Make a goal to be less inactive. The rest will take care of itself.

The second most important principle when creating your Safe Zones is to discover ways of being less inactive. The idea is you should be less idle and less sedentary because it means moving more and moving more burns calories. Seems obvious, doesn’t it?

So why not say exercise more instead? Because, interestingly, it doesn’t work as well as saying be less inactive. If you say exercise more, people feel you are ordering them around so they naturally resist. People like to have a choice. Once you give people a choice of how not to be inactive, they will naturally find other things to do and lot of those things will be physical activity.

The research of Dr. Leonard Epstein, Professor of Pediatrics and Psychology at the University of Buffalo, has found that kids who reduced their inactive behavior lost weight, improved fitness, and maintained their weight loss. In his research they did not tell the kids what to do. They didn’t say go play basketball or go for a run.

Instead, they encouraged kids not to be idle and let the kids figure out what to do for themselves. A lot of what the kids did instead was be physically active so the end result was better health. When kids were told to be physically active the results weren’t as good. Kids like a choice. So do adults.

One idea to try is to restrict the amount of TV and other media (games, music, etc) kids can consume, to no more than a couple of hours a day. Then let the kids decide how to spend the rest of their time. They will naturally spend a lot of the time being active.

Do you see how this works? You aren’t telling the kids to exercise. You just aren’t letting them be inactive by watching TV. They’ll be naturally more active on their own when they no longer have the option of being inactive. It’s a twisted yet cool idea.

For this strategy to work, you need other activities to be available.. It won’t work if you tell kids not to watch TV and there’s nothing else to do. Here is where we see how all the strategies work together. If your community is safe, then kids can go outside and play. If there are parks then they can go play. If there are sidewalks then they can walk and visit each other. All the strategies reinforce each other.

Another key is that if parents sit around watching TV all day and munching snacks, then so will the kids. It’s critical parents act how they want their kids to. The whole family needs to be involved. All this may seem a little idealistic, but kids are now at a huge risk of dying earlier than their parents. You may want to be extreme on this strategy.

To Learn More

·        The Planet Health website at http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/prc/proj_planet.html talks about how to improve the well-being of students.