It’s a safe assumption that parents want their kids to be healthy. The best and most effective way to achieve this end is to approach it with teamwork mentality. That means that the goal has shifted from having healthy kids to having a healthy family.
Healthy Family Strategy
Obviously, as the parents, you need to spearhead the effort and make yourselves the models of health and fitness. While they’re little, your children wouldn’t receive conflicting exposure as to what’s acceptable or not. As they grow up, they would have the inspiration to steer them toward healthy choices.
Here is a starting game plan for pursuing a healthy lifestyle as a family.
1.Fuel up regularly.
This means no starvation diets, even for Mom who might be trying to lose some lingering pregnancy weight.
Eating is an important part of staying healthy. If you skip meals, you’ll be dealing with a spike in your hunger hormone ghrelin, causing you to be insatiably hungry.
When you finally get to eat, you’re mostly likely to overeat since it takes about 30 minutes for ghrelin to subside once you start eating.
In any case, you don’t want to see your kids skipping meals, so don’t model that behavior.
2.Take as many of your meals together as a family.
You can best demonstrate wise eating choices to your children and establish healthy eating habits during mealtime.
Of course, the benefits of eating together as a family do not stop there. In aid of achieving the goal of being a healthy family, it also works to establish your unity and identity as a family.
The emotional harmony that your children get from mealtime traditions is sacred for long-term health.
3.Keep your grocery list healthy.
If you don’t have unhealthy foods in the pantry, there’s no temptation for you and no opportunity for your children to consume something unhealthy.
Temptation is most successfully overcome when you don’t dally with it in the first place. This is why you should keep those sugary treats and junk food out of your home.
There will be instances outside the house wherein your resolve will be tested. It will be difficult enough dealing with those, so make sure that your own home is a safe haven.
4.Exercise at home as a family.
Going to the gym may be your treat to yourself, a temporary escape from your responsibilities at home, but it’s good for your kids to see you exercising. It’s even better that they’d be able to join you.
Let’s face it, just getting to the gym is one of the challenges you have to hurdle in that fitness routine. It’s so much easier to carry out an exercise habit if you don’t need to go somewhere else to do it. It’s definitely more convenient if you can easily squeeze it in between folding laundry and dinner prep.
5.Pursue fun physical activities together.
There’s your workout, and there’s fun and play. Children should be moving around a lot. This is becoming a problem these days because of all the entertainment provisions that keep them sedentary.
You might have to initiate physical fun to get them away from the television and the different digital gadgets present in your home.
What are your options? You can go on nature walks. You can have a dance party. You can play tag, hopscotch, jump rope, etc. Introduce them to the games you played as a child.
You can be more creative and come up with your own ideas as you go along.
6.Have a bedtime routine.
A routine helps establish the notion of quality sleep. Washing and brushing, changing into comfy sleep clothes, some bonding customs (bedtime story, brushing hair, etc.), lights out, no mobile device nearby… Your children will get the idea that sleep is serious business.
It’s easier to teach the importance of good sleep when you make a big deal of getting to bed at an ideal hour and getting a certain number of hours of sleep each night. It is certainly more effective when your children observe you to be well-rested at the beginning of each day.
Family Lifestyle
Being healthy is a way of life. Raising your children in such a lifestyle will equip them to make sound health choices as they become more independent.
Sincerity is essential, and double standards are unacceptable.
