Healthy Weight Management for Children with Autism

There isn’t one strategy for helping all children with autism manage their weight. Because autism presents with varying severity and can include a whole host of different symptoms, it’s difficult to come up with a cure-all that would work across the spectrum. The strategies and advice offered by public health officials are a good place to start. Although it may not be simple to manage, you should try to make sure your child gets at least 60 minutes of activity each day and limit his or her screen time to 2 hours or less. This basic information provided by physicians and officials provides a lot of the necessary principles for helping youth cultivate a healthy lifestyle, but the key for caregivers and children with autism is learning how to manifest these principles in a way that will help the individual uniquely, even considering the specific symptoms he or she may experience.

The following are a few ideas for adapting these basic health principles specifically to a child with autism.