How to help 18 year old DS lose weight

[AWalkAroundThePark]

DS is about a stone overweight. Has a tendency to eat salty, fatty stuff outside of the home and to make whatever he eats at home saltier and fattier. He's aware of the issues and prepared to take responsibilitly for his own eating habits and take more exercise.

What small things can I do to support him?

Make sure there's no junk food in the house. Encourage him to do more around the house and exercise. Offer to pay for a gym membership?

How does he make the food he eats at home fattier?

Does he cook his own food?

Has he got a bike? I used mine to get about independently. So did DH. Has he "discovered" booze? Knocking that on the head would help.

Hide the salt... Or bin it

I found team sport made a difference at that age as I had to turn up, whereas running etc was easy not to do. It's a good age to start something new as well?

Could you do some healthy cooking together? Help him find some dishes he does like, so it's something he can take into life with him.

What kind of salty, fatty stuff? Salt and fat are not necessarily causing the problem, more likely to be starchy and sweet stuff, soft drinks, cereal, overly large portions of pasta, bread, pastry....fat and starch combined is pretty lethal in terms of weight gain - what would be eat in a typical day?

He's tends to tip loads of salt onto his meal - perhaps equivalent to a heaped teaspoon onto a meal that, to me, is already seasoned - I'll have to just stop buying salt. And he'll put big lumps of butter onto peas etc.

I cook some of his food and he cooks some.

Any ideas for healthy meals as think I must be contributing to the problem

Can you describe a typical day of eating for him?

Buy him men's health mag, loads of great info in there on what to eat, nutrition and fitness etc

if it wasn't taught at school, get him to find out about healthy eating, calories in vs calories out etc from a book, not a diet-peddling website.

stop buying rubbish.

no food is healthy or unhealthy per se, but sounds like he is eating more than he burns off.

Come and have a read through the Eating Better threads in Food. We are not dieting but making healthy sustainable changes, less sugar, less processed food, mindful eating. Lots of great ideas for meals there and great supportive chat.

Hide the butter!

salt isn't fattening. butter in veg is rather unnecessary and not great.

Why not get him to log what he eats honestly on mfp or something like that.

Can I just confirm - who raised this issue that your son is overweight? Did you raise it? Or did he?

This is pretty important in terms of how you approach it. If it's him himself who have said "christ, I'm a stone overweight" then you can be more pro active in your support. But if it's you who have pointed it out, then obviously you want to avoid giving him a complex about it.

I'd say if HE has brought this up, then I would look into getting him a workout programme that he can do at home. Considering his age I would probably recommend either Insanity or P90X (both you can get on Amazon). For p90x you would also need to buy a mat, pull up bar and weights (but you can get these cheaply from sportsworld or whatever). Actually for a teenage boy I would definitely recommend P90X over Insanity.

The good thing is that the programmes have lots of different workouts on them, over a number of dvd's (all in the pack), so you aren't getting bored of the same workout over and over again. They are also incredibly effective (I used to do Insanity, which is "better" for girls as it's just cardio).

The other great points are...

1. It comes with a diet plan! So that's a good start for him - as long as he can ignore them pushing their ridiculous juicing products...

2. The best thing...if you go onto youtube and type "p90x transformations" you can actually see people who have uploaded pictures of themselves before, during and after the programme. These aren't officially sponsored videos by the company either. It can be a huge inspiration!!!

If it's you who have raised this, then check out bbc food or whatever, and try and find some healthy recipes. He might be whacking salt on everything partly because of his age, so you might want to look into things which naturally have a very strong taste - vegetable curry (SO healthy if you make yourself), home made pizza (not too bad), etc.

Try and revolve meals around vegetables if you can - for example, a vegetarian lasagne (made with canned lentils) has about a third of the fact of lasagne made with beef.

It will be much easier to approach from a "this is a healthy diet" perspective, than it would be a "you need to lose weight" one.

I just wanted to add that I don't get any sort of money or benefits for advertising those workouts, although frankly I really should considering how often I sing their praises!!!

I recommend them because of my own experiences with the workouts :)

kaykay you make some good points but I am utterly by your comment that 'just cardio is better for girls' - why??!

sleepwhenidie - yeah apologies for that, I realise it might have come across badly, which wasn't my intention!! I did use the inverted commas for a reason!

It was actually because with the insanity dvd's there is resistance training as well, but it uses your own body weight, whereas with the p90x the focus is on resistance training with less cardio.

The cardio being "better" for girls (note: girls not women!) was because of a few things:

1. It's true that women tend to focus on cardio activity as it burns more calories in the short/medium term
2. The resistance work it does also builds in cardio, so there is less "pressure" on the muscles
3. As you're using your own body weight, it is way less disheartening than trying to do resistance exercise with additional weights
4. P90X focuses on building muscle and losing weight to show it off. Whilst this is really healthy, it;s an approach that many women/girls aren't overly keen on, as they don't want to have built up muscle and want to keep some of their "curves". Insanity meanwhile works on cardiovascular fitness and toning up, which is - generally - the sort of workouts that women and girls go for.

Also, for men/boys, having the higher muscle mass (which is biology) means that whilst some of the moves in p90x are super bloody hard, they are still within the realms of possibility at the beginning. For example, they might be able to do one pull up at the beginning. However, for girls, due to lower muscle mass (again, biology), some of the moves in p90x are basically impossible unless you have already done strength training/inherited good strength through your genes.

For example, even at my absolute fittest when I was doing lots of strength and cardio training, I have never been able to do a single pull up. I just can't. Therefore it's very disheartening if you are trying to start an exercise programme!!