Does Your Child WANT To Lose Weight?

If your child is a pre-adolescent or teenager, he or she must make a strong commitment to lose weight in order to succeed. Children of this age simply have too much control of their lives outside of the home and can reverse any approach that you may take to encourage them to lose weight. If your child is working with you, not against you, you can create a successful effort at weight control.

An important method to help your child make a clear decision to lose weight is known as the “Decision Balance Sheet.” Research has shown that making clear decisions about difficult problems in life improves motivation and increases chances of success. Completing the Decision Balance Sheet includes several steps:

Step 1. Have your child complete the "Decision Balance Sheet," (download from the column to the right). You can take notes and write in items for your child or your child can take notes and the two of you can generate the ideas for both the good things and the bad things about trying to reach the goal of weight loss.

Step 2. Compare your Decision Balance Sheet to the Sample Weight Loss Balance Sheet (download from right column).

Step 3. Refine your Decision Balance Sheet based on the example by adding additional items or modifying the way you expressed certain of the items.

Step 4. Circle the items that particularly important on both sides of the ledger.

Step 5. Attempt to refute or minimize the items on the “bad side.” For example, in the example presented above, the third item is, “Others might laugh at me for dieting.” You can talk this over with your teenager and make it clear that no one really has to know. If someone questions your son or daughter as they change the way they order food, your son or daughter could talk about trying to eat healthier and get stronger.

Step 6. Encourage your child to post this list somewhere, like the inside of a closet door, as a reminder of the motivating forces behind this effort to change lifestyle.

From Treating Childhood and Adolescent Obesity by William G. Johnson, Daniel S. Kirschenbaum, and Peter M. Stalonas