Eat Your Sweets, Then Run

Vacations are around the corner and it’s the time for grandparents, uncles and aunts to indulge the kids, a cola here, a mithai there, a pack of chocolates as a gift. Bad news? Nope!

The bad news is that parenting today has become the big deal it was never meant to be. Almost every parent worth his/her salt knows that obesity is lurching somewhere around the corner; one wrong step and the kid will be fat and get vulnerable to lifestyle diseases. Not exactly baseless, if you look at the appalling statistics of urban childhood obesity, but then it takes more than food to make us fat.

For one there’s activity. If your child’s activity is just watching TV then he/she is doomed to get fat even if they eat ‘healthy’. Kids need more than 90 minutes of hardcore play to grow not just in their body but also in their brain. Then there’s stress—kids get stressed from the constant routine of classes, schools, competition and the like. When under stress, they are unable to process their food properly and land up feeling duller instead of energetic post a meal.

Vacations are a great time to alleviate the stress born of routine and to push activity way beyond 90 minutes. It’s also a fabulous way for kids to learn that food is also a means of celebrating, bonding and sharing. That chocolates or anything like mithai/cola/ice cream is not routine but a one-off. That it’s not something you get for doing homework. And parents, know that the biggest influence on your kids are you two, not that aunt who indulges them with an occasional chocolate.

(Rujuta Diwekar is working on her video-book on Ind­ian food wisdom)