Posts tagged as:

gaining weight

Causes of Child Obesity: Poor Diet and Lack of Exercise

by author on January 25, 2010

The two primary causes of child obesity are inadequate diet and insufficient exercise. There’s a simple rule to gaining or losing weight although there are other factors that influence it too. If your intake of calories exceeds what you burn, you gain weight. When children sit for most part of the day, they end up consuming more calories than they can burn. If the child leads a sedentary lifestyle over a period of time, it eventually leads to child obesity. When there are a great number of indoor entertainment options like computer games or video games, today’s children hardly ever go out and play. This means that they miss out on much-needed exercise in the process.

Children need regular exercise or a sports regimen to keep them healthy. Organized sports and outdoor activities provide opportunities for kids to burn more calories. These activities also serve to keep them away from home for longer, which means they do not eat as much as they do when they are at home. Passive indoor entertainment activities like watching movies or playing computer games are too common today, unlike in the earlier years, when kids used to get all the exercise they needed naturally. This is why obesity is a growing problem in recent years.

Obesity could have other reasons besides overeating and lack of exercise. Problems like hormonal imbalances can cause obesity too. Hormonal imbalances cause the metabolism to slow down, leading to inadequate burning of calories. This can be a genetic problem, predisposing the child to obesity. Diseases or syndromes like Prader-Willi syndrome and Cushing’s syndrome may also be causes of child obesity. However, these causes are seen in a small number of cases. The prime reasons remain lifestyle related ones.

To prevent child obesity, family participation is necessary. If you find your child gaining weight rapidly, you should take him to the doctor to ascertain the reason for the weight gain. After confirming that there are no serious issues or hormonal imbalances, you should keep a check on your child’s food intake and exercise routine. Make it a point to take your child to the doctor every year to ensure he is growing well and in a healthy way.

Parents need to set an example for their children in food and exercise habits. They should expose their children to family activities and physical exercises. This will result in physical exertion becoming a way of life. Following an organized, scheduled family activity like that goes a long way in ensuring that you not only do away with the main causes of child obesity, but also maintain your own health in the bargain.

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Beware The Low Carbohydrate Weight Loss Trap

by Editor on November 27, 2009

Many people swear by low carbohydrate weight loss. But how does it actually work? This is a very interesting topic and more research needs to be done in order to affirm whether a low carbohydrate plan is healthy for the body and worth considering as a weight loss plan.

Carbohydrates act as a fuel source for your body. In fact, they are the preferred fuel source over protein and fats and will be used first, and immediately for activity that involves muscle contraction. It is important to realize that all carbohydrates are broken down in the body into sugar/glucose.

This glucose is needed for the smallest of activities such as blinking to the largest activity such as brain activity and needs to be sufficient in the blood and in storage so that it can sustain this ongoing movement.

As soon as we decide to decrease our carb supply as a means of weight loss for a certain period of time, we cut off the supply that is needed to be stored and we start using up the stored supply that should be replaced but cannot, due to the lack of carb intake. The only option that your body has now is to break down the fat in the blood and the protein in the muscles in order to function; this can cause symptoms such as dizziness, tunnel vision, abnormal EEG and fatigue and puts the body under major risk.

And, of course it will be easy for you to lose weight at first on a low carb diet as 1g of glycogen attracts 2.4 grams of water. So, if you have less glycogen in the muscle due to a lower intake of carbohydrates, you will hold less water and your weight loss will mostly be water (Low Carb Diets Revisited: The Atkins Controversy by Phil Kaplan).

Gaining clarity on how your body functions will help you direct your weight loss to a more honest, natural and healthy strategy instead of a quick and fast trend that will fool you into actually gaining weight once you have gone off the low carbohydrate diet plus additional fat gained due to the way in which your body has had to cope with the stress.

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