Doing exercise and making healthy recipes to lose weight with your family

Exercise and weight loss can be hard to maintain without help. Fortunately for many of us, help is close at hand and comes in the form of our family.

Making exercise a family activity not only helps every family member to lose weight and keep it in a healthy range, it's also good for our individual spirits and helps aid in family bonding.

This article explains why making exercise a family affair is a great idea and provides suggestions for you to begin exercising with your family.

Why family exercise is a great idea

Weight related problems are not confined to adults, and more and more children in Australia are becoming overweight or obese in part because they are not active enough.

Making exercise part of our family lifestyle is a great idea because it:

Helps make weight loss and weight control easier
Helps make exercise and weight loss motivation easier
Helps the family share more things in common
Encourages family members to spend more quality time together
Helps strengthen family relationships
Helps children develop healthy habits early in life
Helps children develop physical skills and self-confidence
Helps make weight loss success more likely for any or all family members
Helps keep the whole family happier and healthier

How about getting started

The hardest part of making exercise a family affair is getting started.

Here are some ideas to help make getting started a lot easier:

Find out what your children or partner like to do and make this a focus of your family activities
When talking to children, use words like "fun" and "play" instead of "exercise"
Plan social outings that involve physical activity such as roller-skating
Make it a rule to leave the television off one day a week and exercise then
Don't make exercise a chore; keep it light and enjoyable
Vary the activities you do and let your children take turns at choosing what the family does
Use family walks or bike rides as a time to do more than just exercise together
Try to combine exercise with learning and exploring (for example, try walking around local parks, your nearest zoo or museum)
Try to be available as much as possible when your children want to play
Buy toys, games and accessories that promote physical activity, like balls, bikes and bike accessories, and skates
Try to keep children's minds active during exercise (by getting them to count things like fences, bikes, dogs or houses of certain colors while on walks for example)
Encourage your children to keep an activity diary and plan exciting new activities for the future
Set aside a specific time for family exercise, like early on Sunday morning for example

Be creative

When planning your family exercise, don't just rely on the list above, get creative.

For example, why not buy each family member a pedometer and have a daily, weekly or monthly competition to see who can walk the most steps. Reward the winner for their efforts remembering not to use food as the reward.

Got a better idea? Give it a try; you've got nothing but weight to lose!

Family exercise options

The greatest thing about family exercise is the wide number of options available.

And it doesn't matter what the composition of our family is, whether it's just us and our partner, us and young children, us and older children, or us, our partner and children of any age.

For those of us with new-born children, family exercise may be just taking baby for a walk in their pram during the day and exploring all the sights and sounds of the neighborhood.

For those of us with a brood, family exercise may be taking the children and their bikes along the beach or a couple of times around the local botanical gardens.

For those of us without children or with adult children, family exercise may just take the form of us taking romantic walks or bike rides along the beach or river with our partner at dusk or through the park on our way to our favorite picnic spot.

Regardless of the makeup of our family, here are some examples of the most common and best forms of family exercise:

Walking or jogging with a pram
Family bike riding or walk/bike rides
Swimming
Tennis
Aerobics or gym workouts
Inline, ice or roller skating
Golf
Hiking
Martial arts (e.g., karate)
Hop-scotch
Skipping
Hide-and-seek
Miniature golf
Kite flying
Beach Frisbee
Kick to kick footy
Party activities like badminton or volleyball

Prepare a delicious healthy pizza to have with your family

This pizza has a pita bread for a base, which acts like a thin crust in that it highlights the flavors of the ingredients on top of the pizza. Take away pizzas will be a thing of the past when you see how quick & easy this is to make, and how great it tastes.

This is high protein which will keep you feeling full until your next meal.

Ingredients

1 pita pocket, whole meal, ‘light’
1 tbsp. pizza sauce (we used Leggo)
½ chicken breast, diced
¼ onion, sliced
½ tomato, sliced or diced
2 small mushrooms, sliced
20g chorizo sausage (approx 1 inch), chopped
1 tbsp. grated cheese, reduced fat
Sprinkle of oregano
Cooking spray
Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Preheat oven 200C.
Lay your pita pocket onto an oven tray which has been lined with baking paper. Spread 1 tbsp. pizza sauce over base.
Heat a small non-stick fry-pan, spray cooking spray and saute onions and mushrooms for 5 mins on med heat. Take off heat; lay out on pita pocket evenly. Add tomato, diced or sliced.
Spray your pan again and saute chopped chorizo for 1 min then add chicken with a sprinkle of oregano, approx. 2 mins until cooked. Season with salt and pepper. Take off heat and add to pizza. Sprinkle over grated cheese and bake in oven for 10 mins.

Doing exercise and making healthy recipes to lose weight with your family