It is always an uphill battle to make kids eat healthy food and be physically active to live a healthy life. Peer pressure and TV commercials for junk and fancy looking food have led most children to obesity. It leads to so many severe health conditions like diabetes, heart conditions, breathing problems among children at an early age. A healthy lifestyle can significantly affect your children’s health and help them maintain their weight, sharpen their minds, and keep them safe from numerous health conditions. Your child’s mental and emotional health also remains healthy and prevents them from depression and anxiety.
Childhood overweight can also affect your child’s confidence in many ways and make them lag in many activities in school and otherwise. Taking care of your child’s health becomes prudent so that you can give your child a healthy life ahead.
It is essential to remember that children aren’t both with the knowledge and craving for junk food. The conditioning of having junk food happens only when they are exposed to unhealthy food options. No child makes their own choice until they are made to choose. Nevertheless, changing your child’s food preferences is always possible before it gets too late and childhood obesity triggers.
As soon as you introduce a nutritious and wholesome diet to your children, it gets easier for them to develop the taste of healthy food that can help them in the long run. Healthy eating keeps children’s vitals in control.
We have listed down some tips that can help you instil healthy food habits in your children and make less of war for yourself.
Tips to keep children healthy
Motivate children with healthy food habits
Children start developing the preference once they are fed healthy food. To begin with, you should make nutritious food for them to look fascinating and taste delicious.
Talk about how important it is to eat healthily
As long as you are aware of the benefits of eating healthy, you can counsel your child and encourage them to follow a healthy regime. Talk to your children and tell them how indispensable physical activities are to be fit and free of any health conditions.
Be your child’s role model
Children often imitate their elders, so if you follow a healthy lifestyle, your children will follow you and start eating what you eat. Always ensure you are not encouraging your child to eat healthy while you are eating unhealthy.
Encourage them into being physically active
These days children have restricted themselves to mobile phones and got themselves prisoned. Children need to learn the importance of being physically active to be fit.
Encourage homemade food
No matter how healthy you eat outside, it always has more added sugar and unhealthy fats that affect your kid’s health. Cleanliness is also one of the significant factors that make the food unfit to eat. So, once you start cooking food at home, it will be easier for children to adapt to homemade food.
Start their day with a healthy breakfast
Children who start their day with a healthy breakfast tend to have stable moods and energy and concentrate on their academics properly. Eating high-protein breakfast will curb their craving of eating junk and keep them full for a longer time.
Limit their consumption of sugar and refined carbs
Sugar and refined carbs are known to be less or not nutritious at all, and also they spike sugar levels. They also cause fluctuations in mood and energy that affects your overall health.
Your children will get all the sugar needed naturally from the healthy food you would serve them. Artificial sugar means many unhealthy calories that make children hyperactive and increase the risk of childhood obesity.
What should kids ideally eat and not eat?
Introduce healthy food that tastes good to the taste buds of your children.
Foods you should serve to your children
● Protein-rich diet
● Foods that contain fibre
● Fruits or fresh fruit juices
● Nicely prepared green vegetables
● Multigrain bread
● Legumes and pulses
● Soaked or unsoaked dry fruits/nuts.
● Homemade sorbets and ice-creams
● Healthy carbohydrates
Foods you should avoid or limit serving to your children
● Processed foods
● Junk food
● Aerated or artificially sweetened drinks
● Sweets and chocolates
● Foods high in salt
● Caffeinated drinks
● Raw or uncooked meat
Healthy food choices may not show you results soon, but they build your immunity and make you fit. Fitness never lasts if you choose to eat and feed healthy to your children. Common health conditions like childhood obesity may eradicate if there is awareness among parents and guardians. Children are naive to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy food, and they would always consider something that attracts them. So, to feed them healthy, you can do experiments with healthy food and make it delicious. You can simply disguise healthy food in the dishes and develop their taste, gradually becoming a habit.
Takeaway
The benefits of children living a healthy lifestyle are plenty, and all that it takes is an effort, to begin with. You, as a parent or guardian, will realize that your children have grown healthy.
Children are naughty and love being adventurous. If you are feeding them well and taking care of their health, they would also like to be physically active, which may or may not cause sudden injury—taking precautions is always the most needed thing when you have children at home. If you are parents to children, ensure that you have a family health care insurance plan in place. If you still haven’t registered your child in your family floater plan, do it post-haste with Care Health Insurance. We offer unparalleled health insurance plans that safeguard you and your family in times of crisis. CHIL has a 22900+ cashless healthcare providers that ensure you get immediate access to cashless treatment to our network hospitals located in several cities.
Disclaimer: The information given in this article is only for reference purposes.
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