Helping our teens with weight challenges?

For those following this thread for ideas, I wanted to mention that I recently bought the book "Right Weight; Right Mind," by the Harvard team that does the "Immunity To Change" research and presentations. I don't know a lot more about it, except it was recommended to me. I have way too many books in my to-read pile, but if I get through it, I will report.

In the past, I read the management book "Influencer," which is about ways of creating change. I remember that one of its main points was that to bring about change in personal challenges like addiction, it is essential to have an inside-out point of view: thinking about who you want to be, imagining yourself as who you want to be. So I have been wondering, is there anything I can do to encourage my son to imagine himself as someone who makes healthy choices? Then, if he has good info about healthy choices, that should help. (Good info is of course another challenge, as so many of us know from buying into things like the "fat free" idea).

By the way, "Influencer" was a key in my choice to have WLS--one thing the authors said was to look at pockets of methods that actually make a statistical difference. Although weight loss is the not focus of the book, the authors do mention weight loss as example of change. They did not consider WLS (they instead look at the national weight loss registry), but their way of looking at things made me recognize WLS statistics as showing a successful pocket.

I did something like this when I first started this WLS venture with my wife. For all of the pre-op insurance diet requirements, we decided to avoid the typical diet books and programs and look long term, as in what did we need to do to establish the habits we needed long after surgery - basically WLS maintenance now - and let the loss fall where it may. It wasn't perfect by the standards of any book or diet plan, but it was what we could do as a permanent change, and evolve as necessary to get there. So, very much looking where we wanted to be (funny thing, that's the same thing we get in racing school - look where you want to go, not where you are going...) Once I finally got into surgery and post op times, it allowed me to ignore a lot of the online noise ("that's too many carbs," "that's a 'maintenance' food, not a 'diet' food", "that's not on plan") and concentrate on what was needed to get to next year and the year after.

I think that this is consistent with your earlier point about being hyper-focused on weight; it seems that such more often leads to yo-yo dieting than long term weight control. If you look with a more long term health orientation, the weight tends to take care of itself. If it doesn't entirely, then it can be tackled once some of these basic dietary/lifestyle issues are under better control, and it should at least be a smaller problem.

During his summer breaks from college, a nephew of ours did some camp counseling at his old high school, for some of the kids who would be boarding there during the year. Part of his work was eating with them - typical dining hall fare - which is where he developed his mantra of "Going back for seconds? Have some more vegetables - you can have as much of this as you want!" (how often do you hear that these days?) "You can always have dessert (or another) later if you want." Kind of a compelling statement, particularly for teenagers with two hollow legs. Coming from a fit, athletic 20ish guy, it probably carried a bit more weight than from a grandmotherly dietician, but some of it probably stuck with some of them.

BTW, said nephew is now in grad school working on becoming an RD! Go figure.

With his issue of grazing, which typically involves junk and other convenience foods - the point of having healthy snacks around is a good one. An extension of that is to maybe try to work in less convenient healthy foods - it's hard to really overdo oranges if you have to peel the bloody things first, it's much easier to pour a couple pints of juice. Or nuts, if you have to shell the walnuts or peanuts to get to the nut. It slows things down and gives you something else to do with your hands other than "bag to mouth".

A further thought if he has environmentalist sensibilities, is the point that such "natural" snacks have a much lower environmental footprint than something processed and packaged.

Thank you for this really thoughtful and generous response. I appreciated especially your comments on focusing on the general long term (avoiding micro managing/hyperfocus), and similarly, on remembering a long term health orientation vs a weight focus. I also appreciated your ideas on grazing. And I just loved the insights of tapping into his other sensibilities, like caring for the environment, as a source of motivation. This boy is extremely concerned about certain things like the environment, animals, fairness and equity toward everyone, etc. I will definitely consider ways of tapping into those motivations for my entire family.

Thanks again!