How to help overweight children

Tana Amen, BSN, RN Nutrition & Lifestyle Expert, shares advice for parents with overweight kids on the best way to help your kids become healthy and eat right
Kids Nutrition Tips - How Parents Can Help Overweight Kids
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How to help overweight children

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In dealing with families with overweight children, in starting and sustaining change, I would say that you must live by example and when it comes to the parents, not the children but the parents, I would say they need to jump the canyon. What I mean by that is making behavioral changes with some things. The gradual process works well but not necessarily with diet. So, C. S. Lewis has a great line that I love and it is the gradual process is of no use at all because you can't cross the canyon into small steps. So, when I'm coaching clients, I often tell them “jump the canyon with me.” So, I have them go home and do a full pantry plans and provide just an abundance of nutritious and delicious foods because this should be about abundance not deprivation. We don’t want children to think that we’re taking things just constantly away from them without providing just a ton of nutritious delicious foods and what happens when you are giving your children all this white poise and sugar and refined carbohydrates, their blood sugar spikes and then it drops and then it’s in that crash that they start craving those foods again, same thing with adults and so we create this addiction to all of these horrible foods that the standard American diet is made of so we don’t want to do that and if the parents live by example, children will start to follow. Exposure equals preference. So, we want to constantly expose them to these great foods and we want to make it fun so that's what I would say as far as how do you get children to do this, you live be example and you provide delicious and nutritious foods.

Tana Amen, BSN, RN Nutrition & Lifestyle Expert, shares advice for parents with overweight kids on the best way to help your kids become healthy and eat right

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Tana Amen, BSN, RN

Nutrition & Lifestyle Expert

Tana Amen is affectionately known as “The Brain Doctor’s Wife.” Working alongside her husband, award-winning physician and New York Times best-selling author Daniel Amen, Tana is a highly respected health and fitness expert, who graduated magna cum laude from Loma Linda University’s nursing program.  After school Tana spent years working at Loma Linda’s in their level A trauma unit as a neurosurgical intensive care nurse, taking care of some of the sickest patients in the hospital.  There she learned firsthand the value of diet and nutrition on brain health. Tana is the author of 4 highly successful books, including three brain healthy cookbooks and a coaching guide. Tana is one of the main consultants to The Daniel Plan, Pastor Rick Warren and Saddleback Churches’ Plan to get the world healthy through religious organizations. After the first year the church lost 250,000 pounds, but weight loss was only one of the stunning side effects of getting truly healthy.  Other common effects of The Daniel Plan were increased energy, better focus and mood, and a reduction of many medications for the participants. In May of 2013, Tana’s new book, The Omni Diet: 2 Weeks to Lose Weight, Reverse Illness and Control Your Genes will be out.

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