Child Obesity

For my blog series this semester, I will be writing about child obesity. I am interested in this topic because now in days we all live a very fast paced life. With that being said we tend to put the importance of living a healthy lifestyle aside, we rather buy some McDonalds then make ourselves a healthy meal. That is with you just being single now imagine if you had a child where you have to drop them off school and you have to head over to work every day, now not only is your health being affected but most importantly so is the child’s. My mother had my three siblings and I but she always made sure we ate healthy and stayed active. Now in days simply heating up microwave food and handing a child an iPad seems to be the case. I believe a child’s health is very important because their mind and body’s are still developing and growing. As cliché as it may sound they are the future, so what is a future if it has early onset obesity.

If you have seen the Disney Pixar movie Wale, then you have seen the scenes where it shows what’s left of the human population to be overweight and lazy. Our younger generation has already been corrupted by technology with instead of going outside to play they rather stay inside to play video games or watch T.V or use some other sort of technology that their parents have bought them. If we continue on this path not only will the rates of obesity rise but also will other life threatening diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. It has been found in 2012 that more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese. That was back in 2012 but by today it must have increased much more. There have been many programs that have been created one being by our First Lady Michelle Obama. But along with these programs there should be more enforcement of positive eating in school’s and after school programs to help those families who may not be able to afford to simply put a meal on the table or provide their child with meals during the summer when school is no longer in session. As I write my blog, I plan on learning and exploring more of the ideas people have proposed to help end this epidemic.

In order to order to go forward and be all about ending childhood obesity, we must know the basics of the disease. I’m going to be honest with, I don’t know much except of what I’ve learned in commercials or little snippets from the news. So what I know basically is that is a gateway disease meaning it can lead to our disease such as the ones I mentioned previously. I plan to learn more of what it takes in order for someone to be considered obese and ways to avoid obesity for the children. I consider myself to be a promoter of healthy living but I feel once I learn more about this controversial issue I will be more knowledgeable of what it takes to be healthy. To find out more about the childhood obesity I will be using information provided by programs such as Lets Move. It’s like what people say, in order to create a solution, you need to go the root of the problem. In this case I take that as being, what we know that causes of this disease.

I look forward to writing this blog because I feel that by informing people about what can be done to end this epidemic, the basics of the disease and childhood obesity headlines, more and more people will become inspired and passionate to help the health of many young children and overall the health of future generations to come. Articles such as the one from the Medical Daily show that children have a high risk of obesity if their mother is obese during her pregnancy. This just shows that people may not be getting the right information before their child is even born. I feel that by writing this blog not only will I become more informed but so will my readers which will help spread the message of the importance of having good health. Don’t get me wrong we all get weak and want to eat a cheeseburger every once in awhile but as I write this we will learn how our eating decisions affect the little ones too.