Healthy Food Habits
Now it is a known fact that healthy people make a healthy society. But in today’s urban culture dominated by sensational promotion of junk food, parents find it difficult to keep their children away from unhealthy food products and promote healthy food habits among them.
As a result, obesity is common among young people and consequently they fall prey to fatal diseases like diabetes, strokes, abnormal blood pressure, and so on during early years of their lives. On top of that, as they tend to become couch potatoes, their health goes for a toss.
As obesity is increasingly becoming a universal challenge, it is generally observed that obese youngsters are not able to focus on their work and do not perform well in their professions. This, in turn, adversely affects the economic and social systems. So, people in different countries are taking steps to build healthier societies by promoting healthy lifestyles.
Picture this: First Lady Michelle Obama in America started Let’s Move! program in an effort to engage families and mobilize the public and private sectors to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation.
Of late, Hispanic TV channel Discovery Familia embarked upon an ambitious initiative to promote healthy eating habits and to overcome the obesity problem among people.
The nutritional component in the program encouraged participants to select one healthy eating goal (there were eight and each week participants were supposed to add one more, such as: opting for whole grains, fat-free proteins or portion control).
While it is difficult for children to resist their temptation for junk food, the onus lies on parents to develop healthy eating habits among children right from their childhood.
So, what should parents do? Here are these five tips for them.
1. Homemade Food: Be the change that you want to see in your children. While you should always prefer homemade food or branded packaged food or snacks, avoid taking any food from restaurants.
When you have to go out with your children for shopping or something, start immediately after taking your meals at home. That way, all of you won’t feel hungry when you are out in the bazaar.
2. Increased Involvement: To encourage your children to take meals at home, increase their involvement in the cooking process. For example, let them choose the raw food items that they want to cook and eat. You can guide them about the nutritional value of those items.
Depending on their age, you can even allow them to follow some cooking recipes to make delicious dishes for themselves and for the whole family. Why not!
3. School Lunch: Most parents would have experienced that their children feel hungry in their schools. This could be because of excessive exertion during the school hours. Then they tend to eat avoidable eatables like ice-cream, etc. bought from roadside vendors.
To check this practice, you can give them double diet in their lunch boxes. If you think, it will be heavy for kids, you can instead put some snacks like biscuits or something in their boxes. But take care the snacks should contain only healthy ingredients.
4. Couch Potato? While excessive TV viewing itself is bad for children, sitting on the couch and eating mindlessly when watching TV is worse. To overcome this problem, parents must engage children in some useful activity.
It can be an indoor or outdoor game that parents can play with their children. Or it can be a healthy discussion that parents can have with children to help them stay away from TV and eating like a couch potato.
5. Diet Discipline: Although people want unplanned, random variety in their meals, it will be good if you make a weekly diet plan for the entire family – particularly the children. You can even take professional advice from a dietician to make such a plan. This will help you avoid unhealthy food and stay right on your health track.
These are some of the tips that you can follow for yourself and your children to lead a happy, healthy life. Will you?
Content Courtesy: RMN Company
Loading ...
