My daughter’s school has discontinued food rewards! (San Marcos School District) At first it seemed a little bit extreme – no treats for class parties etc….. I do think it is a wonderful idea now. She has quite a few overweight kids in her 1st grade class. If my child was one of them, I’d be very uncomfortable with wondering what treats she was going to come home with after every holiday or birthday party.
At home, we have severely limited our kids to junk food and occasionally the grandmas indulge them (isn’t that what grandmas do?) At 25 I found out that I had too high bad cholesterol and too low good cholesterol. I had to make a change fast! One of the things I did was incorporating more fish into our diet and we rarely eat meat with more than 7% fat. My kids look forward to Salmon and spinach night (they are 3 and 5).
I also have pre-diabetes even though I don’t appear obese. I grew up eating the typical american diet, which has seemingly become even more unhealthy. I was not overweight at all as a teenager. I ate whatever I wanted and developed bad habits. I don’t want my children to eat junk primarily because I don’t want them to develop these bad habits and also develop pre-diabetes at a young age. My dad found out that he had diabetes at 40 and is in very good control of it. His father had it as well and ultimately died an earlier death due to the complications he had when he didn’t take good care of myself. My doctor did give me kudos and mentioned that if I was still just eating the typical american diet and not exercising much, I’d be one of his morbidly obese patients weighing in at 300 pounds! I just have to be very careful –
I’m very very happy that our school is trying harder to reward the kids in other ways however, I do believe that the lunch program needs a complete overhaul. Its not as gross as the stuff we had as kids but its still not healthy.
Also I’ve lived in an apartment for quite awhile and it is culture shock to me!!!! Many parents are never outside playing with the kids! Whenever my kids are outside, I’m right there with them. We have to go play! What are their parents doing? Especially the ones who have 1 parent home all day? We walk a lot and play at the many neighborhood parks.
Sodas are also a huge problem! I grew up drinking a coke every evening. As an adult I switched to diet to avoid the calories and sugar. My husband kept telling me that it still wasn’t good for me. My well intentioned mother in law would argue with me that real sugary soda is better for you than diet. I’d argue back that the sugar would definately cause me to become a diabetic sooner! Well, we were both a right and wrong because it is all bad!!!! I went to an ear, nose, throat doctor because I kept loosing my voice for no reason. I have nodules on my vocal cords,probably caused by reflux! He gave me some pills to take and suggested cutting out all caffeine and as much carbonation as possible. I took him very very seriously about the carbonation. I’ve saved a ton of money in the last month from not buying it, lost 10 pounds and I haven’t even tried those pills! I feel great! My husband sat in disbelief as I ordered water the other day at a restaurant! Some studies also lead you to believe that drinking any soda will make you want to eat more with it. I believe it.
