Making Diets Convenient
There are a multitude of reasons why more and more children are getting overweight and we can't cover them all in one article or it would get too long and boring to read!
This one focuses on one of the possible solutions for busy moms who frequently feed their kids on convenience, store-bought ready meals that they don't have to prepare and cook because they simply don't have time.
Family values have been eroded so badly by subsequent generations that it is getting rarer to get a family to eat together at the same time and in the same place, for instance around the family dining table.
Kids tend to take their meals to their rooms to eat while playing computer games or watching TV. One parent may work long hours and not be home for the all-important evening meal. Whatever the reasons, many families just don't eat together any more.
Restoring that one important family bonding time could be a powerful answer to at least part of the problem. It would mean that parents have more control over what their children eat. Once that happens, mom can serve up a healthier family meal and that can make a huge difference.
Healthy Solution
Another solution is to replace the store-bought, processed, ready meals that are often full of additives, unhealthy fats, salt, sugar and too many calories with home delivery diet meals that look and taste the same but are much lower in those unhealthy fats and sugar and most importantly, calories. It makes sense that the way of enticing children to eat a calorie controlled and healthy diet is to make it look and taste something like the junk food they have gotten so used to and that has been causing them to be overweight.
Maybe that's not such an easy task when you stop and think about it, but possible nonetheless.
So what does such a diet need to consist of to make it sufficiently appealing to children in order to wean them off the junk and onto a more child healthy option? And how can feeding the kids be made as easy as possible for busy moms to stop them opting to grab convenience meals from the supermarket to save time?
Home Diet Delivery
We've already mentioned the possibilities of using home diet delivery programs such as Jenny Craig or Nutrisystem that are easy on moms as they are very convenient and time saving while being simple to administer.
Often moms don't have the time to spend in the kitchen cooking home cooked meals for their families as moms did in generations past. Many moms have to go out to work as well as the dads to make ends meet in this crazy economically pressurized world we live in. Generally they tend to try and save time by creating family meals made up of processed foods from the store that do not require any preparation or even cooking, simply heating in the microwave.
While this is convenient for the busy moms, it is unhealthy for the family as these processed meals are laden with calories that cause weight gain. They are also pumped full of trans fats, sodium, sugar (or sucrose derived from corn syrup) and artificial additives to make them look and taste good but not to make the body that has to digest them particularly healthy or indeed slim.
Healthy Diet Alternatives
A healthier alternative would be meals from JC, Nutrisystem or Medifast as while these are still mainly processed meals, they are at least nutritionally balanced and low in calories.
They still come with some additives, but the main task here is to do something positive about getting the weight of the children (and the adults while we are about it) down. Serving up meals that they like to eat while not loading on the calories and trans fats is a good step in the right direction for helping a child to get fit and lose weight.
The other alternative is of course to educate moms who don't know how to cook but are not working and do have the time to do it. Many avoid cooking because they are simply afraid that whatever they try and cook might turn out wrong. Getting a bunch of moms in this situation together in some easy to follow classes is an excellent way to give these moms confidence to cook healthy home cooked meals that their families will love and thank her for!
Cookery classes might not have all that much appeal to young moms, but once they start to go and get together, they find it's a great social gathering as well as an educational one.
Do Something!
Whatever the answers are to helping overweight children deal with their weight problem in a healthy and measured manner while still allowing them to eat food that they like to eat, we must find them as an important way forward. Talking about it and reading about it doesn't get anything done until people start to DO something about it! Let's get busy and start doing!