Parents often ask me why their children are facing childhood obesity when it wasn’t a problem when they were young. My answer to this question is to simply look around them. We live in an obesogenic environment and when you pick up on all the traps around that can make you (or keep you) fat it’s not hard to see where our problem came from.
Take the gas station. Since when did getting gas become a time to eat? Is the smell of gas an appetite stimulant? I know food is fuel, but come on! You can get everything from coffee to candy or Big Macs when you stop to fuel up your ride and even if you’re not hungry just one trip indoors usually ends with some sort of calorie consumption. Just one bottle of soda will run you 250 calories. One bag of chips 340, a Snickers bar is 280 calories. Do that twice a week and you’re looking at 7.5 pounds a year, young or old – that’s too much weight to gain in 1 year and that’s just the gas station! This happens at the supermarket, your kids school, work, even the hairdressers and the gym!
And what about exercise? Think back, what did you do when you came home from school? X-Box? Text? Facebook? IM? Right! You were outside, or working, or helping your parents, or doing yard work – not today’s children. Today’s technology is adding to our obseogenic environment. Kids and adults are sitting, sitting, sitting. They have yards, have bikes, have scooters, but they’re not using them – so what do you do about it? Set limits! Turn off the TV, computer and video games. Tell the kids that anything with a screen is off-limits until after dinner.
Even what we watch on TV contributes to our obesogenic environment. When we do watch TV we are bombarded with food adds, most of them unhealthy and most of them aimed directly at the most vulnerable consumer…children. I tell patients
that even if you don’t actually go to McDonald’s as soon as you see a McDonald’s commercial you still remember the commercial. Next time you pass a MickeyD’s that commercial will pop back into your brain and next thing you know, you’re in the drive thru ordering something that you weren’t really that hungry for in the first place. It’s a cruel trap that food companies hope you’ll fall into every time!
So, look around. What else is contributing to YOUR obesogenic environment. Can any of that be removed? Can you remove the commercials by turning off the TV? Can you set limits on screen time at home? Can you set rules about getting food from convenience stores (like don’t do it)? The small steps you take every day will add up to great, big changes – I promise!
Cookus Interruptus
