Play Like You Mean It!

I know parents especially moms will identify with what I'm going to talk about today. Often our kids come home from playing with skinned knees, bloody scrapes and all manner of injuries. Why is that? When children play they mean it, a million dollar athlete doesn't play his sport with near the heart of a 10 year old. They play hard, when they are sliding into the base or running just ahead of who ever is "lt" they give it their all.

When they play, it's the most important thing they know. I'm from the generation of going outside to play since we had no electronic games and very little TV worth watching. Now kids drive their parents crazy playing video games with the passion they used to put into playing outside. That is a trend we really need to stop if we are going to reverse the national problem of obese children.

Playing that video game with the passion they do triggers that fight or flight eating cycle I talked about before. Their little bodies take the excitement of the game as a stress to be dealt with, so it makes extra fuel available to the muscles. Even though the muscles don't take advantage of the fuel by doing work the body now goes into fuel replacement mode and they get strong food cravings.

We as adults need to take two lessons from this. One we need to go outside and play, and play like we mean it. The second is we need to be role models get our children away from the games and get them outside. That can be as difficult but it's vital for reversing the problem of child obesity in the nation.

There is no way we could go back to that world of no games and little TV but we can be a role model and show that we can have fun with active living.

Thanks for reading.

Play Panda