About Families Online

Feature Articles for August, 2003

According to results from the 1999-2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), 15 percent of children and adolescents ages 6-19 years are overweight. This is a four percent increase from the overweight estimates of 11 percent obtained from NHANES III (1988-94).

Many healthcare professionals are urging parents and other caregivers to assume a proactive role in helping children develop better eating and exercise habits. One expert, Dr. Rallie McAllister, a family physician and mother of three, has written a book aimed at helping parents in this endeavor.

In her book, Healthy Lunchbox: The Working Mom’s Guide to Keeping You and Your Kids Trim, McAllister offers twelve ways to help get children eating better and exercising more. McAllister points out that putting children on a diet to lose weight is the worst thing a parent can do. “For kids, dieting is risky business because their rapidly growing bodies depend on an adequate number of daily calories for proper development. Weight-loss diets can also inflict emotional damage that can lead to over-eating or binging later on,” she states. In her book, McAllister shows moms a much better way to help young couch potatoes and junk food fiends eat better, increase their physical activities and adopt healthy habits.

1. Get kids involved in meal planning, shopping, and cooking. By doing so, you teach them the skills they need to select and prepare nutritious foods when you are not around them.

2. Host an international night once a week. Introducing new foods to your table on a regular basis makes mealtimes fun and gets kids to broaden their tastes.

3. Start serving water with each meal. Getting kids used to drinking water helps them meet daily fluid requirements, prevents overeating, and improves their digestion.

4. Replace favorite high-fat, high-cal foods and snacks with similar, healthier ones. Examples: switch ice cream to frozen yogurt or frozen fruit pops, potato chips to baked chips or whole-grain pretzels, soda to flavored seltzer, cookies to dried fruit.

5. Stock your kitchen with lots of easy-to-grab, nutritious snacks. When kids start raiding, they will eat! Examples: precut veggies in individual zipper bags with tiny containers of fat-free dip, individual low-fat fruit yogurt, low-fat string cheese and sliced deli meats, a big bowl of grapes, pineapple chunks, melon balls, and orange sections.

6. Create an after-school job box. After school kids have to pull out a chore, project, or activity and accomplish it before they are allowed to watch TV or play video games.

7. Make a TV or video-game allowance. Studies show a direct correlation between the number of daily hours kids engage in these sedentary activities and childhood obesity.

8. Eat at least one meal together every day. Breakfast is as good as dinner. Kids who eat at least one meal a day with their parents do better in every way than those who do not.

9. McSlow down. If kids clamor for fast food, let them have it, but get it to go. Bring it home and serve it on dinner plates, along with a salad and a side of vegetables.

10. Make sure they eat breakfast. Children who skip breakfast perform worse in school and are more likely to be overweight. Fix them a brown bag breakfast to eat on the bus or at morning snack time if they are not early-morning eaters.

11. Schedule a mom-and-kid activity at least once a week. It can be a walk, a game of catch, a bike ride, or an exercise video your kid created herself. Let him or her choose the activity, and then commit to doing it together.

12. Be a good role model. How the mother eats, exercises, and feels about her own body has the most powerful influence on the health of her children than any other factor.

Dr. Rallie McAllister runs a family practice specializing in health and wellness, and operates a weight-loss clinic called Healthy Solutions outside of Memphis, Tennessee. She is the host of Rallie On Health, a local health TV show with over one million viewers, and writes a weekly nationally syndicated column entitled Your Health by Dr. Rallie McAllister. McAllister is author of the recently published book, Healthy Lunchbox: The Working Mom’s Guide to Keeping You and Your Kids Trim.