Keep Your Kids Out of Fat Camp

What should parents do to help an overweight child, and what will happen if they don’t?

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Carissa Crawford is only 9 years old, but she knows all about the fruits and vegetables she should be eating in a day, and she knows that a healthy kid is an active one. And if you ask her to, she’s more than willing to track what she eats and how she gets her blood pumpin’. She had to do it for her school this past year during a nine-week physical activity and nutrition campaign, and her mom, Melissa Crawford, says that compared to her two brothers, Carissa went all-out.

The initiative was part of the Healthy and Active Communities grant funded by the Missouri Foundation for Health to assess towns for facilities and activities available to keep kids healthy. In its first year, the grant provided $4,700 each to communities in the Citizens Memorial Hospital service area. That includes 18 school districts in five counties. Now in the grant’s second year, the schools were given $1,800 to finish projects or begin new ones. One school added a salad bar to the cafeteria. Other communities requested materials to build walking trails or climbing walls or to better equip school gyms. A committee of local community leaders decided how the funds could best be used there.

The survey that Carissa participated in was a nine-week program for kindergartners through eighth graders that took off during the second year of the grant. Health and activity tips, recipes and statistics were sent home to parents, who then filled out surveys with their children documenting the average number of fruits and vegetables they ate and how much exercise they got on a daily basis. The goal is to get the kids and parents thinking about what is going into their bodies and the risks associated with not being in good health. Diabetes being a big culprit, and the surveys showed that most parents were aware of that. But the surveys also showed that few knew cancer, arthritis and high blood pressure were dangers as well.

In the long-run, Dr. LaVonne Berg and others involved in the grant hope to have BMI (body mass index) data on the kids to see if, after a few years, the BMIs decrease because of the community was made aware of the issue.

What does all of this mean for you, if your child’s school isn’t involved in the grant? Well, Dr. Berg says there are plenty of ways you can take the main ideas and use them in your own home. She works in the CMH Endocrinology Center with children who are referred to her by their physicians for being overweight, pre-diabetic and diabetic, so she has passed these tips along to many a parent in an effort to help get their kids on track before it’s too late.

Get Moving

For starters, she says, add exercise and make activities fun, so your child wants to do them. That could be something different for each child, and it doesn’t have to mean going to the gym: Try kickboxing, using a treadmill during TV time, dancing, team sports or even Dance Dance Revolution. Even starting out with small amounts of exercise in 10- to 15-minute increments throughout the day, will improve insulin resistance, Dr. Berg says. Plan one-on-one active time for you and your child. A child is more likely to do the activity with a friend, and even more so with a parent, Dr. Berg says.

Don't Skip

It might seem as though not eating could be a solution to overeating. But that’s not the case. The real issue is what children are eating and how much, and skipping a meal can be bad news. Never do it, Dr. Berg says. Especially breakfast. If kids skip meals, she says, then they will eat a lot after school, getting all their calories between the end of school and bedtime. That will slow their metabolism and send their bodies into starvation mode during the day. Rather than helping them lose weight, a skipped meal will make their bodies hold on tight to everything they take in. Make sure your kids have a complex breakfast before they leave the house every morning.