Children

It’s 10:30 Tuesday morning. My oldest has been off to school for a couple of hours and my two younger daughters, 3-year-old Adelina and 16-month-old Ava, are watching cartoons. There are countless toys throughout the floor in the living room, their bedrooms, the kitchen counters look cluttered and the morning dishes fill the sink. If I walk into the laundry room I’ll find clothes that need to be folded and plenty of clothes upstairs that need to be washed. I have two choices: stay and clean or head to the gym. I know better than to attempt to get the house in “order’ before heading out; one thing will lead to another and before you know it the entire day has gone by and getting to the gym becomes bleaker as the evening approaches.

So I decide to leave the house “as is” and make a dash for the gym with my girls. This means letting go of the idea that the house has to be “perfect” before I can leave. I have to focus on how doing my daily exercise is MORE important than having a spotless home. But trying to head to the gym right now means I must get myself dressed, get the girls changed, comb their hair and place them in their car seats in the mini-van in a whopping twenty minutes! Since the child care at the gym closes at noon, I must arrive no later than 11 o’clock so that I can have a solid hour to work out. It’s a challenge but you just have to make the decision to do it. The countdown begins.

The challenge of childhood obesity is all about improving the kid's body composition. Body composition is generally expressed as a "percentage of body fat", and like golf, a high percentage is always bad, and a low percentage is always good.

There are three generally accepted ways to measure body composition. They include underwater weighing which is the most sophisticated, the most time consuming, the most expensive, and almost always performed in an exercise physiologist's lab. A second method, the skin fold technique, involves measuring the thickness of a participant's skin with a caliper. The resulting data is plugged into a formula which produces a percentage of body fat. The third, electronic impedance, is a computerized method that yields similar information.

None of the Accepted Methods are Being Used

All three have their issues, but interestingly enough, none of them are used in our nation's schools to measure kid's body composition. They're all too time consuming and too expensive. School systems lack the funds to do this kind if testing, so they settle for a method known as Body Mass Index, which is just the modern term used to describe the age old height weight charts that have been around since the dinosaur age.