"Teens in Training"

The Solution to Adolescent Obesity

As a parent I remember watching with adoration, my little ones frolic about with unbounded energy. Children at play provide a certain contagious power that makes the child in us all want to drop the commitments that bind us from the same uninhibited abandon that we all secretly desire and desperately need.

We can all learn a lesson from watching a child at play, and if we join in, we can help our child meet the activity requirements that experts believe they need in order to be healthy and keep obesity at bay.

A study published in the April 2004 issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine says lack of vigorous exercise is the primary culprit that is responsible for making kids ages 11-15 overweight.

Although alarming, an interesting finding was discovered by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine. Researchers examined 878 youngsters to determine how diet, physical activity and sedentary behaviors related to overweight status. They found that 45.7% of the 878 children were either at risk for becoming overweight or already classified as overweight by the standard body mass index (BMI) for age.

This was a practical study that involved activity tracking methods. Each child that participated in the study wore an accelerometer that recorded the amount and level of physical activity that each child incurred every minute for a week. (An accelerometer is a small devise worn on a belt that stores data, similar to a pedometer). The study concluded that both girls and boys in the normal weight group participated in 2-4 more minutes of vigorous physical activity per day than the at-risk and overweight group. Furthermore, it was discovered that boys in the at risk group watched 141.5 minutes of television per day, compared with 108.4 minutes per day for the normal-weight boys.

Now let's examine the findings for a moment. We are literally talking about getting our at risk youngsters up and moving a mere 2-4 minutes more per day, so let's just do them one better and round that time up to 5 minutes. As far as limiting television exposure, we are looking at eliminating about 30 minutes a day from the tube. Is this really asking too much of us as parents to monitor our children's current activity level and add 5 minutes of movement while subtracting 30 minutes of lounging? I think not, and to give you some ideas on how you can accomplish this I've included a few ideas in the chart below: