Eat well; Move more; Live longer
Change 4 Life
I am proud to announce that Banstead TaeKwon-Do has become a Change4Life supporter. Generally, I live a healthy lifestyle and I encourage my children to eat a good & varied diet and get a whole bunch of exercise with the long term plan being that they learn to make good health and nutrition choices as they get older, through their teenage years and in to later life.
We all know that obesity, across the age spectrum, is becoming more of a problem in the UK. This is certainly not the case for all people, but for the children who have a combination of lots of highly calorific food and lack any real physical activity will become obese which also carries health risks and can lead to health problems that might usually be seen in adults.
The basic situation is this: if someone consumes more calories than their body uses then the excess will be stored around their body as fat. This doesn’t mean the we should suddenly put our kids on silly low fat diets because they need to grow! It does mean, however, that children should eat a variety of good food so that the calories they do consume are put to good use around their body and provide the right nutrients to grow properly.
The scary thing is that child obesity is on the increase and will continue to do so unless certain habits are changed. A report by BUPA from March 2009 says that child obesity has risen steadily for the last 20 years and makes reference to 14% of boys and 17% of girls being obese, although there is no reference to their age groups.
The solution is relatively simple to say but sometimes very hard to implement, however if good health and nutrition habits aren’t given to children then later in life they will find it so much harder to change. For example, my Dad has been told that unless he loses weight he will become Type 2 Diabetes – now even being told this he finds it incredibly hard to change his hard wired eating habits. Help instill good habits in our children and hopefully we can reduce adulthood obesity too, a good healthy and varied diet and regular progressively more difficult exercise is the answer.
I’ll write more on this subject but for now if you’d like more information on the subject please refer to these web sites:
Obesity in Children (BUPA article)
You and your children and certainly get a good dose of exercise by taking part in TaeKwon-Do – contact me for more information.
- James.
