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Embarrassed When Communicating With Your Kids Over Childhood Obesity?

With childhood obesity growing exponentially, like a forest fire raging out of control, one big challenge for parents and teachers is to find ways to communicate with kids about the problem without offending or embarrassing them. After all, if youre unable to communicate, how can you resolve the problem? In light of that challenge, here are ten things to keep in mind when communicating with your kids on obesity.

1.Start young, before they have a chance to pick up too much excess weight. As a matter of fact, the younger you start, the better the odds become of avoiding childhood obesity, which almost inevitably turns into adult obesity.

2.Avoid negative terms like fat, obese, and chubby unless you want to offend the youngsters self perception, and all that goes along with it. Thats a dead end street, with no redeeming qualities, and you should avoid it completely.

3.Instead, couch your conversations in terms of how to get stronger and avoid weakness. In many years of school teaching I met lots of kids who wanted to be bad, but I never met a kid (boy or girl) who wanted to be weak in anything (and that includes reading, writing, and arithmetic). Weakness in your kids world is UNCOOL. However, BAD is just another way of saying strong, resilient, and uncompromising. So in place of good and bad, substitute strong and weak.

4.Choose an activity that pays for a child to get both stronger and lighter, and then teach them how to improve, in public, on a regular basis, over a period of time. Done correctly the childs public success, and the praise that follows, will show them that they can try new things in public (they can take a risk) without embarrassing themselves, feeling ostracized or alienated by failure. Done right this activity will strengthen self-perception instead of undermine it.

5.This activity could take a variety of forms, but the simplest example is pull ups. I suggest pull ups for several reasons, starting with the fact that theyre simple, everyone understands them, they require little space, and almost no money. Also most kids usually associate pull ups with being strong.

6.And as any gym teacher will gladly confirm, kids who can do pull ups are never obese. And kids who are obese can never do pull ups. In other words, developing a kids ability to do pull ups, along with his/her desire to maintain it, immunizes them against obesity for a lifetime, naturally, without pills, shots, or special diets.

7.Using a height adjustable bar along with a technique called leg assisted pull ups, where a child jumps and pulls at the same time, allows all kids to experience immediate and continued success. And by inching the bar higher and higher, they eventually run out of leg assistance and theyre doing real live pull ups.

8.Always treat pull ups as an opportunity instead of an obligation. That is to say this activity should be something your kids get to do (like Disneyland) instead of something they have to do (like clean their room). It should be a reward not a job. Done right, you can use the opportunity to do pull ups as the reward for cleaning their room. Until the room is clean Johnny, well do no pull ups and youll miss out on the opportunity to get stronger.

9.Lessons packed between the lines of this strategy include the fact that regular work, good eating habits, and getting sufficient rest (at night and in between workouts) MAKES A PARTICIPANT STRONG. On the other hand, the lack of regular work, poor eating and rest habits, along with counterproductive behaviors such as using tobacco, alcohol, and drugs MAKES A PARTICIPANT WEAK. And again, Ive never met a child who wants to be weak in anything. Have you?

10.The other hands-on lesson that you can teach is personal responsibility. In other words if someone else does your homework on the pull up bar, you make no gains. Nobody else can do the work for you...its totally up to you.

P.S. What if youve failed to start em young before theyve had a chance to pick up much excess weight? What if theyre in junior high, high school or beyond, and theyre already significantly overweight and deathly scared of anything that smells like a pull up bar? What then?

My suggestion is that the golden rule of pull ups is equally true for kids from three to ninety three. That is to say if you can do pull ups you cant carry much excess weight, and if you carry much excess weight you cant do pull ups.

However, almost anyone at any age can use a height adjustable bar together with leg assisted pull ups to generate immediate access/success. Furthermore, almost anyone can inch the bar higher and higher over time, combining regular workouts with improved eating and rest habits, and produce thin slices of improvement over weeks and months until they can physically pull their own weight. And when they reach their goal, theyve immunized themselves against obesity for a lifetime without pills, shots, or special diets, as long as they never lose that hard won ability. Its about that simple.

Rick Osbourne is a Chicago based writer who currently serves as Executive Director of Operation Pull Your Own Weight, an informational web site that's dedicated to naturally immunizing kids against obesity for a lifetime without pills, shots, or special diets. If you're interested in childhood and obesity, then check out http://www.pullyourownweight.net any time. Osbourne is also a public speaker, and hes recently published an e-book entitled Operation Pull Your Own Weight: A Radically Simple Solution to Childhood Obesity (http://booksonboard.com/index.php?BODY=viewbook&BOOK=139219) that provides practical minded parents and educators with a simple, functional, affordable, and infinitely measurable antidote to childhood obesity.

posted by ujzboi @ 4:50 PM