We establish the following objectives: - Help children in losing weight and adopting a healthy lifestyle; - Reducing bullying over fat children and children with less opportunities by promoting inclusion; - Reconsidering sports as essential activity for having a long term strategy for a heathy life. We may synthetize our goal in helping children and adolescents with weight problems to achieve a positive weight and emotional balance in a positive way, gaining self-confidence and new friends. Participants in this project, by raising awareness of the need for a healthy lifestyle, changing the fast food diet with healthy traditional food and adequate water consumption. As to the expected impact of the project in the field of personal development, students will increase their awareness about the appearance, perception of the body. Promoting cultural interaction and of traditional feeding methods helped children to establish connections with the community in which they live by promoting their own culture and that of their partners. For teachers we wanted to identify ways to integrate content related to a healthy lifestyle in the taught subjects or during counseling hours.
Our school as well as our partners has been closed for several months and children couldn’t participate in sport competitions or regular training. All these increased number of children with weight problems. At the same time in families with less opportunities children have suffered and they didn’t benefit from the food they got in school. It is very important for these children to have a chance to a healthy and balanced life. All of these children are at risk of mental breakdowns. Based on the needs analyzes carried out within each school, we identified the following real common problems: -students have an increased body mass index compared to normal on the 12-14 year old target; -Students communicated during the pandemic only with 4-5 classmates; -Sports activities were reduced or absent during the pandemic, except for students living in a house with a yard; Through this project we wanted students to get in contact with partners from different cultures, but who face the same problems. Through direct interaction we established real solutions: menus, eating habits, sports activities, but also increasing self-esteem and the degree of involvement in communicating with students from their own school or partner.