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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have been struggling with this too. My eldest, now almost 14, started getting heavier around age 7/8. My side of the family is quite slim, although I struggled with being heavy as a tween thanks to a medical condition and then developed anorexia as a teen. Now I try very hard to have a healthy relationship with food - and I LOVE food - but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I think about my weight/food intake every single day. Mostly I just don’t weigh myself, I move my body every day a reasonable amount and I don’t overeat. 
My daughter is now a teen and what I had thought was typical pre-teen chubbiness is now definitely an overweight kid. She’s not obese and never has been close but she is heavy for her height. My husband’s family is almost all overweight so I do think there is a genetic predisposition towards heaviness. My daughter is generally a good eater, and probably eats the least of my 3 kids (the younger 2 are both quite slim, my son is borderline too skinny) but she does like sweets and I am fearful of being overly restrictive because of my own history with eating disorder. We eat healthily as a family over 80% of the time but I can’t police what she eats at school or after school now that she’s old enough to go out with her friends. I do talk with her a lot about the hidden sugar in Starbucks and bubble tea and that kind of thing and she only has sugary drinks about once a week. She’s active and walks a ton (we live in the city) and dances multiple times a week. She is somewhat unhappy about her size but doesn’t seem overly motivated to do anything about it and again I don’t want to push her into an eating disorder. I’m encouraging her to do more exercise in the form of “working out” because it’s important for her health but beyond that I don’t really know what to do. She’s never going to be a thin person but she can still be healthy. She just surpassed me in height at a bit over 5’7 and I think she weights about 160 which makes her just in the overweight category for bmi (which I do not think is the best tool for measuring health). But she’s in the middle of her growth spurt, 6 months ago she was probably 5’3 and weighed the same. [/quote]

You sound like you’re doing a great job!  I think it’s important to get kids used to moving and getting exercise outside of organized sports (eg walking/biking to get places, working out or going on runs or swimming as a family, stuff like that) because it’s really easy to stop doing organized sports as a young adult and that can mess up a previously healthy diet/exercise balance.  This happened to me when I was in college and then again after having kids, both things which distrusted a previously very active life.[/quote]

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