There are a number of things that you can do at home if you have an overweight child to help them lose weight. One is to have them get involved in planning your meals as well as the shopping and cooking. Empowering them to choose what they eat, within the boundaries that you set, can be a highly successful way to teach them how to make good decisions. Not only that, but they learn the highly valuable skill of knowing how to cook.

Second, increase their exercise level by beginning some sort of a rewards program. Many children live lives that are extremely sedentary, which contributes to their weight problems. Use their preference for activities like watching TV and playing video games to your advantage by making them “earn” the TV time with exercise. To get them started, make a set of note cards that assigns reward points based on the activity. This accomplishes two things at once – it gets them exercising and also limits their “screen time.”

Last but not least is the idea of sending your child to a fitness camp. Gone are the days of “fat camps” that use militaristic techniques to get kids to lose weight. Today’s summer weight loss camps incorporate fun and exciting activities with valuable lessons and skills in choosing foods, cooking, and so on. Most importantly, your child will enjoy themselves at the camp and will learn valuable life skills that they can adopt in their daily lives.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 10:11 am and is filed under Childrens Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.