New Year, New You
With the start of the new year, many people will have set goals to achieve a healthier lifestyle.
You may have started a new diet, a new exercise routine or given up smoking.
All of these lifestyle choices are a step in the right direction towards a healthier and better You.
We have been particularly impressed by our friends and colleagues who are attempting various challenges, e.g.
It’s easy to focus on your goals but what about children’s goals?
Unfortunately, childhood obesity is a major problem. According to the Government publication, Childhood Obesity – a Plan of Action, nearly a third of children aged 2 to 15 are overweight or obese. This is a staggeringly large percentage of children and unfortunately, although this report was published in 2017, it doesn’t seem to be changing.
So with a ‘New Year, New You’ attitude fresh in our minds, would it be worth taking some of that energy and discovering what can be done for children as well as yourself?
Over the next few weeks, Tagtiv8 are going to start looking to help you really stick to your New Year’s resolutions and help children at the same time. This week we’re going to look at ways of promoting and practicing a healthier lifestyle at home.
Healthier Lifestyle At Home
If you promised yourself that you would eat healthier it may be a good idea to include the whole family in this new nutritious journey. Instead of just cooking healthy meals for yourself, think about what is going into the rest of the families mouths too. It may end up being easier to supply a healthy meal for the entire family rather than just for yourself and feel less lonely in your diet.
Check out some advice on healthy eating from the NHS here. We also love the pearls of wisdom from Lisa at Happy Happy Vegan. Check them out here.
You may also find this little quiz helpful to assess the lifestyle choices you are making. You can customise it to suit members of the family or even take it together.
Getting an interactive game console may also be a great (not to mention fun way) to get the kids exercising at home. A Nintendo Wii is a good example of this. Or, you could try putting on an exercise DVD at home and getting the whole family involved.
Keeping an eye on what treats your child has is also a very good way to help reduce the risk of your child gaining weight. Sugary drinks are a major culprit. Try swapping the sugary drinks for a diet option, water, or no added sugar squash. Although fresh fruit juice and fresh smoothies appear healthy, they actually contain a lot of natural sugar and are less filling than what they are actually made of. For example, would you give your child 18 oranges to eat in one sitting? Would they be full after two or three at most? Well, 18 oranges is what it takes to make a carton of fruit juice. There is 9g of sugar in 1 small orange – that works out at least 162 g of sugar in a carton of fruit juice – that’s over 6 times the amount of sugar a child should have a day!
Don’t even get us started on breakfast cereals that are marketed to children.
Although the United Kingdom has led the way in labelling food with a traffic light system to show consumers exactly what nutritional value a product has, some of these can be confusing – for example in the case of sugar. Sugar comes in many different forms and with very different labels. It can sometimes be hard to tell which sugars are better to consume. This is also the same with some types of fat. For example, nuts are a good source of fat whereas crisps are not. The government is proposing that the labels are made clearer so that consumers can understand them better, but in the meantime, if you’re struggling we found this to help.
The important thing to remember when starting a healthier lifestyle at home is that educating yourself on ways to eat healthier and stay active is key. Once you have the basics down, the rest comes pretty naturally.
It’s important to remember that children’s needs are slightly different to our own but one thing stays the same – we all need to be healthier in order to lower childhood obesity. If we all educate ourselves on ways to be healthier, then this trend is less likely to carry on into the next generation.
Watch out next week where we will be discussing ways to achieve a healthier lifestyle during school hours!