healthy life

Tips for New Dads: 9 Healthy Habits to Teach Your Kids

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Watch Me, Dad!
Even if you just brought your bundle of joy home days ago, you’ll scarcely blink your eyes before your active preschooler crows at the playground: “Watch me, Dad!” But remember that your child watches you. Read on for tips on demonstrating a healthy, active life, so you’ll never need to tell your child, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Get Your 5-a-Day
You’ll have greater success introducing your child to colorful, crisp and crunchy fruits and vegetables if you regularly eat and enjoy them yourself. Research shows that eating five or more fruits and vegetables every day helps prevent heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and stroke (CDC, 2009).

Berries at breakfast, salad with lunch, and steamed veggies with dinner satisfy you, help keep you slim, and show your child how to eat for health.

Cook Up Fun
Engage your child in the kitchen and garden—even if you live in the city and your garden consists of pots of herbs in a sunny window. Kids love to stir and pour, and their sense of wonder will come alive as they watch tiny shoots emerge from the soil and transform into veggies, herbs, or fruit they enjoy.

Bag Lunch = Good Health and College Funds
Switch from getting your midday meal from the sandwich shop or fast-food joint to packing your own lunch. You’ll log plenty of practice in making healthy, tasty lunches by the time your child marches off to kindergarten. Eating a bagged lunch also will help manage your salt and fat intake and save you money—which you can funnel into a college fund.

Early Childhood Activity
Model an active life for your child from the get-go. Bundle the baby into a carrier and check TrailLink to find a beautiful place to walk in your area. Invest in a jogger that lets you run, walk, or skate while your child takes in the sensory stimulation the outdoors offers.

When your child is big enough to ride in a safe and comfortable bike carrier, cruise around to show them the sights and demonstrate that bicycling is fun.

Go Smoke-Free
Now is the time to let go of your tobacco habit. You’ll feel better, have more energy to play with your child, live longer and—most importantly—you won’t model unhealthy, high-risk behavior.

Get help quitting through smokefree.gov, call 1-800-QUIT-NOW, or talk with your doctor about smoking cessation aids.

Be Friendly
Friends are good for your physical and mental health, according to an analysis of 148 studies published in PLOS Medicine that showed a link between relationships and lower mortality risk (Holt-Lunstad, et al., 2010). Women tend to reap this benefit more than men do, but you can counter that trend.

Join a social, athletic, community, or faith-based group where you can meet others, develop relationships, and show your child that friends are important throughout life.

Show Them How to Snooze
This may sound like illogical advice for a new dad who is up at night with a newborn. However, chronic sleep deprivation is linked to an increased risk for type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, kidney disease, stroke, cancer and depression (NCBI, 2006).

As time passes and your child grows, show them the importance of regular sleep by going to bed and getting up at the same time each day—even on weekends. Aim for seven to eight hours a night

Raise Your Glass (of Water)
According to USDA dietary guidelines, moderate drinking consists of two drinks or less per day for men (USDA, 2010). If you tend to consume more than that—even occasionally—think about cutting back. You’ll lower your risk for liver disease, pancreatitis, some cancers, and high blood pressure, which are associated with overindulging in alcohol (CDC, 2012), and you’ll exhibit a responsible approach to drinking.

Hand Over Good Health
Hand washing is the best and easiest way to prevent the spread of colds and flu. As soon as your child is a toddler, teach them how to lather up and scrub thoroughly:

  • before preparing or eating snacks and meals
  • after using the bathroom
  • after sneezing or coughing into hands
  • after each diaper change
  • after handling trash or touching a pet
  • Wash for 20 seconds, about the time it takes to sing “Happy Birthday” twice. Your child will have fun while developing this healthy habit.

Source: health line

 

Why happiness is healthy

You might call it a sense of well-being, of optimism or of meaningfulness in life, although those could also be treated as separate entities. But whatever happiness is, we know that we want it, and that is just somehow good.

We also know that we don’t always have control over our happiness. Research suggests that genetics may play a big role in our normal level of subjective well-being, so some of us may start out at a disadvantage. On top of that, between unexpected tragedies and daily habitual stress, environmental factors can bring down mood and dry up our thirst for living.

Being able to manage the emotional ups and downs is important for both body and mind, said Laura Kubzansky, professor of social and behavioral sciences at Harvard School of Public Health.

“For physical health, it’s not so much happiness per se, but this ability to regulate and have a sense of purpose and meaning,” Kubzansky said.

Why be happy?

Many scientific studies, including some by Kubzansky, have found a connection between psychological and physical well-being.

It’s not as simple as “you must be happy to prevent heart attacks,” of course. If you have a good sense of well-being, it’s easier to maintain good habits: Exercising, eating a balanced diet and getting enough sleep, researchers said. People who have an optimistic mindset may be more likely to engage in healthy behaviors because they perceive them as helpful in achieving their goals, Kubzansky said.

Lower blood pressure, normal body weight and healthier blood fat profiles were also associated with a better sense of well-being in this study.

For now these studies can only show associations; they do not provide hard evidence of cause and effect. But some researchers speculate that positive mental states do have a direct effect on the body, perhaps by reducing damaging physical processes. For instance, another of Kubzansky’s studies found that optimism is associated with lower levels of inflammation.

If what you mean by happiness is specifically “enjoyment of life,” there’s newer evidence to support that, too. A recent study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that people ages 60 and older who said they enjoyed life less were more likely to develop disability over an eight-year period. Mobility was also related to enjoyment of life. This study does not prove that physical problems are caused by less enjoyment of life, but suggests a relationship.

Where happiness comes from: genes + environment
There is substantial evidence that genetics play a big role in happiness, according to Nancy Segal, psychologist at California State University, Fullerton, and author of “Born Together — Reared Apart.”

Research has shown that identical twins tend to have a similar level of happiness, more so than fraternal twins. And in identical twins, one twin’s happiness is a better predictor of the other twin’s current or future happiness than educational achievement or income, Segal said.

“If you have happy parents and happy children, I think that people usually assume it’s because the children are modeling the parents,” she said. “But that’s not really so. You need to make the point that parents pass on both genes and environments.”

What’s more, there seems to be a certain level of happiness that individuals have generally, to which they usually gravitate, Segal said. That level depends on the person, and the situations he or she is in.

Even if genetics has a big influence, though, that doesn’t mean anyone is biologically stuck being unhappy, she said. It might take more work if your baseline mood is low, but certain therapies have proven useful for elevating psychological well-being.

The environment is still quite important for psychological well-being, too, Kubzansky said.

“To say to someone, ‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ is kind of not looking at the whole picture of, what are the environmental constraints on things they can do?” Kubzansky said.

Source: cnn