Pushing your overweight child to exercise might be of no use, for a new study has revealed that exercising has no impact on weight loss in children.
Researchers suggest that overweight children should be encouraged to eat healthy food and focus on their calorie intake.
In order to lower the rate of childhood obesity, parents need to focus on healthy eating and cutting calorie consumption, rather than engaging them in sports and games.
The researchers insist that obese children are inactive because of their weight, and not fat because they are inactive and this is the reason why efforts to promote physical activity for averting childhood obesity have failed.
Overweight children face difficulty while exercise as they run out of breath, so they are more inactive than slimmer counterparts.
"Our explanation is that fat kids are inactive because they are fat and not fat because they are inactive. They find it hard to exercise because they run out of breath, and so they don't," the Telegraph quoted lead researcher Brad Metcalf, of the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, as saying.
"It is getting them to make sure they do not acquire fats through other means in the first place.
"They will lose more weight through healthy, lifelong changes to their diet than physical activity.
"The most cost-effective way of easing the problem would be to put all the money into getting kids to stop eating junk food rather than splitting it between that and getting them active.
"It is tempting to make kids more active but it doesn't produce the expected results.
"In France, they have taken out vending machines from schools and banned students taking in chocolate bars in their packed lunch. They have also banned adverts for junk food on TV during children's programmes and they are seeing it is making a difference," he added.