Lifestyle and Childhood Obesity

Childhood obesity is a condition where a child is severely overweight for his/her age and height. Children with a Body mass index (BMI) equal to or higher than 95% of their peers are considered obese. Children with obesity have its impact visible on their bodies as well as their minds. Children with obesity are more likely to develop high blood pressure, high cholesterol, increased risk of impaired glucose tolerance, type 2 diabetes, and breathing problems.

Due to the changing lifestyle the amount of physical activities is reducing and consumption of bad calories is increasing at an alarming rate.

Diet and binge eating are one of the major causes of child obesity. Diet of children suffering from obesity mainly consist of unhealthy and fast food and increased screen time also compliments it. They tend to sit idle using gadgets and eating fast food and don’t pay attention to the amount of food they are eating leading to overeating.

Lack of exercise is also a common cause found among obese children. Due to their body mass, they find it difficult to exercise and avoid make effort on it. This leads to a further increase in weight making it more difficult to exercise. Also due to the mentality of children that exercise is a painful task, they start taking it as a burden and drift away from putting effort into it.

Children tend to follow their parents. In the case of family’s where the parents are unhealthy and avoid a healthy diet their children also follow them and become obese. Since there is no motivation from parents the children also stop caring about their increasing weight.

Due to being overweight, obese children also face body shaming and insults from society leading to stress and depression. They start to isolate themselves and reduce activities outside their homes and become shut-ins. This drastically reduces their physical activities and pumps up their binge eating leading to more increase in weight and diseases with it.

The socioeconomic factor is also a major cause of increasing child obesity. Children in developed countries are more used to eating processed food and less healthy food. This has caused increased portion sizes, unbalanced diets, alteration in eating time. This new food environment causes more long-term effects on and child’s physical and mental health.

Medication is one of the least expected factors taking part in increasing child obesity. Many concerned with their increasing weight prefer to take a shortcut to lose weight with the help of medication. But medication can only control obesity for a short period of time and after a certain amount of its time, the weight starts increasing again only to make it harder this time to lose it.

Though there many factors increasing the obesity rate in children, their ample amount factors to help in reducing it as well.  

A balanced diet is the best way to control child obesity. A proper meal consisting of a variety of high nutrients food and less high bad fat concentrated food can be consumed at a fixed time table daily. This can help in control unnecessary and overeating and help in reducing cholesterol.

With a balanced diet, a balanced amount of exercise is also needed. This will help to burn up the excess fat in the veins, reducing the blood flow to normal levels and make the body more active. This will also help the body to be more resilient to diseases.

 

- Krati Khandelwal