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.

The Kaiser Family Foundation released a report in January showing just how much time kids were spending on entertainment media, like tv, video, computer, ipod etc in a typical day.  The study was conducted with kids from 8 to 18 years old.

You may surprised to read these results:

There is a lot of correlations and stats about what was found.  But let me just make it simple.

Kids are spending way too much time in front of the screen.  Cell phones and ipods are adding to that.  What was interesting was according to this study, only 3 out of 10 young people said they had rules about how much time they could spend in front of the screen.

Some other interesting finds:

• big increase in mobile media usage – cell phones and ipod
• 64%of young people said the TV is usually on during dinner time
• 45% said the TV was on most of the day

Read the full report from Kaiser

Related resources: Reducing tv – screen time articles- printable goal trackers

How to limit your child’s TV habits in a positive way- ‘Managing TV Time’ -Nourish Healthy Kids Article

Ideas for ’screen free’ alternative activities- ‘TV and screen free’ list of ideas- fun activities for kids.( printable pdf)

Limiting TV time-  printable time tracker for kids -Printable daily/weekly limiting screen time goal sheets for kids

Set a Limit TV time (or whatever media device) Kids GOAL sheet- Printable agreement sheet

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

Invite family, friends or that special someone to exercise with you this week! Plan an outing that includes fun physical activity, like dancing, skiing or bowling.

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.

In my last post I discussed some tips on how to help kids to be active as a part of a daily lifestyle.

To build on that, I wanted to talk a little more about exercise.

There are three kinds of exercise that important for your child.

1.  Aerobic exercise for the heart:

You will often hear that kids need moderate to intense exercise (aerobic activity). Activities that raise our heart rate are moderate to intense depending upon how much it raises our heart rate.  This is important for all of us because our heart is a muscle and it needs exercise too.  When we do activities that raise our heart rate, we are essentially making our heart exercise.  We also breath harder when we are doing aerobic activity and this is good for the lungs.

Here are some examples of moderate activities for kids:

• Walking briskly
• Swimming
• Bicycle riding
• Tennis (doubles)
• Hiking
• Skate boarding
• Roller blading
• Ice skating

Here are some examples of intense or vigorous activity:

• Race walking
• Playing tag
• Martial arts
• Skipping
• Swimming laps
• Tennis (singles)
• Fast paced dancing like dance revolution
• Cross country skiiing
• Jumping rope
• Field hockey
• Hiking uphill

2.  Kids also need bone strengthening activities.

These are activities where we we essentially putting weight or force on the bones.  This is important because it stimulates our bones to be grow and be strong.

Activities that produce impact on the bones (usually from the ground) include:

• Running
• Jumping Jacks
• Hopscotch
• Jumping rope
• Skipping
• Potato sack race
• Hopping on one or both feet
• Basketball
• Tennis
• Hopscotch
• Gymnastics
• Hip hop dancing

3.  Finally, kids also need muscle strengthening activities.

These are activities that make muscles small and large do more work than usual.  For adults this is usually accomplished from weight lifting or resistance exercises.

Common muscle strengthening activities for kids include:

• Push ups
• Rope climbing
• Tree climbing
• Sit ups
• Climbing trees
• Playing tug of war
• Monkey bars
• Wheel barrel races

You can see that many of the activities listed can actually fall into all three categories.  The important thing is to help kids find activities that keep them moving around and having fun.  When kids are actively playing they will naturally do activities that help the heart, muscles and bones grow healthy and strong.

Activity family agreement

Activity printable tracking sheet

Fun Activity for kids

Get the kids moving!

Limiting kids TV time

Help the kids get active is a great healthy goal for kids and families.

Getting kids to be active is more than enrolling them in sports.  Sporting activities are great but sometimes the focus of sport is winning and losing and not necessarily the need to be active.

Kids need to be active every day for at least one hour.  In fact, that is what is really good for all of us.

The best way to help your kids love activity and develop daily exercise as a habit is to:

• lead by example, be an active parent
• find activities that they love so it is not “exercise” but fun
• sports is good but discuss the role of sports in helping them be active every day
• have some active fun as a family
• let little ones play, the playground or park is a great way for kids to be creative and have fun being active

Related resources from Nourish Interactive- The Fun Way to Learn About Nutrition!

Be Active- family agreement

Daily Activity printable tracking sheet

Printable Healthy Goals Tracking Sheets For Kids

Activities for kids printable list of fun ideas to be active! Print out and put on fridge as reminder to have fun and be active.

Get the kids moving!

Limiting kids TV time article

Printable Tracking Sheets

Click Here for Kids' Physical Activity Tracker Page

Click here for printable tracking chart for kids!

Related resources links:

Kids Be Active 60 Minutes a Day- NFL Fuel up to Play 360

Too much focus on sports & not enough fun activities

All activity may not be equal article

Perform an Activity Analysis. Think about why you haven’t been physically active and then brainstorm ways to move forward. Remember, exercise doesn’t have to be expensive, taxing or boring!

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.

Other resources:

Physical Activity family agreement

Being Active printable tracking sheet

Activities for kids

Setting healthy family goals article

Get the kids moving!

limiting kids TV time

Cherish Every Pound-
If you need to lose weight, take it slow. 1 to 2 lbs. per week is a healthy and sustainable weight loss goal.

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

We know Michelle Obama has been promoting healthy eating and being active to kids but it looks like President Obama has joined in.

In a new public service announcement, President Obama is seen playing football promoting physical fitness activity as part of the NFL 60 campaign. Kids need to be active at least 60 minutes a day.

We know kids spend too much time on the couch watching TV. To get kids off the couch, we need to find activities that they enjoy. Some kids love sports, others enjoy dance and others enjoy walking in nature. The important thing is to find the activities that your child really likes and then it won’t be exercise but FUN!

Here is a list of ideas of fun activities you can do indoor and outdoor.

You might want to make it a fun contest to see how many minutes your child can log daily using our kid friendly “Be a Move It Kid” Agreement and our free “Be a Move It Kid” Tracking sheet to encourage physical activity.

Be patient and praise your child as they begin to change habits and move off the couch.

Remember, small changes add up to a healthy child!