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BGonline.org Forums
Teach your children well... (OT)
Posted By: happyjuggler0 In Response To: Teach your children well... (OT) (Chuck Bower)
Date: Wednesday, 23 April 2008, at 4:14 p.m.
It has become fashionable, indeed a way of life and thinking, to blame others for one's own failings.
Yes, I am willing to believe that for some small amount of people that obesity is genetic, and there may be little if anything that they can do about it.
But genes don't explain why it is rising. At its heart, getting overweight, as opposed to maintaining one's overweight status (I've got my own beer belly, not pointing fingers at anyone mind you), is a simple function of consuming more calories than one burns. Period. One can argue that different configurations of food combine to make them harder to burn, but this is effectively the same thing.
Thus, either parents today in the US are overfeeding the little munchkins, or they aren't letting them go out and play and walk around on their own like they used to when I was growing up.
I won't bore you (oops, too late) with how I walked home from school (roughly a mile) in the Blizzard of 78 (a Boston area storm that techinically didn't fit the definition of a blizzard, but threw the entire region into paralysis anyway for a week or so) when I was in the 5th grade, not just by myself, but with my younger brothers who were in the 3rd and 1st grades. Crazy to wlak home in a blizzard? Well, I was originally waiting for the bus like all the other kids, which was verrrrrrrrry late, and I was telling a teacher how if I had walked home like I normally did I'd be home by now, when she suggested I ought to walk home now because it was probably safer than taking the bus, which who knows when it was going to show up, if ever?
We got home just fine by the way, although it was kind of scary whenever a car came by because I had to practially bury my youngest brother in the snow drifts because that was the only way to get out of the way. I wish I had had a camera.
Chuck is right, let your kids walk to school. If you must, walk with them, it will do you good too to burn off calories and increase your own metabolism a bit. I was thin as a stick (so to speak) until I started drinking beer regularly in my early twenties, and most other kids should be the same. We, i.e. my brothers and I and our friends, even played video games. But we also went out and played, and had paper routes, and rode our bikes all over the place. We got our exercise without realizing we were exercising.
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