Here’s a radical proposal for the workweek ahead: Let’s band together and take back the lunch hour. And once we get it back, let’s put it to good use.
Let’s take a walk.
A fact that will surprise few of you: In 2006, KFC — the fried chicken people — conducted a survey of working America’s lunchtime habits that found, among other things, that nearly two-thirds of worker bees surveyed declared the lunch “hour” to be “the biggest myth in office life.” In practice, 52 percent said they took less than 30 minutes for lunch and 58 percent reported that they eat at their desk and work through lunch.read more
Tuesday morning I was at a Brains & Bodies workshop conducted by Advocates for Health in Action, a consortium of local public and private sector groups “shaping a community where healthful eating and physical activity are the way of life.” Brains & Bodies is a program of the Wake County PTA designed to encourage healthy habits in our schools. Healthy habits such as PTA fundraisers that eschew cookie dough sales in favor of fun runs. That kind of thing.read more
Wondering what you can do as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program to stop the super-sizing of our kids? If you have preschoolers, you can do three things according to a study to be published in the March Pediatrics.
Eat dinner as a family (at the table, not on TV trays assembled in front of the “Family Guy”).
Make sure your preschooler gets at least 10.5 hours of sleep a night.
Don’t let them have more than two hours of screen time a day.
According to a survey of parents of 8,550 4-year-olds, kids who adhered to the above three practices were 40 percent less likely to be obese than their slacker counterparts who sucked down their mac & cheese in front of a dusk-to-dawn Dora marathon.read more
Yesterday, First Lady Michelle Obama revealed her — and the nation’s — plan for combating childhood obesity. It’s called, appropriately, Let’s Move. That the first lady has made this her top priority underscores how serious the matter of our kids’ ever-expanding waistlines has become: About one in three kids in this country are now overweight or obese (that number has tripled over the past three decades), health-care costs related to obesity run about $147 billion a year, this is the first generation in recorded history that stands to be less healthy than its parents. The stats go on.read more