I’m not a parent, and never have been. But I was once a kid–a kid with a weight problem–and I have pretty much thought about food and fat every day of my life since I was ten years old. I’ve also devoted a lot of brain space to trying to figure out how parents can help their kids lose weight—or at least, feel good about themselves no matter what their size.  Let me repeat that: To help their kids feel good about themselves no matter what their size.

After interviewing hundreds of parents and kids for my book, Teenage Waistland: A Former Fat Kid Weighs in on Living Large, Losing Weight and How Parents Can (and Can’t) Help, I came up with the following list of things you should absolutely, unequivocally, 110 percent keep in mind when trying to help your kids. Granted, this is not easy. A lot of the stuff on this list requires you take a good long hard look at your own behaviors, your own feelings about weight and food, before you can truly help your child.  I think of these as the Ten Commandments to Helping Families–and in the process, helping yourself.

1.  Exorcise (Exercise) Your Inner Demons: The most confounding challenge for parents who want to help their kids be thinner is that kids and parents are often conflicted in themselves– and with each other–about food, weight, and weight loss. Most of the parents I interviewed wrestled with weight issues their whole lives, and unwittingly passed on their problems to their kids. The struggles come in myriad shapes and forms–some are obsessed with being thin; others were fat and have devoted their life to maintaining their weight loss; some still are fat and hate themselves for it; while others have wrestled with eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia.  Learning how to help your kids is a process, and it involves honesty about your own relationship to food, weight, health, self-esteem, shame and fear. Find out what is making you stuck/wrestle with your own ambivalence, get help if you need to, so that you can move forward clearly and confidently.

2.   Beware The Charismatic Cure-All: Kids are fat for different, often complicated reasons: physical, psychological, emotional, cultural, and financial.  The path to change is complex and unique for each person. While some teens are successful with structured programs like Weight Watchers or fat camps, others can lose weight simply by switching from soda to water and skipping dessert every other night. Still others may need to make more radical changes in their diet to get where they’d like to go. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

3. Curb Thy Parental Ego: It goes like this. You do everything right, your house is a pillar of health and well being, you exercise regularly, your kid exercises regularly—and still, she’s overweight. Is she sneaking food behind your back? Probably. It’s enough to make you pull out your hair strand by strand. Or hole up with a vat of ice cream. But guess what? No longer are you the sole responsible party.  Your teen needs to decide on the “when, if, and how” questions about losing weight herself.  You can encourage and support her, but you can’t control her. Indeed, while very young children may take direction from parents without struggle or controversy, this is rarely the case with ‘tweens and teens. That’s why it’s so important to be a healthy, positive role model while they’re young. After a certain age, it’s HER decision to change, not yours– so don’t beat yourself up.

4. Fear Not the Winding Path: Many teens–heck, many PEOPLE– lose and regain weight several times before it finally “sticks.” In fact, it’s normal to fail at least a couple of times before you succeed.  The more educated you are about why most popular diets fail, the more you can avoid the dreaded “yo-yo” effect and gain some permanent weight-loss traction.  Try to use every setback as a positive learning opportunity and keep moving forward.

5. Be Open To Real Change: Good health is a whole-self deal, involving mind as well as body. Very few kids—indeed very few adults—will achieve long-lasting life change unless the change is mental and spiritual as well as physical. Just ask Oprah, who has struggled mightily with her weight, and, it seems, finally come to a place of real acceptance about her physique., (trying to thing of someone  who only achieved lasting change after the mental/spiritual revolution)

6. If You Don’t Have Anything Nice To Say…Shut Up! Fear and shame NEVER inspire change in the long run—whether they’re overt or covert, or whether they come from family or from society.  A parents’ shame about his/her kid’s fatness can actually contribute to the child remaining fat. Why? Because they feel bad and punish you–and themselves–by overeating.   Shame erodes the self-confidence, persistence, and sense of efficacy required to surmount the challenging frustrations and deprivations of weight loss.  It can also lead to unhealthy approaches to dieting  and even eating disorders.  Check out our list of things NOT to say.

8.  Love Her For Who She Is Now:  Many of the health risks of obesity are real (though some of the hysteria and many of the statistics are disputed), but disapproval of fatness for aesthetic, moral, or shame-based reasons often hides behind a ‘health’-based disguise.  Don’t let your love for her be molded by some insane beauty notion that 99.8 percent of the world does not embody.

9. Practice What You Preach: To be helpful, parents have to be open to changing themselves, and not just lecture and fret.  What you do/who you are is often far more influential than anything you say.  (Remember, teens only listen to a small percentage of what you say and their Bullshit Meter is hyper sensitive, especially around YOU!)

10. Take it Day by Day: Good health is a daily process, requiring patience, kindness, and forgiveness not only for your child, but for yourself.  Helping kids achieve good health means offering love, support, and acceptance; encouraging them to focus on doing things they enjoy rather than obsessing only on weight; and helping them change self-destructive habits of behavior and of thought inch by inch, pound by pound, day by day.

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Photo courtesy of tiennox22