Do you want your kids to grow up fit and healthy, or overweight and prone to cancer, heart disease and diabetes?

What a stupid question, right?

But it's actually a useful question in motivating us grownups to get serious about being playfully fit. We have unlimited excuses for not taking care of ourselves. We can always put it off until tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, when the kids are in college, when we retire… And we comfort ourselves with adolescent fantasies of immortality, until our coworker with 2 young kids drops dead or gets cancer. Or we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we're not hurting anyone but ourselves by our unhealthy lifestyles…

Let's be honest - that kind of thinking doesn't feel very good, but it's often a satisfactory substitute for action. So how do we get "leverage" on ourselves, so those dangerous rationalizations no longer chain us to inaction?

Remember my first question? If you want healthy and fit kids, how are you going to contribute to that outcome? By eating crap and telling them to snack on carrot sticks? By encouraging them to exercise while you sit on the sofa watching ESPN? By living in a stressfully high gear and encouraging them to smell the roses and enjoy life?

If you want your children to be healthy; free from ailments like eczema, allergies, asthma and ear infections, and free from worry over eventual cancer, heart disease or stroke, then it's time to face your own responsibilities. It's a three-stage process:

1. Get healthy yourself. Exercise playfully and safely, build up your core stability and muscular strength to prevent injury and create fitness. Eat well. Gear down and breathe deep often. Unless you're doing it, your kids aren't going to listen to a word you say. Start in integrity. Also, transitioning kids from the Standard American Diet and Lifestyle will take energy and commitment. If you don't feel so hot, you'll never outlast them.

2. Make rules that support a healthy household. No junk food in the house. Limit TV and computer games to one or two hours a week. Play outside every day, unless it's dangerous outside. Be prepared for some resistance - unhealthy lifestyle habits are addictive.

3. Develop a family fun and fitness plan. Go biking and hiking and gardening and constructing and playing together. Look for and create opportunities to be wholesome together. Walk on the earth and feel the power of nature together. Take deep breaths and appreciate each other.

Wherever you are now, know that this is not a pipe dream. But it all starts with you. To misquote Gandhi, "Be the change you wish to see in your kids. "