You’re in your car, on your way home from a tiring sports game. You feel proud of yourself because you worked hard, running and jumping all over the place trying to help your team come out with the win. The cheers from the crowd are still ringing in your ears. You can almost smell the calories dripping down your forehead. How do you reward yourself? By eating a nice juicy burger from good old McDonalds. After stuffing your face with fries and drowning it down with some root beer, you have the feeling that your stomach doubled in size. You realise you probably just ate all the calories you burned off only an hour ago, if not more. That being the case, you decide that tomorrow you will eat more healthy food. You grab lots of fruits and vegetables to bring to school, and you end up eating them all. Finally, to reward yourself, you sit on the couch for the rest of the night watching all the shows you have saved on your DVR that you haven’t got the chance to watch yet. Well guess what? Consequently, you didn’t do much better than the day before.

According to the Childhood Obesity Foundation, in order for kids and teenagers to live a healthy lifestyle everyday, there are four simple steps you must take; eat 5 or more servings of fruits and vegetables, spend no more than 2 hours in front of a screen, have at least 1 hour of physical activity and never drink sugar sweetened beverages. However, in order for this to work, you must do all of this everyday.

These steps seem simple enough, right? In today’s society, apparently they are not. Teenagers in our society spend their day in front of the television pigging out on fast food and sugary drinks, and this has its consequences. In 2007, 29% of teenagers had an unhealthy weight according to BMI, and this is not easily outgrown. If this trend continues, by 2040, up to 70% of adults aged 40 years will be obese or overweight.

Sure, you can say this is easy to prevent, we just have to encourage teenagers to live a healthier lifestyle. Although we’ve tried and tried in commercials, books, school and announcement, these numbers have only been going up throughout the years, so obviously these methods are not working. Between 1981 and 1996 the number of overweight boys went from 15% to 35.4% and girls went from 15% to 29.2%. That’s twice as many in only 15 years! These numbers only continue to skyrocket higher and higher. If we don’t act fast, there will be serious consequences.

Instead of being active, teenagers spend their days in front of their televisions, laptops and cell phones. Our Canadian youth spend on average 7.8 hours every day watching television. In addition, around 25% of our population, instead of eating delicious home cooked meals eat fast food everyday.
We have become the first generation that will die before our parents. Because of the way we are living, we are going to die sooner than had we lived in a healthier way. But who raised us this way? Our parents. Parents are the most influential people in a child’s life. Kids whose mothers encourage them to exercise and eat well and who also model these activities are much more likely to be active and healthy eaters. Nowadays, about 40% of family food dollars are spent on food outside the home.
Dr. Marc Tremblay, director of active living and obesity research at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario, says we need to treat this crisis as a wake up call, "We need to stop saying 'we can't' because the health of the population is at stake here."
We’ve tried very hard to decrease all the numbers listed above, but nothing we’ve done seems to have helped. Knowing this, it does not mean we stop trying, it means we try harder. Everyone must try, parents, teachers, activists, politicians and most importantly, us as teenagers. Take the initiative to live the best way you can, healthy. For a moment just think, do you really want to have to make your parents bury their own child?