My Child is Obese

If you are worried about your child’s weight, you are not alone. Millions of children across the world are overweight. This is an even bigger problem in the United States than in other countries, but it occurs in all nations across the globe. Figuring out how to help your child get their weight under control can seem like a daunting task. There are a couple of small changes you can make that should help.

First off, you don’t want your child to develop an eating disorder. This means that you shouldn’t be shaming your child because of their weight or what they’re eating. You need to encourage them to eat more healthily, but not shame them. Help them to understand what is healthy and how to make good decisions about food, but don’t shame or discipline them if they make mistakes in their journey.

If your child is obese, you absolutely must look at your family diet. Many parents think that a child not being active is the problem, but usually it’s diet that is the real problem. You’ll never be able to out exercise a bad diet, so you’ll want to make sure that you’re feeding your child a healthy diet. This also means that you’ll also likely have to look at your own diet as well in order to address the problem.

You gain weight by eating more calories than you burn throughout a day. If you eat a lot of junk food such as chips, cookies, cereal, pizza, and other high calorie foods, it shouldn’t be surprising that your child is gaining weight. Similarly, you need to look at what drinks you have in the home. Are you drinking a lot of soda or juice? These drinks are very high in calories, and it’s really easy to gain weight by drinking soda every day.

You need to change the food that is being consumed in your home to lower the consumption of calories to a lower amount. If you’re buying soda, stop doing so - look at getting a Sodastream or moving to diet soda at least. If you love chips, look at replacing them with something a bit lower in calories such as plain popcorn. Rather than cereal every morning for breakfast, look at other simple and healthy alternatives.

Making more conscious decisions about the food that is in your home will go a long way in helping your child to lose weight over time. You need to completely remove the foods that are unhealthy from your home though. Keeping unhealthy foods in the home makes it too easy to fall back to them whenever you want a snack. This means that your family diet in general needs to change to be more healthy overall.

As you work on changing the family diet, you can also look at increasing activity as well. You’ll never outwork a bad diet though, so don’t think that you can just increase activity for your child and it will address the problem. Exercise is good for your body to help keep it active and healthy, but it’s not the key to weight loss - the key to weight loss is a well-balanced diet. Find activities that you enjoy doing so that you can engage in them with your child as well.

Obesity among children is quite common. Work on eating a balanced diet in your home that tastes good, but removes the high calorie foods. You’ll likely find many benefits to this beyond just helping your child to lose weight.