Can you tell if your child is overweight?

According to a new study, you may be underestimating your child’s weight. A large proportion of the parents of overweight children—and especially mothers, who are surveyed more often—do not perceive their children as overweight. In some studies, the percentage of parents who don’t realize (or won’t admit) that their child is overweight has been reported to be as high as 80% to 90%.

One thought was that we have a greater percentage of overweight and obese children.  So overweight kids don’t stand out as much as they used to twenty years ago.

Regardless, of the reasons, it is important to first start with a pediatric check up and see where your child is on the growth chart.  You can also use our BMI calculator designed for kids but remember this is just one measurement and has to be combined with other factors.  If your child is indeed overweight, then working with a dietitian is recommended. The basics will still apply:

Don’t single out your child, work as a family to eat healthier

Set one or two goals for changing eating habits and track them.

Be patient, positive and encouraging.

General guidelines of areas to work towards:

• Find activities that your child and family can do together and work towards being active for at least one hour every day.
• Increase fruits and vegetables.
• Decrease sugary and fatty foods that don’t offer nutrition,  just calories.
• Get plenty of sleep.
• Limit TV time and screen time to 2 hours or less a day
• Eat breakfast every morning

Resources from Nourish Interactive:

Printable Nutrition Tips and Tools for Parents

Healthy Parenting Nutrition Articles- ‘Nourish Healthy Kids’ newsletter articles and tips

Free Nutrition Education Games for Kids!- Fun interactive games and tools

Healthy Nutrition Tips Calendar -Printable PDF

Printable Healthy Nutrition Tips Calendar

I came across this video about kids being active.  I love the music.  Made me get up from my computer and break out some moves.

With the weather still being pretty cold, here is a fun aerobics video for kids, you can even do the DVD with them. Make being physically active a fun part of your day together.

This is a fun way to encourage kids to be physically active for 60 ‘Move It Minutes’ a Day. You can get a taste of the DVD from this youtube video.  Show it to the kids and see if they start to move.  Finding different ways to get your kids having fun while they are active is the key to helping them build this as a life long habit!

Fit Factor for Kids Website and DVD

Resources from Nourish Interactive- The fun way to learn about nutrition:

Move It Minutes- Printable Daily Physical Activity Tracking Sheet

Get Kids Moving Tips- Healthy Family Article

Family Fitness Tips, Being Active and Fit

More Resources:

Let’s Move - New initiative for improving kids health, nutrition and increasing daily physical activity.

Michelle Obama speaks out on the new initiative “Let’s Move”

Let’s Move will give parents the support they need, provide healthier food in schools, help our kids to be more physically active, and make healthy, affordable food available in every part of our country.

We support Michelle Obama and our President 100%.

Healthy Choice Resources

Fun Healthy Goals and Tracking sheets

Nutrition Games and Tools for Kids

Nutrition Tools for Parents

Nutrition Tools for Teachers

Most holiday pledges are broken in the first few weeks of the New Year. Teach your children how to focus on healthy goals each and every Monday to maintain the momentum you need to make real change!

Mondays are a great day to renew Family Health vows. Every Monday, you will find some healthy tip to help your family start the week off on a Healthy Note!
Thanks to Healthy Monday organization for sharing their Monday tips.

A very exciting and ambitious goal was set by President Obama this week.

President Obama has announced that a task force on Childhood Obesity has been created.

Spurred by the sad fact that:

• kids are predicted to have a shorter life span than their parents
• childhood obesity and the related diseases has tripled among children
• current strategies are not working

President Obama has made this one of his key missions:

TO FIGHT CHILDHOOD OBESITY

He is:

• redoubling the efforts to solve the problem
• he wants the problem solved within a generation!
• he wants a comprehensive plan delivered in 90 days!!

Wow, that is quite a hefty goal and schedule.  I applaud the fact that he is taking such a strong stand to address this serious issue head on.

I still don’t think most people/parents realize what this will mean to our children’s lives, health care system and economy if we don’t figure out how to stop this trend.

But under this new leadership, I am hopeful. I am excited and energized!  We can make a difference if we all make this a priority.

Do we need an electronic plate to help kids learn to eat healthy food portions?  According to a new study published in the British Medical Journal, a new computerized “plate” is more successful in helping overweight children and teens lose weight than standard treatments. Also see below for strategies to try at home that don’t require an electronic plate!

Essentially, this new device is an electronic plate that weighs food and gives feedback on how fast or slow kids are eating.  It is teaching them at the table to eat slower and put less on their plate.  The device plots a graph showing the child, the rate at which food actually disappears from the plate, compared to the ideal graph programmed in by a food therapist.

The study found the overweight kids that were participating in this study tended to eat larger portions very quickly. There is a couple things we know.

• The body takes about 20 minutes to tell your brain, you are full.  So if you it too quickly, you may be full, but not really know it yet.  So you eat more.
• The more you put on your plate, the more you tend to eat.

What can you do to help teach your kids to slow down and eat healthier portions?

Eating slower tips:

• Talk as a family during meal time.  When you are talking, you are not eating.  So it slows down the eating time.
• Teach kids to take a bite and then put their fork down.  This helps kids take a pause instead of eating one bite after another.
• Teach kids to take a sip of water in between bites.
• This might sound extreme, but announce the start of dinner (i.e. 5pm is dinner)  and let kids know that you will sit together and talk and eat for 20 minutes.  In other words, help kids realize that this is not a rush or race to “finish and then go do something”.  This is part of family time.
• Teach kids that it is healthy for the body to eat slower so that your brain has time to know when you are really full.  Kids are smart and learn fast.
• Take a look at your own eating habits, lead by example.

Smaller portions:

• Use 6 inch plates or the “salad plate” for dinner.  Kids are less likely to put the same amount on a 6 inch plate versus an 8 inch plate.
• Place smaller serving utensils on the platters.  Instead of a large serving spoon, how about a spoon that is larger than a tablespoon.  Even a tablespoon can work.
• Ask kids to put only one serving on their plate to start.  If they are still hungry, they can always put a second serving afterward.
• Cut up meat (you can usually ask the butcher to do this for no extra charge) into 4 ounce servings.
• Place larger serving spoons for the vegetables and fruits.  We want the kids to eat more of this healthy, low calorie food!

Serving Size and Portion Information-Resources from Nourish Interactive:

Healthy Serving for Kids

Portion Size Reference Guide

Healthy Nutrition- Food Games for Kids

New childhood obesity study from University of Montreal indicates that how close a child lives to a convenience store promotes childhood obesity.

Well, it makes sense.  Convenience store carry food items that are processed and usually high in fat and/or sugar.  Do you go to a convenience store to buy fruit or vegetables?  Well, no, because they don’t really sell that.  So what do you get at a convenience store?  slushies, chips, candy, soda, cookies…

Another study done in urban areas found that kids who lived near convenience store purchased:

• On average, the students spent about $1 and purchased 356 calories of snack foods and drinks each visit.
• Chips, candy, sugary beverages and gum were the most frequent purchases

It is probably not a good idea for kids to go to these convenience stores to buy their snacks.   But in all honesty, even if you had a grocery store full of fruits and vegetables at the corner, would your child go there and still buy the processed high calorie food?   And of course the older a child is, the harder it is to control their “away from home” eating habits.  This is very true.

That is why it is so important to help kids develop healthy habits and a love for healthy foods while they are young and have not formed their habits yet.  That is what we are all about.  Helping parents and educators teach kids about healthy eating and activity while they are still young and just starting to form habits.

This could be a very good healthy goal for your child and family to work on.  It can be as simple as having one healthy snack a day!  Simplicity and fun are the key to helping your child be successful.  Children like to do things that are positive and they feel successful.  Don’t we all?

More resources to help kids eat healthy snacks:

Healthy Kids Snacks Agreement

Healthy Kids Snacks Fun Tracking Sheets

Take the Healthy Eating Challenge Article

Healthy Summer Snack Foods For Kids Article

If your child is overweight and you are worried about how to best help them lose weight in a healthy way, I recommend seeing your pediatrician and having a meeting set with the pediatric dietitian.

But there are also a great deal of good, credible resources available to you.

I just read an article written by Pediatric nurse who is creating a 12 part series called “Why Weight”.  This 12 part series will dedicate itself to taking an in-depth look at the factors and behaviors that contribute to obesity in children. I think this will be a great resource and a wealth of good information so I wanted to share this with you.

Each week she will focus on one of the following 12 issues that contribute to childhood obesity with strategies to help parents address them.  Here is a list of the 12 issues she will cover each week  (Affectionately termed, “The Dirty Dozen”)

The Dirty Dozen (in no particular order):
1.  Drinking Soda
2.  Use of Convenience Foods
3.  Daily Sugar Consumption
4.  Hidden & Obvious Fat Sources
5.  Hunger
6.  Balance and Rhythm of Meals and Snacks
7.  Not Enough Produce (Fruits & Vegetables)
8.  Too Much ”Screen Time”
9.  Activity (Structured vs. Unstructured)
10.  Portion Distortion
11.  Bad Habits Start Early (Sneaking, Hoarding, Skipping)
12.  The Magic of Mealtime

Read part 1 – Kids and Soda

Just wanted to wish everyone a very Happy New Year!

It is hard to believe that another year has rolled by.   We believe that the best way to fight childhood obesity and keep our kids healthy is through early fun nutrition education.

We thank you for your support over the last two years.  We could not have grown to over 350,000 hits per month without you kind words about our site.

We are so appreciative and grateful to all the moms, dads, grandparents, teachers and nurses  and kids who took the time to pass our site along to others.

We are so excited for 2010 and look forward to working with you in a fun way to promote healthy eating and daily activity to our children.

Look for us in twitter, facebook and myspace as we join the social networking world with new free games, nutrition tools and printable worksheets!

We will see you in 2010!

Are we surprised by the latest report indicating that the food and beverage industry has failed to live up their commitment to change their marketing practices to children? I have to say, I am not.

The US Council of Better Business Bureaus initiated a voluntary, self regulatory program three years ago. The goal of the initiative was to really improve the nutrition of foods and drinks that were advertised to children. This was initiated after numerous studies showed how much money and how many marketing ads were being shown to young children that promoted unhealthy, high sugar and/or high fat foods. Combine that heavy messaging with the time kids spent on TV and it’s no wonder that kids know popular fast foods and junk foods before they can even talk!

The initiative called “Better-for-You” was implemented to try to fight childhood obesity. We know that childhood obesity will not be solved by one initiative but changing the junk food and fast food marketing tactics to kids is certainly one important step. Kids are influenced by their clever marketing and they put a lot of money behind it to make it fun and engaging to children!

The fact that the participation was voluntary and they were agreeing to “watch” themselves says a lot about how strongly we were willing to take a stand against unhealthy food advertisements to kids. This may surprise you, but many other countries already have strict regulations in place that ban unhealthy food advertising to kids – it’s the law!

Here is what the report found:

• nearly three out of four (72.5%) of the foods advertised on television to children are for products in the poorest nutritional category
• Commercials for healthy foods like fruits and vegetables accounted for only 1% of all food advertising to children
• Nearly half of all food ads that used popular children’s characters (49%) promoted foods of the poorest nutritional quality

The honor system doesn’t seem to work well for corporations when it conflicts with their pocketbook. We have to really question the viability of this current initiative and if self regulation is really the answer to addressing this part of the problem.

One thing we can do at home is make nutrition and healthy foods fun. Let kids learn about nutrition in a way that is engaging and meaningful to them. We have to fight the junk food FUN with our NUTRITION FUN! We can’t wait for congress to pass a law, our kids are growing now and learning their eating habits and food associations now.

We, here at Nourish Interactive, will continue to find new creative ways to help you bring nutrition into your home in a fun way. We have games, colorful nutrition tools and free print material that are all designed to help parents and teachers make nutrition fun. We have to be our own marketing campaign “Eating healthy is fun.”

Resources for teaching kids about healthy nutrition from our website:

Fun nutrition story page – nutrition stories for kids

Kids’ healthy nutrition games – fun educational games teaching kids about healthy habits and the food pyramid

Fun nutrition tools – interactive learning tools for children

Parents nutrition tools and tips – healthy tips calendar, meal planners, bmi calculator, recipes and more!

Nutrition tools for teachers – free nutrition games for classrooms, food pyramid printables, worksheets, and nutrition lesson plans.