What is making our kids obese?

You don’t need a survey to tell this. A visit to your kid’s school should be more than enough. Children are becoming extra large these days! The experts blame the marketing muscle exercised by fast food chains and quick serve restaurants for this. There is also a greater likelihood for plumper kids to grow in overweight teens and finally as obese adults. Hence it becomes imperative to curb childhood obesity.
You are what you eat. Like always weight and food share relationship with each other. In the Indian scenario when the baby is young mothers tend to force feed the child thinking that this will nourish the child. This lays the foundation of obesity in children. As the child grows he is bombarded with images in media that hard sells junk food to their viewers (read children). Chandrima Sanyal, mother of seven-year-old concurs to this. She says, “Meal times have become a constant battle for me because my daughter insists on having instant noodles, pizza in place of nutritious home cooked food.” Chandrima is not alone in her struggle.

All TV and no play makes kids fatter day by day. Apart from junk food too much of sedentary lifestyle is responsible for making our kids overweight. Earlier kids would hop and jump in the playground after coming from school. Nowadays, children sit before the TV or the computer after finishing their meal in a hurry to catch re-runs of shows or to plays games. Internet too sneaks in the lives of children, initially in the garb of innocuous research for homework. As kids gain the license to use the net they build their Facebook accounts irrespective of the fact that they are not even eighteen. “I have many friends who are active on Facebook,” shares ten-year-old Swastee, “and we love to play games, particularly Petville.” Obviously with so much activity happening on the ‘received’ mediums (read TV, video games and online games) kids are not enthusiastic enough to pound the ground in the evening. Amidst all of these sedentary activities popcorn, cakes and cookies provide constant company to the children. “Is it a surprise that the kids are bloating up?” asks Chandrima.
Getting trapped in the vicious circle of obesity. When you are overweight you are at the receiving end of jibes and sneers of your fellow classmates and friends, explains Dr. Arti Anand, Consultant Clinical Psychologist with Ganga Ram Hospital. To bottle up the sadness overweight children eat more, particularly junk food which acts as a comfort food, says she. This starts the vicious circle. It’s no coincidence that depressed kids are usually obese.
What to do?
1. The first step involves weaning kids from unnecessary TV viewing and munching on junk food. To accomplish this, you need to figure out interests of your child that could be pursued in the spare time in place of mindless viewing of the TV. It’s a good idea to get the child enrolled in a hobby class.
2. Weaning off the junk food will be difficult. You got to ration junk food initially and then combine it with portion control. Offer the child healthy alternatives in place of junk food. You can engage the child if he is big enough in the cooking process to arouse his interest in the healthy eating habits.
3. Adopt a dog. If you’ve space and resources at disposal get a dog home but only if the child had been insisting for one. Try to make the child responsible for the mandatory walks of the dog and you are sure that twice a day your child will get some physical activity.