Family Fitness Challenge

One of the repetitive comments I get from parents who have had their families come to my program is along the lines of, “I have been telling my son to eat his fruits and vegetables for years, and there is nothing we have been able to get him to do it. Now that he has done the challenge he is nagging us if we do not order the fruit or veggie off the menu when out to eat, or if I do not have a fruit or veggie on the table with all the meals I prepare-I do not know how you do it!” One of the problems with being a kid is that your parents are nagging you about everything, not just one thing. When they are told to turn off their bedroom light, brush their teeth, floss every night, do their homework, not to sing at the table, wash their hands before every meal, cover their mouth when they sneeze, take their shoes off when they come into the house, put on bug spray, put on sunscreen, practice their piano, pick up their room, put on their seatbelt and flush the toilet-it can be very hard for them to differentiate what activities we are asking them to do that are more important, or less important than others. During my program they get to focus on one concept, healthy choices, and also just get a chance to hear it from someone other than their mom and dad. There is a verse in the Bible, Ephesians 6:4 that states, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” It is believed that at the time this was written, it was addressing specifically the fathers because they were the ones who were in charge of disciplining their children, but these days, mothers play this role just as much. Another version of this verse that I can relate to more readily is found in the Living Bible. The Living Bible was written by Kenneth N. Taylor and first published in 1971. It is a translation of the Bible that uses paraphrases of scripture to make the Bible easier to understand. Kenneth N. Taylor found that family devotions were difficult with children because of the difficulty the kids had with understanding the vernacular of the King James Version which was the predominate translation at the time. In the Living Bible, Ephesians 6:4 is read as “And now a word to you parents, don’t keep scolding and nagging you children, making them angry and resentful; instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord”. Did you hear that warning? God wants us to quit driving our kids crazy. If we continue to nag our children they may begin to resent us, or at the very least, start tuning us out. I believe that the program I have been instructing is effective for kids partly because I am not their parent telling them to do yet another task to add to their laundry list of directions. I also think it has more of an impact because I focus a great deal of the program during my lectures on why certain behaviors are healthy or not healthy. I am not just telling them to do it “because I said so” and there is something cool about the children watching as someone tells their parents what to do differently for the first time ever! Before I began investing my time and energy in child obesity intervention, the typical dinner at my house would generally include a fruit or vegetable. Quite honestly, since I feel like I have enough battles in my life, I rarely would put a fruit or vegetable out for one of my children if I knew it was one that they particularly did not like. I remember those nightmare dinners when I was a child. I hated green beans, then, and I do now. My mother would always make me sit at the table until I ate them. Well, I was pretty stubborn, and I could sit there a pretty long time. I also learned, fairly quickly, that I did not like the show-downs at the dinner table, so when we would have green beans with dinner, I would start earlier in the meal, watch for a moment when my parents were not looking, and slip a green bean under my siblings’ plates (I was one of seven kids, so I had a lot of plates to choose from!). Another sneaky way I would solve my green bean dilemma is that I would wait for a sibling to look away and then I would put a few green beans in their glass of milk. The hiding of the green beans became my mission. I would spend the entire dinner figuring out where I could hide the green beans so that I could “clean my plate” and leave the table when I was done, but not have the putrid taste of green beans in my mouth. Since I did not want these vegetable battles as a mom, or hidden vegetables all over our kitchen table, or worse accidently drinking a hidden lima bean in my milk, I really did try to offer fruits and veggies that I knew my children enjoyed. Still, despite the valiant attempts, it was shocking to me, that after the meal was done and the plates were being cleared, how many grapes, cucumbers, strawberries, carrots and apples I would find myself throwing in the garbage at the end of each meal. One day I was looking at information on-line and I found a nutrition quiz you could do on your child. This was around the time I was becoming interested in child obesity, so I thought it would be a great place to start. I am a health conscious mom, and I have healthy weight kids, so I was pretty sure my children would do great. I started with answering questions about my first-born son, and guess what he got at the end of the quiz? A big fat “F”! I was aghast! Part of why my son failed the nutrition intake quiz was because when I really had to quantify his number of fruits and vegetables he got each day, he fell far short of the recommended five per day. If I was being completely honest, there really might have been days that he may have gotten through the day with zero fresh fruits or veggies (because fruit snacks did not count). What taking this quiz told me as a parent was that even though my son was a healthy weight, if he had an “F” in nutrition at age nine, he may not maintain that healthy weight into his teenage years. It also made me stop and consider what his health may be like when he is a young adult and is forced to possibly sit at a desk all day and is unable to compensate for his short-comings in his diet with three hours of soccer with the neighbors on our front lawn. What would his blood sugar, cholesterol levels and blood pressure be like as a grown man? I assume very similar to the patients I see on a daily basis who come to me to help manage their diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol. Many (but not all) of these issues are a result of poor dietary choices and carrying too much weight. I never met my husband’s father, but I know that he was over 300 pounds when he passed away at the age of 45 of a heart problem. Although it is impossible to say if his obesity directly played a role in his early death, I imagine it did not help his health status. After my son failed this nutrition quiz on-line, I felt a sudden urgency to do something drastically different in my household. So, the dilemma is, how can we as parents act on the principles that the scriptures call us to do in Ephesians 6:4- to not continuously nag or exacerbate our children, and still manage to get the positive behaviors that we want? I found that the reason my son failed the nutrition quiz was not because I needed to nag him just a little bit more, I just needed to present food to him in a different way...and now I do!