How many times a day do you see your kids slouched around a screen?  Celebrity trainer, Parenting magazine fitness editor, and co-author of the book Sneaky Fitness: Fun Foolproof Ways To Slip Fitness Into Your Child’s Everyday Life, Larysa DiDio discusses the best ideas from over 100 games and activities she developed to get any kid off the couch in this transcript from the Jan 3 fitsmiForMoms Radio Show with host Linda Frankenbach (if you prefer to listen to the podcast, you can find it here).  

Linda Frankenbach: Happy New Year everyone, and welcome to FitsmiForMoms Radio. I’m Linda Frankenbach, the founder and CEO of FitsmiForMoms and Fitsmi. Our company, as you all, I hope, know, really is focused on trying to help overweight teenage girls who struggle with their weight, and to also help the parents of overweight kids in any way that we can. And both of those sites and these radio shows try to work together to help you, parents, figure out what to do to help your kids. And we’re really happy to have you for our inaugural show in 2012. Those who listen to us live will note that our time has changed. We are now Tuesday afternoons, every other Tuesday at 3:30, and we alternate with our radio show for Fitsmi, which is also Tuesdays at 3:30.

So thank you so much for joining us today. Today our guest is Larysa DiDio. Larysa comes with a fascinating background, has done so many things in terms of fitness and kids. I’ll give you her bio. She is the fitness editor for Parenting magazine, and she runs a fitness facility, PFX, in Pleasantville, New York, which was one of the first gyms to offer classes specifically for kids; one called Boot Camp Baby, and Get Fit for Prom, and both of them have attracted national scholarships from Canyon Ranch and others. Larysa is also a trainer who works with celebrities, and professional and Olympic athletes. She is ambassador to Best Bones Forever, a government campaign to get girls healthy, and in 2008 she created Get Fit with Larysa, a DVD for tween girls which was designed not only to help them get fit, but to help them build self-confidence. She is an unofficial contributor to the training badge, or the fitness badge for the Girl Scouts, and she contributes to Girls’ Life. But more recently she has published a book; she is the co-author of a book called, “Sneaky Fitness: Fun, Foolproof Ways To Slip Fitness Into Your Child’s Everyday Life,” and we are very happy to have Larysa with us today, who is going to discuss a lot of what she has in that book, and we hope that these ideas are going to be really helpful to you. So welcome Larysa. So glad to have you.

Larysa DiDio:  Thank you. It is so fun to be here. I’m so excited to be on your first, your inaugural show for 2012. I’m hoping, and I think it’s going to prove to be a phenomenal year. I’m really excited about this year.

LF: Well that’s terrific. I’m going to start—you’ve done so many interesting things in fitness and so on, and I’m really interested in finding out, what is it that brought you to start focusing on fitness for kids?

LD: Okay, well, I was reading a couple of questions that you sent to me and I was thinking about this, because I’ve been in fitness for so long, for over 20 years, and I was trying to think, How did I get to really concentrate on kids? And I think it started when I was a child, and when I was a child I loved doing—I loved being active, and I loved doing obstacle courses, and my dad would set up obstacle courses for me in the backyard, and my friends, I would time my friends. Because I had such fun doing it, I said everybody must have as much fun as I did, and I got them going, and I sort of was their personal trainer at eight to eleven years old, which is kind of funny. Then in my early teens I was quite thin, and was made fun of because I was thin and I felt very weak, and I took it upon myself to speak with the gym teacher and ask him what I should do in order to buff up or get a little stronger. And he suggested that I go into the weight room, and he gave me a program for the weight room, and I was one of the few girls in the weight room training. And I found real comfort in the weight room, even though I was an athlete, but I found comfort there because I found it to be a non-competitive atmosphere. I thought that people were—the kids there were on programs, they were mature, we were all just competing with ourselves, and I loved it. And I got my friends to come, and it really took off, and I thought to myself, If I’m feeling like this, everybody else should feel like this. They should have the opportunity to be empowered the way I was empowered. So I continued with my fitness quest. I went to college, and I was training my adult clients in my early twenties, in my mid-twenties, and the kids, their kids, would jump in and want to work out with us, from as young as three years old to as old as twelve years old, and most gyms don’t allow kids, because of insurance reasons, and because they don’t want to actually have to take the time to show kids what to do, because they take a little more practice or a little more instruction, because they’re not used to being in a gym—that the kids really, this was new to kids. That they really had an interest in doing it, so—and many of them, and increasingly so, needed it. So I would work with the kids and the parents together, and not only was it great for the kids to work out, but it also was a great bonding experience for parents and kids alike. So that’s how it really started, and then I started working more and more with just children. I found how great—and I was reminded of how great I felt working out at such a young age, and so grateful to the ones who helped me, and helped empower me through fitness, that I really felt a mission to share the same and help other kids in the same way, and the more I worked with kids, the more I saw how it even helped them even more.

For example I trained a girl named Allie, and she’s 11 years old, and she was very overweight. She is in a private school in New York City, and her headmaster came to me and said, “I’m not sure what you can do, but we’re having trouble with this girl who’s overweight. She’s being ridiculed, really her confidence has gone down, her grades have gone down. I’m thinking maybe she needs a little fitness, maybe you can help her, maybe you can empower her in some way.” I worked with her for a year and her teachers, the teachers—actually three teachers—went to the headmaster and said, “What psychologist is she seeing, because we’ve never seen such a difference in a girl in a year?” and the truth was she wasn’t seeing a psychologist, she was just empowered through fitness and strength training with me. So what I did, and the more I work with kids, the more gratifying and empowering it is for me, so that’s really how I moved forward, and then writing the book was just a way for me to connect with as many kids as possible. So that really, that’s how I started with children, and I continue to—it’s my mission really to be able to end the childhood obesity epidemic in every way, shape, form that I can starting with one to a thousand kids at a time.

LF: Well, that’s fabulous. That’s a great story. There was something you said there that really—I think it is important for us to talk about a bit more. You know, all of us who are working with kids, trying to help, know that feeling better about yourself is a really important step in the road to getting more healthy, and you talked about how fitness alone, and the support that that gave to the gal you were talking about, really changed not only her health, but how she felt about herself. Can you just talk a little bit more about why you think that’s the case?

LD: Here’s the low-down. Children who are overweight, they are at a predisposition, and increasingly so, for adult-onset maladies such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease. It’s really amazing that now they’re finding 13-year-olds with high cholesterol, and they’re putting 14-year-olds on diabetes medications. This is awful enough physically, and if you tell a 14-year-old child that she can’t be overweight because it’s not great for her body to be overweight because she can develop diabetes, and actually you can tell the parents the same thing; they can develop diabetes or cardiovascular disease. This doesn’t resonate. They don’t see it, it’s not tangible. What’s diabetes? It’s high blood sugar, it’s—whatever. So the physical issue and the physical problems that go along with being overweight are bad enough, but the most immediate consequence of a child being overweight, as told by the children themselves, is social discrimination. And it comes in the form of a) being ridiculed, b) teased—just being ousted from groups, being made fun of. Imagine what it’s like to be picked last for the kickball team every day of your life. This is what these kids go through, and I’m not sure if you saw today on the news, that Georgia has started a new ad campaign. They launched a new ad campaign trying to end the obesity crisis in their state. Their state has the most amount, they have one million kids who are either overweight or obese. They have the most amount of kids in their state in the United States, and the posters and the projections that they have in the pictures, and the quotes along with it, are a little—they’re a little riveting and they’re a little horrifying at times, and people are sort of a little horrified by it, and it was on the Today Show today, and I think that…

LF: Can you just talk, before you go on, just talk about what it was about the ads? Because I think there’s going to be some talk about this. We did hear about it.

LD: Sure, yeah. There’s a picture of an overweight girl, and underneath there’s a caption, “I don’t go to school because I feel like I’m fat, so I want to be home schooled.” And that, actually, you know, I work with seven girls who are home schooled as a result of being overweight and being ridiculed. One of the major reasons why kids want to be home schooled is because they’re too embarrassed—so the issue that I’m having here is that parents think—people are horrified in New York City, and, I don’t know, I guess, there was the Today Show and they were talking about people in New York City, how horrified they are at the images of these kids being overweight, and the quotes underneath them, but I think that this is the message that needs to be sent to parents. Because the only thing that’s going to get parents to think is by putting themselves in their children’s shoes. Like I said, if you, and it’s my experience, if you tell the parents that their kids are going to get diabetes or cardiovascular disease, or cholesterol, it’s so foreign for them that they don’t really think about that. But you tell a parent that their kid is sitting in the corner crying and huddled up because she feels so badly because she’s getting made fun of, that sort of hits home. And I find it’s the catalyst that allows and brings about change in the home, where change really needs to occur.

LF: That’s really an important observation, and we have heard from many clinicians and others how challenged they often are to get families to come. And I’m interested in what you’ve done in terms of your boot camp and your exercise thing, and those girls you just mentioned who are being home schooled. What was the—what got them to you? What was the catalyst? Was the girl the factor, the main factor, was the mom? The dad? What do you think pushed them over that line where they said, We need to get help?

LD: I think, and I know, that it’s typically the mother, and sometimes the father, because fathers are definitely getting more involved in their daughters’ lives, but it’s the mother responding to their child either 1) not fitting into pants, trying to go to the mall and realizing that they can’t fit into “normal sized jeans” and feeling how badly their child felt when they couldn’t do that. So it’s not really the ridicule that their getting in school, it’s how badly they’re feeling about themselves in day to day life at home.

LF: And have there been cases where the girls somehow found out about you and pushed mom or dad to get there?

LD: Typically it’s parents—well a child has pushed to come see me when they know other kids and other friends that I have helped, and they feel like I can help them too. And actually most of the time it’s the mother who’s the catalyst, but the mother sort of steps aside towards, you know, the middle of our sessions, and it’s the child who really continues the relationship with me and actually books the sessions with me. So a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old seeing the difference and seeing the difference in how she feels is the one who will push her mother to book sessions with me, or email me or text me, I need to work out again, I need to work out again. Because I’m looking good, I’m feeling good. And that—when it gets to that point, which is usually pretty quickly, within two or three weeks, I feel very, very happy because then they’re taking charge of their lives and really I find that it’s working. And it happens very quickly, and it has never not happened with any girl that I’ve worked with.

LF: And how long does your program generally last?

LD: Typically kids work with me for between two and four months, which is about what they need in order to keep them going. Then sometimes they’ll take four to six months off and then they’ll come back sort of like for another boot camp for another six to eight weeks. It typically goes along with their school schedules. I may not see them during the summer, so they’ll take two months off during the summer, which is fine, and they’ll feel just like an adult, in September, that they sort of need a boot camp to come back. But they always use my principles. Once—the principles that I use in teaching and training my clients are ones that can be used over and for the rest of their lives, which is why my programs are usually—it’s permanent lifestyle change, as opposed to just a weight loss program or a get fit program. It’s a permanent lifestyle change. So they can take my tips with them, and although they like seeing me and they like me pushing them, and they like to work with me, and sometimes they need just a little added boost, they can use the exercises and the principles that I give them even when I’m not with them.

LF: And just to wrap up this section, if someone, one of our listeners, lives in the New York area and would like to get involved with your program, how would they reach you?

LD: The best way would be to email me. You can go on my website or you can just email me: larysa@larysadidio.com.

LF: That’s terrific, and final question about your program. How expensive is it? I know that there are scholarships that are available, which is just fabulous, and how much would a family expect to pay for a program like this?

LD: I’m unique because I’m a celebrity trainer in New York City, so I’m a little—I may be on the higher end, but I have other trainers in my gym and in my facility, and in surrounding areas, that I can recommend that I’ve taught how to train, using my training methods, but for an hour session, between $40 and $125 for the hour. Per session. But there are also classes that we teach in our gym, it’s FitnessXperts.com that you can pay about $10 per session, per class. There are a group of kids. Also the Ys in your area. YMCA is a great source for kids’ fitness programs.

LF: That’s really, really helpful. Let’s talk now about your book.

LD: You know, can I add just one more thing about kids’ fitness? DVDs are really great, and if you were looking for something that’s a little more affordable for your child, if you go on to something called collagevideo.com you can find videos there for under $10 a video, and also you can go onto Fit TV, which is actually on TV, and you can find, for free through your cable, exercise DVDs there. And kids do love exercising in their home and on DVDs when they can pick different things, so that’s also a great option.

LF: That’s a really important point. Glad you made it. And we certainly do believe, with both of our sites, that there are possibilities for help that you can get digitally. You can get them by connecting to the right places, and I’m glad you mentioned those couple of places. We really think it’s important to make parents and kids aware of where they can get help locally, and nationally.

So you obviously have learned a lot in your years of doing this, and you wrote this book, “Sneaky Fitness: Fun, Foolproof Ways To Slip Fitness Into Your Child’s Everyday Life,” so tell us a little bit about what this book suggests. Maybe just run us through the top ten things that a parent can do to slip fitness into her or his child’s life?

LD: This book was—I wrote this book because I wanted to give parents a way to get kids to exercise without them knowing it and without the fight. Not saying that kids shouldn’t traditionally exercise, because I believe in traditional exercise, I believe in the hour of gym time, and I believe in after school activities and intramurals, but I wanted something in addition that would get kids motivated to run and just be active daily, sort of like everyone was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, where we would just go outside and play. I wanted to bring back the play and the activity back into playtime for kids, so this book was written as in response to that. I also wanted parents to know that—if you go through my book there are components of fitness, and they are, some of the five that I use are, balance, strength, agility, cardiovascular, and flexibility. So the kids, the play that kids are doing outside isn’t just necessarily fun play. They think it’s fun play, which is phenomenal, but underneath there are smart components of exercise that are benefiting your children now, and will for the rest of their lives, even if they only do an activity once. Then it benefits them in many ways, and there’s something called muscle memory; once you do an activity once, your muscles will remember how to do it and they’ll remember which muscles to use and how to perform the exercise, even if they haven’t done it in a while, which is why if you took ballet as a kid, and you haven’t done it in a while, you know, your knees may be a little creaky, but 30 years later you can go into a plie, or you can go into a pirouette. So I just wanted parents to know, and to give them sort of a source for getting their kids to play and have fun, but also give them a source of looking at what their play is actually doing for their kid.

LF: And one more question before you tell us what some of these great ideas are. What age group of kids are you targeting, are you talking about in this book?

LD: So we target three different age groups, and I think that’s a strong point because I think that motivation is the key to fitness, and what motivates a three-year-old or a toddler won’t necessarily of course motivate a tween child. So we break it into three different groups. So there are activities for toddlers and preschool ages, so that’s between two and four, five, you could be five years old. Then school-aged kids from five to nine, and then tweens, from 10 to 14. And the toddlers are at the beginning of the book, then it goes to the school-aged kids and then the tweens. That’s not to say that—there are also activities in here that we recommend as a family. So if a family has kids of differing age groups, we have activities that sort of everybody can do together. But that’s how we sort of break them up.

LF: Great. So let’s start, since you’re—obviously the ideas are age-driven—let’s start with that oldest group. I think many of the parents who listen to us are coming to us because of Fitsmi, which is targeted to girls, teenage girls. Now let’s talk about a couple of—with the amount of time we have, maybe two or three great ideas for how to get 10 to 14-year-olds out there working at it?

LD: Yes, the number one way that I love to get kids to exercise is something that I call—an activity that I call in the book, Your American Idol. Kids love American Idol. Tween girls love bands, they love pretending to be in a band, they love pretending to be on TV dancing. They absolutely love it. Combine that with their love of YouTube, and flip cameras, and recording themselves. It makes for such a great activity, and an active activity. So it’s actually making their own music video. They would prepare by looking at a video on TV or on YouTube, a clean one preferably, ’cause you know you have to watch as a parent of a tween, and MTV and the things that are out there, so you have to sort of monitor that. But preparing the dance moves, and actually my tween son does this with his friends. The new LMFAO video, called Party Rock, it’s the best, most fun video to dance to. And we, and his friends, and they asked me to help them, we learned probably seven moves from that video, we put it together, practiced for a good three days, three or four days, just practicing. Then we put it to music and videotaped it, and so the next couple of days we were videotaping different backgrounds. We did it outside, we did it inside, and this is not something really parents have to do with their kids. They just asked me to do it with them and I thought—I love dancing so it was fun, but it’s a great activity, especially for tweens to do, and it’s super, super active.

LF: Great idea. Girls like that. Boys like it too?

LD: Boys love it. My son, yes. And they love videotaping themselves, and actually boys and girls love to do it together.

LF: And then they upload it…

LD: And it’s actually one of the few activities you can get tween boys and girls to do together.

LF: Well, that sounds like fun. We might ask if we can get some of those videos on our site.

LD: Oh, I would love it. Yeah, my kids would love it.

LF: That would be great fun, and great fun for our Fitsmi users to do the same thing. We love that idea. What else?

A Bosu Balance Trainer

LD: I also plant items. There’s something called a Bosu. It’s a half of a ball, or you can use a trampoline, a mini-trampoline. If you plant items around your house that kids love to jump on, and readily jump on. Have you ever seen those balance balls? They’re big and you can sit on them? And you do exercises on them?

LF: Sure.

LD: Put that in a room, or put a half of a ball, or put a trampoline in a room. A tween kid just goes to them. You have to jump on them, you have to sit on them and bounce on them. So my kids actually don’t sit on couches, and they don’t sit on my chairs. I don’t even have to tell them to bounce. They actually would prefer to jump on this Bosu and bounce up and down while they watch TV, because kids are going to watch TV, let’s face it. They’re going to watch TV, so better that as they’re watching TV they’re more active. And jumping can burn up to 250 calories in an hour. So my kids will—and they don’t even realize that they’re getting tired. So after 20 or 25 minutes, they’re jumping on this thing, just because it’s fun and it’s mindless activity, while they’re watching TV.

LF: Great. Great idea, particularly understanding that kids will watch TV, and often parents have big fights over that, but here’s a way to combine something really positive with TV. How about one more for this age group?

LD: Okay, another great one, this age group really loves to be—to work with the community and donate to the community, and honestly I find that any kind of drive, whether it be a car wash, or, when we were in middle school we did something called a rocking-chair-a-thon. And we sat in rocking chairs and rocked all night for 24 hours, if you can believe it, to raise money. So they love to be involved, and they love to organize, and they love to donate and be involved in the community. So to help them organize an event that would be active. We also—you know what, we also had an eighth grade Alliance Run for the Blind, and it was to help blind kids in the area, and we had a relay. And all night we would run one lap around the town. And it was in a small town so it was easy to do that. But all night we had a relay, and I think I ended up running twenty laps in one day, but it was really fun, so not only—it was social, which was fun, and kids love to be part of a group, so we all did it together. It was active, and it also gave back to the community. So it was a total great program. So that’s a great way to get tweens active.

LF: So last question about this group. Often when the idea comes from the parent it is, by definition, a bad idea. How do you get over that with your kid and have the kid sort of take the idea on as his or her own, and not push it off because it comes from mom or dad.

LD: Right, well there are a couple of ways that you can do that. You can either 1) plant ideas. I love planting. I just put a brochure down, or mention it, because kids will listen to their parents. You don’t think that they’re listening when they’re tweens, but they’re actually listening. But they don’t want you to know that it came exactly from you. So you can plant, like during—you’re having dinner and you say, You know, I heard that there’s a great rock-a-thon going on at the church next Friday. And just let it go. And then maybe throw a rock-a-thon pamphlet out, and that is the best way to do it. And if kids are interested they’ll look at it, and they’ll pick it up and throw it out as their own idea. I actually do this with my husband; don’t tell him that. But it’s called planting, and it’s a great way to do it. The other way to do it is enlist their friends. Because even though a child won’t listen to their own parent, in the tween setting, a kid—the friend of your child, will listen to his or her parents more than his own parents. So you can actually talk to your child’s friend, and get them excited about an idea, and they will rope your own child into the activity. That works all the time.

LF: That sounds terrific.

LD: It works all the time. It’s foolproof.

LF: So just for parents who have younger kids too, we’re short on time, but very quickly, a good idea for a younger kid.

LD: Well, kids love to help. School aged kids love to help, they love to feel helpful around the house. Even younger kids love that, so whenever I’m doing chores, they actually, interestingly enough, love to do chores. So I’ll make a list of things that we need to do in order for them to feel helpful around the house, and they’ll march to doing it. Whether we’re washing the car today, or we’re cleaning the windows, here’s what we’re going to do, and the key is to—because they don’t have great—they can’t stick with one activity. They sort of need to move around—the key is to make sure that they—they don’t have great attention spans—the key is to move around in activities. So you’ll do a particular activity for ten minutes, usually ten minutes is about the max, and then move on to, say, sweeping the floors. And then move on to saying, All right, we need to really clean off the front porch today. Here’s what we’re going to do. And march to it. And play music; music is a great motivator, so when you’re doing this, play really fun, exciting music.

LF: Well, given that your kids are game to do chores, I think there’d be a lot of parents wanting to know what you’re feeding them, because, you know, the last thing they can do with their kids is get them to do chores, but love these ideas. Your book sounds terrific. We hope that parents will pick it up, check out your website if they’re in the New York area, think about those CDs and other things that have been suggested, and we thank you so very much for joining us, and we hope that we’ll talk to you some more, and we hope we’ll be able to get a bunch of your ideas up on the Fitsmi and FitsmiForMoms website. So thank you.

LD: Thank you for having me. If anyone has anymore questions, they can feel free to email me also at the email address that I provided earlier, larysa@larysadidio.com, and I’d be happy to answer all questions or help anyone in any way that I can.

LF: Terrific, terrific. Thank you so much.

LD: Thank you so much for having me. It was great, thanks.

LF: Okay, bye-bye now.