When my siblings and I were growing up in Italy a fat child was a rarity. Families eat healthy, homemade, local food, and thankfully neither the fast food industry nor the internet had taken over yet.
Times have changed, not necessarily for the best when it comes to certain aspects of life. Oh, my! Am I starting to sound like my grandmother? “Ai miei tempi!” (Back in my day!), she used to lament, and I would roll my eyes…
Today fast food seems to be the inexpensive answer to an overly worked household. It isn’t easy to break habits and to see that to eat healthy doesn’t have to be expensive, or require a lot of time. To buy at local farmers’ markets (and they are all over), for example, provides us with the freshest of foods with out the high costs of the big supermarket chains.
But back in my day children also were not sitting for hours in front of television, at the time the closest thing to today’s internet. First of all in Italy we just had a couple of channels that provided few programs addressed to children. In any case our mind was not geared to choose sitting down over playing, especially if we could do it outside.
We were eating healthy, but we also were eating a lot! Aside the main meals, in school we enjoyed home provided snacks at recess, and hefty, very nutritious merende (afternoon snacks) in the middle of the afternoon. How come we weren’t overweight? What we ate fueled the energy we continuously relied on for our active life.
Most of us were engaged in after school activities; swimming, playing tennis, basket ball or soccer, and ballet. It is interesting that when in higher grades our studies became more time-consuming and many of us had to interrupt or reduce our afternoon activities, many of us gained some weight because we continued to eat the amount of food we were eating when we were more active. So, it isn’t just eating the wrong food that causes overweight; sitting for hours in front of a computer, or attached to a cellular, or any other gadget, contributes to it enormously.
Admittedly, though, there are times when a cellular is a godsend! What can you say when, at the restaurant, at the table next to yours sits a family enjoying a peaceful dinner while a toddler plays games with one of the parents’ cellular? How does a toddler even know what to do with a cellular?! (OK, mine is just jealousy, since I am not exactly an authority when it comes to technology.) Trust me, I know what it was like to take a baby to a restaurant and try to have a semi-civilized dinner! After all our keys had disappeared under our table, we used to ask the waiter for spoons to entertain our first born; he would play with one for a blink of an eye, and then throw it to the floor. And we would ask for another. By the end of our meal with our keys and dignity there were heaps of spoons under our table. We didn’t dare showing up to the same restaurant twice! EVER!
