Teaching Kids to Be Healthy

Living a healthy lifestyle is a great way to help extend your life, while allowing you to have the energy and ability to do more with your life. When you're healthy, you’re able to play with your kids more, you’re able to get out and take on exciting adventures in life, and you’ll be able to feel comfortable while doing it.

You should make sure you're teaching your kids the importance of living a healthy lifestyle. As kids learn about being healthy, and live a healthy lifestyle, they’ll start to feel a sense of pride. Kids aren’t that different from you in that sense. As you try to live a healthy lifestyle yourself, and you accomplish it, you also feel better about yourself.

It’s important that as you work on being healthy, you make sure you’re really focusing on the actions that they are taking. Too often, people focus on the outcomes of what being healthy leads to. Having a body that is able to perform and be active is certainly a great benefit of healthy living, but most often this leads to kids feeling body shamed if they don’t live up to a certain image. Living a healthy lifestyle should not be about the image you’re projecting, but rather about the opportunities it makes available to you.

Everyone’s body is different, and two people may implement the same healthy eating habits, while also being active day to day. One of those people may end up being heavier while another may end up looking much stronger. You should not teach your kids that living a healthy lifestyle is in order to have a certain image. The goal of a healthy and balanced lifestyle is to help make most activities easily accessible, and allow you to enjoy life more easily.

In order to teach kids about being healthy, you need to focus on both eating habits, and being active. This doesn’t mean that you deprive your kids (or yourself) of all of the food that tastes great. Having pizza every now and then is not the end of the world - while you don’t have to eat it, let your kids enjoy it. Help them understand that it’s not healthy, but it can be enjoyed from time to time (we eat pizza about once a month in our house).

Teach your kids healthy eating habits by making healthy meals. It doesn’t have to be a struggle to make healthy meals for your kids. Focus on the basics, and let your kids taste food that is plain, with little added butter, salt, or other additives that are found in a lot of foods these days. Kids won’t explode if they have to eat plain macaroni that’s not covered in yellow colored butter.

Be active with your kids as well. Get outside with them, run around, and enjoy the time that you have with them. During the winter months, get out in the snow and make snowmen or chase after them in the snow. Make snow angels. Have them help shovel the driveway, and just enjoy the ability to be active with them.

As you’re active, your kids will be more inclined to be active. If you work out at home, make sure your kids see or know that you do. Tell them about your exercise routines, how they help you in your goals, and why it’s important in general to be active. Explain to your kids the importance of a well-balanced workout routine (or at least any workout routine).

It can be hard to help kids understand that being healthy is important. If you didn’t have an active lifestyle when they were younger, then it will be much harder. However, starting an active lifestyle now is more important than putting it off. Teach your kids the importance of being healthy and active as it will enable you and them to do the things you want in the future.