the biggest gift you could ever give them

If you have an overweight young child or teenager you may just reckon that their weight problem is a passing phase of their lives that they will grow out of. In some cases this is true but you should know that in the majority of cases it is not.

New research published by the Journal of the American Dietetic Association which looked at almost 2,300 teenage boys and girls for over ten years between the ages of 15 and 25 shows that teenage weight problems often stay in adulthood.  For example the researchers noted that 8.4 percent of the girls as teenagers used laxatives, diet pills or resorted to making themselves vomit to lose weight and this number rose to almost 21 percent when they became adults.

Professor Dianne Neumark-Sztainer who led the study and who researches at the University of Minnesota explained that the figures showed that many young people did not know about the dangers of unhealthy weight loss practices and that they should be informed that they could even be counterproductive to losing weight.

If you want your children to be healthy throughout their lives you need to teach them about healthy eating when they are young rather than giving them treats all the time. The first ten years of a childs life will have a huge impact on its eating habits and make it extremely difficult for them to change them as they grow older. Taking your children to a fast food restaurant might be a fun activity for them and make you a very popular parent but if you do it too often you could be setting themselves up for the future health problems and social insecurity that obesity brings with it.

Your children will probably never thank you for it but if you bring them up eating healthy, it may be the biggest gift you could ever give them.