One big issue that’s becoming a growing concern as time goes on is that of childhood obesity. All you have to do is walk around a playground to really get a good idea just how serious this issue is. With more and more kids growing overweight by the year, this is not only going to place a greater strain on our future health care system, but it’s also going to impact these kids confidence with themselves as they grow older. In addition to a sport like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a balanced diet is also important.
While body weight may not play that large of a factor in the younger ages of five to twelve, once they move past this mark they become more much aware of their larger body size and it will likely affect them in negative ways. By taking steps towards battling childhood obesity early on in their life and taking a pro-active role yourself, you can help prevent this from becoming a major problem in their lives. Here are some of the biggest things you should consider with regards to childhood obesity, as well as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Glendora, CA.
The first thing that you should be making sure you do is emphasizing better food choices over dieting. It’s never a good idea to give the young child the impression that they should be restricting their food intake. This can lead to negative associations with food and foster the development of an eating disorder.
Instead, you want to help your child make smarter choices when they are hungry. While you don’t want to enforce food restriction, you should enforce them listening to their body’s own hunger signals. This is the best way to get them in the habit of correlating their hunger with their food intake at a young age. Then down the road they will be less likely to eat for reasons other than hunger and more likely to stop eating once they are full.
Aim to teach your children the importance of regularly including fruits and vegetables in their day along with lean sources of protein. Try and steer them away from large quantities of very carbohydrate heavy sources such as pasta, large quantities of bread, and all the various snack foods that are available. Next, you also should be very concerned with finding activities that they enjoy. If a child gets a negative experience of ‘exercise’ at a young age, it’s going to be much harder to remove this image from their mind later on.
Instead, you should seek out activities that they will truly enjoy and want to take part in on a regular basis. Younger children and teenagers are primarily focused on the ‘fun factor’ in their life, and anything that isn’t considered such is quickly going to get dropped for another activity. What your aim to do will be to replace all their sedentary ‘fun’ activities with more active counterparts, so that they will gravitate to these instead. In this regard, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a fantastic activity for teenagers and children. It’s fine if they have the odd sedentary activity they enjoy (balance is important), but don’t let your child become hooked on the computer, video games, or television as the primary means of passing their spare time.
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