sure they find clothes that be for his age. appropriate, and are stylish enough that they are not further intimidated because of their clothing. This will cost more than you would prefer as most larger sizes cost more and mods are always on top. Know a good place to alter things too, so if you have to buy a larger size to accommodate a bigger tummy, the rest of the garment isn’t that big, there’s room for Aunt Matilda too. This is where you can REALLY help her son get it on. By buying better quality fabrics, that don’t show big bulges, for example, or a garment that is very well made and hangs very well, she will make her son look smaller than he is. Good underwear counts too, especially for girls. Find a way to make them feel special with accessories, for example, or shoes.

15. Back to basics, you are not alone. Let them know, that they are beautiful inside. Appreciate all the unique and special things that are. Give beauty messages often. Praise best features, extra efforts, exercise, and food wins. Take them to movies like Shrek, Harry Potter and others where there are heroes who are not quite skinny. Show them art that depicts ancient cultures when thinness wasn’t so fashionable. (Botticelli, Rubens, African tribes for example). Give them unconditional love and acceptance regardless of their success or failure in any of these areas.

16. Be spiritual.