Get Fit Slowly

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Food At Home

It’s safe to say that I still haven’t sorted through all of my issues with food.  When you throw in the wife who has eating healthily figured out perfectly and all the food issues surrounding raising healthy children, my problem gets compounded greatly.  Needless to say, I spend a lot of time thinking about food.  A lot of that time is divided between feeding my kids healthy options throughout the day and thinking about what I’m going to put on the table that evening that is nutritious, delicious, and tasty.  Sometimes,  my efforts in the evenings fall short.

Food at School

Several times in the last month, while talking about Meg’s day at school, she’s mentioned a snack that has been less than ideal.  Each kid in class brings snacks for 3 weeks during the year.  I try and bring fruit, pretzels, yogurt, cheese, milk, etc.  But most of Megan’s classmates bring “fruit” snacks, juices, and cookies.  Don’t get me wrong, I sometimes give these things to my kids.  They aren’t walking health food stores.  But I get the feeling that for a lot of the kids in Megan’s class, the snacks that they bring are the snacks that they most frequently eat at home.

How my kids eat when they are away from home is only going to get harder for me to deal with as they get older.  I used to be a teacher and I’ve seen first-hand the kind of crappy food that kids eat in school.  Many kids forego the long lines in the cafeteria for the shorter lines at the vending machines.  Mountain Dew and Sour Patch Kids don’t really fit my idea of a healthy lunch.  But often, that’s what I saw.  I hope that by starting early we can instill some healthy attitudes towards snacking and eating nutritiously.

Food in the News

The New York Times is fast becoming my primary source of fitness and health related information.  Today alone, I found two article that caught my eye.   Bake Sales Fall Victim to Push for Healthier Foods, describes how bake sales are falling by the wayside because of the tighter restrictions about the types of food that can be sold to kids at schools in states such as California.

The second article was much more interesting.  Are Schools Really to Blame for Poor Eating? suggested that schools really aren’t to blame for the food problems of America’s youth.  One of the more interesting points was that students who attend schools that don’t allow the sale of soda don’t drink less soda than students who attend schools that do allow the sale of soda.  In fact, soda drinking amongst school age kids has decreased during the past few years.  That’s a good thing.

The second interesting fact in the article illustrated how childhood weight problems actually get worse during the summer time when kids are out of school.  This makes perfect sense to me; when left to their own devices, without schedules, kids will do what comes naturally to them.  Heavy kids will eat more and be less active while slighter kids will eat less and be more active.  It makes sense to me that for most kids the daily schedule of school, including meal and snack times, makes it easy to maintain a healthy weight.  So, it seems that schools may actually help kids eat healthy and stay active.  It’s my job to etch it into their brain that they need to stay healthy and eat well when left to their own devices.  That’s a tall order for someone who might not be the best example.  We’ll keep working on it, that’s for sure!