Selling Your Kids on Losing Weight

The benefit of being home with your kids cannot be emphasized enough, yet perhaps not unexpectedly it is the influence you can wield on your little dears’ eating and exercising habits that makes this a good way of helping them to shed extra pounds if needed. Of course, just like anything else in parenting, helping your kids to lose weight is a lot harder than you had envisioned. In part it may have been the unrealistic image of your simply exchanging potato chips with carrot sticks while your children unquestioningly accept the sudden change.

In the same vein, you most likely also forgot to calculate in the time you will spend breaking up fights among siblings, friends, and even the sullen acting out children suddenly deprived of their sugar and carb fixes may exhibit. In the end, you might find yourself fixing never-ending processions of healthy snacks which remain largely uneaten and then spend a similar amount of time cleaning up the food that dropped all over the house.

Selling your kids on losing weight in many ways is a much harder sell than pitching it to a friend or grown up family member. The children need to be on the same page with you, understand the need for losing weight, and trust you to have their best interest at heart. Depending what their ages are, this challenge must be braved in any one of many unusual ways. After all, thinking outside the box when it comes to childhood weight loss is the one surefire means of keeping your kids interested and on their toes.

Start out by telling your kids in very clear details why you need them to lose weight. They need to understand that this is for their own good and not something that they are doing for you as a personal favor. Remember that by their very nature, children tend to be selfish and also very literal. Going into detail about the future has very little impact, whereas referring to the here and now and highlighting the advantages your children will realize as they are losing the weight is much more likely to motivate the child.

Sit down as a family and decide on, set, and enforce nutritional boundaries. This should include the foresight not to purchase certain calorie laden snacks, while investing a bit more money in snacks that are healthy and likely to result in a waist line reduction. In the midst of this calorie reduction by nixing junk food in the home, remember that your kids still have the need to snacks and if they are social creatures, they might find ample opportunities in other friends’ homes.

While you do not want to embarrass them in front of their friends, you will be wise in fortifying your kids for learning how to say no to snacks and other some such temptations. Empowering the child to be in control and allowing them to vocalize their commitment to the diet is a big step in the process of getting kids to claim ownership of their weight loss, and no longer see losing weight as something that a parent has forced on them.