It is easy to criticise the parents of overweight children, but would you know what to do if your child was obese? It’s not as simple as cutting out the junk food, as childhood obesity expert Dr Matt Sabin explains.
Sabin, who runs an obesity clinic at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital, says putting an overweight kid on a strict diet is not only inadvisable — it’s potentially dangerous.
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Instead, food intake should be gradually reduced and combined with a rigorous exercise regime.
“Doing one without the other simply won’t work, especially in young children where exercise has many other benefits on physical and psychological health and where calorie restriction alone to induce stabilisation in weight gain would not be safe,” Sabin says.
Adults often struggle to stick to crash diets, and Sabin says children are no different.
“If there are a lot of tantrums and fights then it is unlikely that there will be a good short- to medium-term outcome,” he says.
If a healthier diet is phased in slowly, the opposite occurs and parents often find their child becomes far more even-tempered and well-behaved.
“More often, there is a reduction in mood swings and an improvement in behaviour as the child consumes less processed and high glycaemic foods,” Sabin says.
Even if your child is a healthy weight, there are things you can do to ensure they avoid obesity later in life.
Dietician Jane Barnes from FoodSense, thinks the key to this is raising your kids to see food as fuel and not a reward.
“We have set up an environment with food as a reward,” Barnes says. “We have got this notion of food as a reward from childhood experiences.”
Related: What to do when your kids don’t get along
Despite this, Barnes says children should still enjoy the occasional treat. Junk food shouldn’t be banned, just eaten in moderation.
“Food should still be fun,” Barnes says. “I am a believer in having a little bit of everything. Nowadays when you go to McDonald’s you have a large coke a large fries and a large burger. This is just unhealthy.
“We can still feed our kids fast food here and there but rather than having that large meal, you could share two burgers and some fries between three or four people.”
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