With almost 20% of children 6 to 11 years old categorized as overweight and 80% of overweight teenagers becoming obese adults, it’s important to find a way to reduce our children’s current weight and future obesity risk.

Surprisingly, the answer may lie in an activity that’s popular with the younger set: text messaging.

According to a study from the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill, text messaging can help children to monitor and change their eating and exercise behaviors immediately.

Usually, adults use paper diaries to track their weight, their calories consumed, and their calories burned off with exercise. It can be a very effective strategy.

But the researchers believed that children weren’t likely to use paper diaries consistently. So they modified the concept to let kids use cell phone text messaging to report their results and to receive feedback messages.

Here’s How The Study Worked…

It contained 31 families with 58 children from 5 to 13 years old and their parents. They were given educational sessions over a 3-week period to instruct them to get more exercise, reduce their time spent watching TV, and decrease their consumption of sugary beverages.

Each kid was given a pedometer to measure the steps they took everyday. They also had goals for the number of steps they took as well as the minutes of TV viewing and number of sugary drinks consumed each day.

The families were divided into 3 groups who:

1. Self-monitored by cell phone text messaging…

2. Self-monitored via a paper diary…

3. Didn’t monitor at all (the control group)…

The first 2 groups were required to answer these 3 questions everyday:

1. How many steps were recorded on your pedometer today?

2. How many sugary drinks did you consume today?

3. How many minutes of TV did you watch today?

Each family in the text messaging group was given a cell phone. They were told to send one message from the child and one from the parent each day to relay their answers to the 3 questions.

For every message sent, an immediate automatic feedback message was returned based on what the original sender said.

Here Are The Results…

Only 28% of the kids in the text messaging group left the study. But 61% of the paper diary group and 50% of the control group left the study.

In addition, the text messaging group adhered to self-monitoring by 43% versus only 19% for the paper diary group.

So it seems that if kids like to do something like text messaging and they get immediate feedback and encouragement, they’re more likely to adopt behaviors to lose weight and reduce their risk of obesity.