(Written by guest blogger, our lovely work experience girl, Emily)

Whether at the gym or the local tennis club, nobody likes to join in on exercise if they’re the only one with a bit of wobble. It doesn’t just make you feel self conscious but can make you stop wanting to do exercise completely! So it’s understandable that kids that put weight on tend to stop doing as much exercise. School is the time where you’re constantly looking at everyone around you, wondering if you look the same as them, ‘am I normal?’ Self confidence is so fragile when you’re young, one step in the wrong direction and its gone.

So, wouldn’t it be better for us to advise children in the benefits of a good nutritional diet? Well, reading the piece on the BBC’s website would suggest so. A new paper, Archives of Disease in Childhood, suggests that children stop exercising when they gain weight, not before. The paper talks of educating children in nutrition as well as exercise. After all, we’re always told that it’s both exercise AND nutrition in that leads to a healthy diet. Not just exercise.

Maybe if we educated children in nutritional values we would be able to restore some self confidence in those children that are overweight and get them feeling more comfortable within themselves and back into exercise.

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• Exercise ‘won’t cure child obesity’ (independent.co.uk)
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