Gradual shift in habits helps avoid fitness-program rebellion

Impatience can kill even the best fitness programs.

Folks are aware that too many kids in the United States are overweight or obese. We even know how to reverse the situation and how to prevent it. We know that more physical activity helps. We know that eating smarter helps, too.

Time is our biggest problem, and our impatience only fuels the time issue.

When we're faced with a problem and we've figured out a few ways to attack the problem, it always seems to take too long. As the saying goes, we "want it done yesterday!"

Like many exercise or weight-loss programs, impatience destroys the plans of many kids and their parents who seek improved fitness. We want to take shortcuts.

For instance, instead of slowly changing our eating habits, we go from eating snack cakes, cookies and chips and drinking a soda with lunch to "rabbit food" and water.

Our bodies might like that change, but our brains are quick to rebel.

Over time, we develop an attachment to certain foods. Eating them satiates us on a level that goes beyond our stomachs being happy.

Don't believe it? Watch the look on the face of your favorite chocoholic after a Snickers or a few M&Ms. That look comes from bliss, because a few M&Ms might melt in your mouth but they hardly put a dent in your hunger.

Getting past that mental desire for certain foods takes time.

Exercise is the same way. We can't go from doing nothing seven days a week to highintensity and high-impact exercise, 60 minutes a session two sessions a day for seven days. We'll burn out after a month.

Eating and exercise patterns develop over a long period of time - and reversing them can take just as long. We're not going to completely change our ways in three months, or even five or six months.

The quickest way to have a child or parent rebel against a program is to drop use of TV and video games from five hours a day today to one hour a day tomorrow. That significant of a drop will be equally difficult for the parent or guardian because the TV or video games have been a surrogate baby-sitter for five hours a day, allowing parents to do whatever. Now we have to fill that "whatever" time doing something constructive with our children.

Understanding our nutrition needs and physical-activity needs takes time. If we go into a program knowing that the implementation phase of our plan might take six months to a year and understanding that the maintenance will take even longer, we will have a higher chance for success.

Milo F. Bryant's fitness column appears in Monday's Life section of the Colorado Springs Gazette, and his blog is at milobryant.blogspot.com. Bryant has two National Strength and Conditioning Association certifications. He also writes Gazette sports columns.