Let's+Move.+A+Step

__Let’s Move: A Step Towards Decreasing Obesity in the U.S.__ On February 9, 2010 First Lady Michelle Obama launched the Let’s Move campaign. The campaign sought out to create a healthier and more active US. Its main target is children but it also includes parents, caregivers, and others within the communities. Michelle Obama mission is to help decrease the childhood obesity/overweight rate and this program is doing just that. Let’s Move is positively affecting families medically and socially by informing and creating programs to help them become healthier.

Let’s move is taking the steps to help improve the medical state in which young children today are in by changing bad eating and exercise habits. I believe in order to get a better understanding for why this campaign is so important one must know what being obese/overweight is and the affects of it. Doctors categorize people overweight or obese by determining one’s bmi (body mass index). It doesn’t take a doctor to tell if a kid is overweight, one can look and tell most of the time. One sign of an unhealthy child is if they become exhausted just by doing little task. Being overweight or obese has a lot of health effects. “High blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease are only a few of the affects associated with it” states the Stanford Hospital and Clinics web page; it also states that a obese/overweight child not only has a lot of medical disadvantages but social ones also. In today’s society a person’s thinness determines one’s attractiveness so those who are not thin suffer. “Suffering such as being tormented and discriminated against” can come with being obese or overweight (Stanford). This can hurt children. Someone having those things happen to them at a young age can affect their lives in many ways. Children tend to pick on obese children and this can cause emotional distress for the innocent victims. It can lead children to feeling bad about themselves, alienation, and cause them to lash out at themselves and others. This is one reason while it’s important to start healthy living at a young age.

The Let’s Move campaign is raising national awareness about nutrition and exercise. We can all acknowledge the fact that this generation of children is neither as healthy nor active as the others before it. The article //First Lady aims to trim American waist sizes// mentions that “for the first time, today’s youth are on a track to have shorter lifespans than their parents” (Benac). This should be devastating news to everyone. Children are eating more and more junk food and fewer foods that are healthy for them. Let’s Move is empowering parents to take more action in helping to create healthier future’s for their children. “In addition to purchasing food for the family, parents and caregivers serve as role models for healthy behavior”(Ogilvie). The campaign is asking parents to eat healthier foods around their children and for them “to provide fruit for their children’s snacks” (Tennant). Parents play a huge role in creating healthier children.

It’s not just the parents who the program is trying to get to help children eat healthier foods it’s also getting schools involved in the process. Let’s Move is “pushing schools to dish up healthier lunches” (Benac). School meal regulations the campaign has promoted included schools serving “more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to reduce sodium, saturated fat, and trans fats” that students consume (Khadaroo). The “ultimate solution to the obesity problem has to come from parents, schools and communities working together” (Benac). The campaign alone can not stop the epidemic. Everyone in the community have a part in making children healthier. The campaign does not force people to change the obesity rate; it’s the prerogative of the people in the children lives to choose if they want to make the effort to do so.

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