Raising a Healthier Generation: 

Preventing Childhood Obesity

I’m taking my commitment to better family health on the road for the next few weeks. My family and I are off to Cleveland to visit my family and take a well-deserved break from school and work.

My plan is to eat healthy, sleep well and spend a lot of time doing nothing with the kids and my husband.

Oh, and there will also be a lot of talk about how this will be the year the Browns will finally make the playoffs, but that’s likely just a Cleveland thing.

I wish you all the best for the next few weeks – and look forward to seeing you back here in July!

It’s summer time and the students are starting their internships! Congratulations if your son or daughter landed a position for the summer. This is a fantastic way to learn new things, meet new people and develop professionally with real work experience.  You can help them and make sure they get off to a great start with these 7 tips:

This morning as I was browsing headlines, I came across one on FoxNews titled Sibling bullying is under-recognized, study finds. Of course I had to read it.

I’ve been writing this blog and keeping to my new plan for six months now, and I’ve got to say it’s going great. But let’s be honest – six months is a long time. So long, in fact, that I’m going to fully admit to getting a little distracted.

That said, I haven’t gained any weight – and if you’re at all like me, you’ll know that counts as a win. But I have lost focus and I know why.

After returning to work from a 12-week maternity leave of which my pay consisted of a little short-term disability and what vacation days I had saved (which meant only using five days during my 40 weeks of pregnancy for sick or vacation), I tried to do it all. Why do we do this to ourselves? I was being cheap, or I had a lot of pride or a lot to prove (you pick), and I thought I could and should be able to put 125% into my roles as mother, wife and employee. Unfortunately, none of these areas can afford 40+% effort and I still needed six hours of sleep per night.

Curious George and the Berenstain Bears are definitely SFW, but they're not often discussed at the water cooler in the office (or more accurately in our case, the coffee maker.) But when you work with lots of moms and you work for Kars for Kids, an educational youth charity, children's books come up frequently in conversation. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Gordon Korman, Madeline... they're all up for discussion.

Yes, Jennifer, you are 100% right: Having a good night sleep has a major impact on weight and on someone’s ability to stick with a healthy eating plan. It sounds like one of the easiest recommendations to put into effect, “Sleep more and you will lose more weight.” But we all know it’s not always that easy, so putting some real thought into your sleep hygiene may be required to put this into effect.

If someone is not getting enough sleep, or a good quality of sleep, a number of things may occur that impact their ability to lose weight:

“I think parents should be held accountable for their child’s actions…”

This is a partial quote by Julie Hertzog, the Director of the National Bullying Prevention Center, in response to one community’s decision to pass an ordinance that allows police to ticket parents of chronic bullies. The emphasis in the ordinance is on the response of the parents once they are notified in writing that their child has bullied another, whether face-to-face or by way of cyber bullying.

Ok, so the Diet Coke thing was a little too hard to give up in one go. My schedule has not my own right now. In fact, for the first time last week, the hubby and I hired a babysitter to help get the kids to school one morning because I was traveling for work and he had to be at work by 8 a.m. It only took us nine years before we couldn’t deal with a morning drop off by ourselves! Of course, now the kids are asking if they can have a babysitter every morning, but that’s another story.