1. One disadvantage of being an overweight teenager is not having any interest in exercise and physical education.
As an overweight teenager myself, I see where they are coming from. Although exercise would seem like the obvious cure to cut your weight down, kids have a different mindset, especially teenagers. As a teen myself, I am very lazy and being lazy makes me not care about physical activity. Therefore, I continue with my lazy habits, and continue to be overweight. I know to most people this sounds terrible, but as I said, teens do not have the same mind set as adults, so they do not care about exercise.
2. Another reason teens might not care about exercise is because even though they may have tried exercise in the past, they feel like they have not been successful and therefore they give up on it.
I myself have had a lot of experience with this. For example in my PE class we would always do sit-ups and pushups, but because of my weight, I would never do them right. Because of this I would always go into a corner by myself and do them the incorrect way because I didn’t think I could do them correctly. If other overweight teens feel like this and have the same traumatic experience when they exercise, they may not have the confidence to try it again.
3.My final reason kids who are overweight do not like to exercise is that they do not feel like they have the strength to do the exercise. First off, you need physical strength to complete an exercise. If you overwork yourself, the side effects are bad, such as headaches, dehydration, and light-headedness. You also need upper body strength. This is very important, especially for kids, but being overweight and being lazy prevents kids from having upper body strength. Therefore kids cannot do the basic exercises like sit-ups, pushups and even planks that most everybody can do. I can relate to this reason the most out of the three reasons I gave you and here is why: When I boxed about a month ago, I was ok with it, the tasks were ok for me, but the problem was that I was getting overly tired after the first session. The second session was different. I was getting tired during the session, and by the end of the session, my head was killing me. I felt dehydrated and lightheaded. It was not just the upper body strength, it was the whole session that made me feel lightheaded.
How exercise will benefit overweight teens.
Although overweight teens might not show interest in exercise, as I explained in my first three paragraphs, exercise will still benefit them in various ways. For example, when kids exercise, they will always burn off calories, so if a teen eats a snack that is 100 calories, and then they go on the treadmill and burn off 100 calories, they burned off what they just ate. I know this is not a lot, but eventually calories lead to pounds. Even though I talked about all my negative experience with exercise, I still have positive memories. For example, this past week while I was at my grandma’s house, I went swimming almost every day. Each day I got better and better and my grandparents complimented me on how much progress I was making, not only with my swimming skills, but also with my weight loss. This makes me proud and motivates me to do it more. I hope that other kids have similar experiences and therefore feel motivated to exercise.
Conclusion
In this article, I explained how overweight teens do not like exercise and some of reasons behind it. However, I still think there is no excuse to not exercise. It might be helpful to have teens experiment with different sports and see if they find one they like. If this happens, more kids will find activities they enjoy. They will become fit and strong, and this will be a positive response to the problem of overweight and obesity plaguing children across America.
