Parents & Weight Gain

If you’ve put on a few pounds over the years, you might want to blame your kids.

It probably doesn’t come as any big surprise to any parent, but having kids means you don’t exercise nearly as much as you need to---and that means over the years you put on the pounds. But how much this affects you might be the big surprise.

As part of the Gallup-Healthways Well Being Index survey, nearly 60,000 Americans were interviewed about how often they exercised. It turns out that if they have an under 18-year-old child in the house, then they don’t exercise very much. And 28% of the parents surveyed said they don’t really exercise at all. Again, it probably won’t surprise any parent much that the ones least likely to exercise had kids under 4-years-old in the house.

But this was having an impact on the parent’s health. One-in-four of them reported being obese and over 35% overweight. This was more than parents without children in the home.

So what does this mean, are kids bad for your health? No. But as any parent will tell you, they do occupy a great deal of your time. The secret is to make exercise one of your priorities and involve the kids if you can, especially as they get older. This will do two things. One, keep you in good health, and two, get your kids to realize how important exercise is to overall health.