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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

At 11, I was overweight enough to be 'obese' and yes it bothered me quite a bit but if my parents ever asked I just said "I don't care" or "it doesn't bother me"

Yes, other kids noticed and picked on me somewhat for it too.

Has he always been somewhat overweight? If so, it's not likely he is going to outgrow it in the coming years, its more likely that he will continue to gain.

Don't try and focus on fitness because that is just going to be a fail and make him feel worse.  Being overweight means it is already harder to participate in activities and it makes you feel worse when you see others do it effortlessly and you are huffing and puffing.

Focus on diet and eating.  Just start changing the kind of food you have in the house.  Start by limiting sweets to one kind of sweet at a time in the house or per shopping trip. One bag of cookies for example.

when a bag of chips is finished, don't replace them with another bag of crackers or chips.

Look at your freezer. Is it full of convenience foods? Unfortunately the highly processed stuff isn't helpful for changing diet so aim to use up what's in the freezer and not replace most of it.

Be ok with full fat butter, cheese, yogurt, sour cream. These are just more flavorful and can make moving away from processed foods a bit easier.

Don't buy things like whole wheat bread or low fat foods. Both have a lot of sugar and additives, don't taste that great.

Use up any juice, juice boxes, soda and don't replace for a while.

Your DS will eat junk at school but that's better than eating junk at school and at home. 
[/quote]

Did you slim down 'naturally'? Would you have wanted your parents to do anything to help or make things a bit easier for you?[/quote]

PP here and no I did not slim down naturally.

I was a little overweight as a kid as well. In high school I did start dieting and doing some mild exercise on my own ( walking) and managed to lose about 15 lbs and stave off additional gain until I went to college where I promptly gained the freshman 15 about 3 times over!  I eventually got to the point where I was almost classified as morbidly obese in college so I dieted using diet meds and plans like jenny craig and took off enough weight to go back down to just obese.  In my 30's, I got into the morbidly obese range and went to a medically supervised hospital diet plan and it took a couple years but I am now finely down to just the overweight range.

What my parents could have done is what I outlined above.  My mom especially since she did the grocery shopping. She would tell me not to eat junk food and try and hide it but she refused to not buy it since my siblings wanted it. She didn't need to stop completely but if she she didn't need to buy cookies, ice cream and candy each and every week and make sure that our house never lacked those. We also ate way too much processed, frozen foods but back then I don't think people realized how those could effect diet.

I also think if I had learned about being sensitive to carbs early on I might have struggled less. [/quote]

It is just sad to see what state US food industry is in, and what is considered "healthy" food by many, and it is in fact far away from healthy food.  What is even more sad is that people don't want to hear about it and don't care. I too once thought whole wheat was ok, what a fool I was.  But, I found that people don't want to learn because it is easier to just don't think about it. My niece is obese and her mom "washed her hands off of her" in her own words! So sad.[/quote]

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