Why today's kids are fat

America's pre-teens and young teenagers are more overweight than ever before new reports indicate and the health experts are working overtime encouraging mothers to carefully monitor the amount and kind of food their children are consuming. School lunchrooms are re-evaluating their menus and the kind of food and drink that is made available to students. New York City has passed a law requiring the public posting of food items and their calorie content at most fast food restaurants. Mika Brzezinski rails almost daily on "The Morning Joe" show about the need to eat healthier in order to stay trim and live longer. Food and beverages we buy at the grocery store prominently feature words like "lite" and "free" on their labeling. It seems like the food police are everywhere.

A lot of people forget that this is a relatively new phenomena. When I was growing up, there was no "lite" or "free" anything. We loaded up on calories and carbs at every meal. For breakfast, I had either bacon or ham with eggs and hard-tack homemade biscuits and gravy. Hamburgers and fries for lunch was a usual fare and my favorite supper meal was pan-fried pork chops and fried potatoes. Dessert was almost always a couple slices of pie or cake because those were made daily at my house and I drank cokes with every meal. When I was a freshman in high school, I was a hefty 105 pounds and only weighed 145 pounds when I graduated.

Now you would surely think with the "diet" I was exposed to on a daily basis that I would have blimped up, just like today's kids are doing but obviously I didn't. And the reason I didn't was exercise. Not the "health club" kind of exercise because we didn't have any of those in the town I grew up in. Nor did people "walk" or "jog" for exercise. In fact, that would have seemed pretty silly back then. We got our exercise through good old fashioned play.

Practically every guy in my school was into some kind of athletics. PE was a required class to take so even those few kids who weren't athletes were exposed to some form of physical activity an hour a day, five days a week. The rest of us not only took PE but had some kind of athletic practice after school like football, basketball, baseball, or track. And in the summer time, we were up at the crack of dawn to meet down at the baseball field where we would literally play all day long until it either got too dark to see the ball or we would knock the cover off of it and wouldn't have any black tape to wrap it back up with so we could keep on playing. Almost all of us had bicycles and we rode them everywhere.

Kids don't "play" nearly as much today as they used to thanks to all the technology that has developed since I was a kid. They sit at home on the couch or lay in the bed in their room and play video games or computer games or surf the Web or text each other for most of the day every day. And in doing so, the only thing they exercise are their fingers.

If you're engaged in a sedentary life style, you're going to put on pounds even if you're eating "healthy" and if you're not, you're going to gain even more. Losing weight or gaining weight is a pretty simple concept despite all the confusing information we're exposed to about the subject. Although everyone's metabolism is slightly different and some people have to work harder than others, the basic rule of thumb is that you have to burn up more calories than you consume. If you do, you'll either maintain your weight or lose weight. If you don't, you'll gain weight. It's really that simple and any nutritionist will tell you that.

When I was a kid, almost all of us burned up more calories on a daily basis than we consumed. Kids today don't. So if your child is overweight, the very best thing you can do for them is to get them off the couch and outside playing.

With few exceptions, it works better than any diet plan or calorie counting formula out there.