Solving Childhood Obesity Is A Family Affair

Parents dictate their childrens future... statistics show us parents are failing at encouraging their children to have healthy lifestyles. Studies have shown that it is the responsibility of parents to provide guidance and inspiration for their children to pursue healthy and active lives. It is the environment that children live in home that will ultimately determine their pattern of eating, activity levels and attitude towards pursuing a healthy life. We can remove all the dessert bars; soda and junk food machines from the schools and children will still continue to eat improperly. Parents or guardians must take responsibility and maintain a healthy example for their children to establish a healthy physical, psychological and emotional lifestyle.

Poor nutrition and a lack of daily exercise have been the leading causes of the rise in health problems and the decrease in academic achievement amongst children. In addition, children will develop emotional and psychological problems that will manifest throughout the rest of their lives. Its a common understanding that you cannot put a price on ones health, but when bad habits begin to lower the quality of life and you can quantify the result in lower income and increased medical costs, it becomes very real. Thus, demanding the need to find a solution.

Kids are more physically active when their parent encourages and supports that interest. Such support boosts children's positive attitude toward exercise as well as their interest in organized sports. And when you participate in free-time physical activity with your daughter or son, you increase her or his enjoyment of unstructured fitness fun.

You don't have to excel at any sport to accomplish the necessary changes to improve your childrens health. Try these ideas for playing and being active together:

Take a family bike ride or walk. Find nearby trails, tracks or safe routes for all ages in your group. On weekends, when you have more time, plan rides or walks at sites farther from home to keep up interest.
Reduce the time your kids spend inactivewatching TV and DVDs, playing computer games, even at the movies. Substitute active entertainments such as swimming, bowling, going to the roller or ice rink, visiting the zoo.
Play games outside with your kidseverything from hopscotch and jump rope to hide-and-seek, basketball or badminton. Don't worry about what the neighbors will think.
Play physically active games indoors with your kids. Treasure hunts, dancing, ping-pong, even yoga can keep the family moving when the weather makes staying inside necessary.
Consider getting a family membership at the local "Y" or community center. These facilities give you opportunities for several kinds of play and often have special parent-child activity sessions.

If you belong to a health club or gym, find out if your adolescent or teenager is eligible to join. Then you can exercise side-by-side on various types of equipment. Be sure to have a trainer show your child how to use the machines and set up an appropriate workout program for him or her.

Obesity has so many ramifications. It contributes to higher incidences of cancer, specifically kidney cancer, and orthopedic complications, due to the excess stress on bones and cartilage. Diabetes alone costs about $130 billion a year. The disease can cause blindness, kidney failure, strokes and heart disease.

Experts with the International Obesity Task Force estimate that 22 million of the world's children under 5 are overweight or obese. The organization estimates that 300 million people worldwide are obese and 750 million more are overweight.

Genetics is not always fair and some people have more trouble staying lean than others. However, it is only recently that having a body that tended toward staying lean was any kind of advantage. Through most of history survival depended on being able to store as many calories as possible against times of scare resources or famine. So the modern body evolved to cope with times of scarcity not times of plenty - and we have the genes to prove it.

Unfortunately, given our lifestyle that provides huge amounts of easily available calories and very little exercise it is inevitable that people will tend to gain weight. The solution is for parents to teach their children to eat less, eat better and exercise more, that is not always easy, but many things that are simple are not easy.

Mike Torchia is a nationally-recognized health and fitness expert who specializes in children's fitness. He is the founder and president of Operation Fitness, a program designed to improve health and fitness among America's young people.

More information on childhood health and fitness issues and programs can be found at Mike Torchia's Operation Fitness information page

Total Yoga Dvd

Using Yoga and Meditation To Discover Your Hidden Talents

Do you feel as though there is something missing from your life?

How about the nagging feeling that you have been just floating through life so far, yet to make the sort of difference you envisioned as a child?

It's common to have the "gut" feeling that we are capable of much greater things in our lives, but to lack clarity on how we can realize such accomplishments.

Now is the time to change all of that by using yoga and meditation to become directed by inner strength and passion rather that external influences.

Face it, the vast majority of decisions in our lives are directed by others. You would be correct in arguing that we don't have someone else telling us what to do every single hour of each and every day, but through leaving our lives to chance and by following a short-term, tactically driven lifestyle, we really control very little about the direction of our life.

No wonder that as each year passes we seem to drift further and further away from the key characteristics of someone in control of their life: happiness, health, meaningful relationships and a fulfillment that can only be achieved through alignment with your inner passions.

LOOKING WITHIN TO FIND OUR GREATNESS

As we move through life we become better and better at "tactical living". We get better at making short-term decisions related to short-term goals, fooling ourselves into thinking we are making giant leaps of progress when in fact, we are moving further away from inner-directed greatness.

We chase job after job, business after business with the hope of gaining more money - but for what?

We deal with health problems with an ever-growing list of substances from alcohol and drugs to painkillers and sleeping pills, yet we fail to recognize the underlying cause of such ailments.

Relationship seeking becomes an essential part of our life, each subsequent relationship is designed to overcome the limitations of the first and satisfy our ego giving us that short-term fix that eventually leads to the very thing we hope to prevent - loneliness, unhappiness and unfulfilling relationships.

Through all of this "tactical living", we become lost, adopting outward beliefs, impressions and values to help make the many decisions we must make each day.

What if we could harness the power of strength, passion and inner spirit that exists today, deep inside of us?

With yoga and meditation you can open up your inner resources to work in your favor, overcome the conflict that often exists between your decisions and your inner values.

I first started yoga and meditation to relax, to simply re-capture a portion of the day for myself and I have to admit, the insight gained into my own strengths and passions is a powerful effect I had not earlier planned.

After just a few months of practicing yoga and meditation, two important things happened:

1. It became easier to relax and let my sub-conscious thoughts make their way to the surface. We all have a powerful sub-conscious that is capable of directing your life, the key is to understand what the messages are.

2. Through the process, many people soon begin to experience new feelings of self-respect, a like for themselves achieved through greater understanding and self-awareness. Quite simply, you can't like someone you don't know, and most of us go through life not really knowing who we really are. In fact, this lack of knowing what is deep inside us scares us enough to cover it up entirely.

Success in relationships, health, social situations, career, finances are all embedded within us, by choosing to understand and leverage our internal strengths and talents, we can live the lives and impact society as we secretly know is possible.

Adopting just 15-20-minutes of yoga and meditation each day will open your conscious mind to your sub-conscious strengths and talents making you virtually unstoppable.

Join The World's Top Achievers Reach Inner Strength, Happiness, Fulfillment and Live Their True Potential by Discovering The Secrets of Yoga and Meditation.

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