Despite the title of this article, the situation with a child that needs to lose weight is not easy. Usually the entire family needs to change eating habits and lifestyle to make the child’s diet a success. Luckily there is a lot to do if you truly want to help a child lose weight and the good thing is that you will also end up feeling healthier. Here is a checklist with 5 changes that you can make to help a child lose weight. See if you are already doing this or if you could make further changes to create a better situation for you and your kids!
1. Drink Water!
It should be so obvious, but give this a thought, how often do your serve a soft drink? Add to this the juice and other beverages with sugars that your child gets outside the house. Drinking diet beverages is also not recommended for weight loss so cut these out of your life now! It is better to allow juice or soda with real sugar once a week than drink the fake stuff every day! Cold water with some lemon or just plain is delicious and you can add ice cubes to make it fun and refreshing.
2. Sugar
Sugar is not only in drinks and if you take a look at common snacks like biscuits you will see that they are loaded of this white poison. If a child eats too much sugar they quickly run out of energies. Serve raisins mixed with nuts instead. Clean out your cabinets of the sugar snacks and stick to the fruit when you need something sweet. Candies should also go as they are very bad for the body and teeth. Serve some cake or ice cream in the weekend as a treat. It will be something to look forward for everyone and make the child’s weight loss a lot easier.
3. Are you walking?
Do you always take the car, even a few blocks or do you walk? Try to implement a rule that you walk to places that are within 10-15 minutes of walking. This will create a very healthy habit of moving and it will most certainly aid the weight loss of your child. Try to plan activities where you walk, bike, dance or just move so that the fat burning will be a natural part of you and your child’s life.
4. Limit Sitting Time
The TV and video games are babysitters when you need to prepare a meal or clean up but consider cutting this time to 30 minutes to 1 hour a day. If the kids have to think of other forms of entertainment it will most likely be something where they move. This is very good for a child that needs to lose weight so if you can, get rid of the couch potato activities!
5. Eating schedule
Put the entire family on an eating schedule. This means that no one can go and get snacks whenever they want. You let your child know when meal time is coming and that after that there will be no snacks so the kid better eat their food. You can certainly add snacks in between meals but these need to be more or less scheduled as well and include healthy alternatives like fruit and rice crackers.
Click on this picture for more information about Todd Hollander’s book about overweight kids and how to end the epedemic of overweight children: