Since the 80’s, teen obesity has been on the rise in the United States, and now in the 21st century we are facing serious issues when it comes to teen obesity. Even though it is a known problem talked about every day, most of the parents, in fact over 80% of parents think their children have a healthy and normal weight. The reality is different, over 35% of the teen population is obese, so that makes 20% of the parents wrong and not focused on their children.
Director of the Trust for America’s Health, Jeffrey Levi, stated that obesity is currently the biggest public health issue the United States has to face. The cat is that we are facing a serious issue, but the people of the United States somehow fail to see that truth. Whatever the reason for parents to ignore this, they will have to, because, this is an alarming issue that lead to much more complicated things.
People have to realize that obese is not chubby, and definitely not cute. The fact that a child is obese means that it has over 25% of body fat, and that is more than unhealthy. The fact is that obesity often leads to heart diseases and serious heart conditions that none of us would like to face. If that is not enough for people to worry, well obesity causes diabetes and strokes, in addition to many other life threatening problems. We need to be alarmed, every year over 300,000 people dies because of the issues and diseases caused by obesity, some wars took fewer lives than obesity in the United States alone for each year. If this didn’t frighten you then maybe the fact that children ages 10 to 13 who are obese have over 80% chances to become obese adults that will have all the problems that come with obesity!
So what can we do about it, how do we explain to our ten year old child that he needs to lose weight because his life might be at risk. We don’t, it is impossible to say that to a child and expect him to understand without giving him the fright of his life, so what you should do is play the fun card. By telling your child to go play ball and jump ropes for fun or because that way he will be able to do something he loves is the best way to motivate your kids for some physical activities that will result in losing weight.
Most of this is our fault, we allowed the computer era to crawl under our children’s skins making them uninterested into going outside like we used to. We allowed them to stay all day in the house playing games, chatting online, and doing all sorts of things that have no physical movement, as a result they got fat, unhealthy fat. This is the time to start changing all of that or we are going to face plenty of children ending up with heart conditions and other fatal diseases causes by obesity.
