Teenage healthy diet for weight loss?

[bluestarthread]

Looking for recommendations for my nearly 13 yr old daughter. She is a big build, strong (does martial arts 2/3 times a week) and nearly as tall as me (5'4"). She started putting on some weight when she was about 9 which I thought was pre-growth spurt gain. She's grown but kept the weight and is now a bit conscious of it and wants to loose some.
Apart from the obvious eat less and exercise more and cutting back on snacks, can anyone recommend a book, diet plan, tv show we can watch together to have a sensible talk and plan for helping us all as a family to eat healthier and trim ourselves up a bit?

The same happened to my dd from age 11, she always 'loved her food', but for the first time, began to really put on weight at around age 13 and tipped into the overweight category (I casually weighed her by pretending I was checking if my scales was working)

It's very hard, because at this age, there's only so much a parent can do, they spend so much time away from home/with friends meaning that a lot of the responsibility of what they eat lies with them.

Some changes I made (and she really did not like it to begin with)

Gave her smaller dinner portion, banned her having seconds (I always got around it by saying I was banning all of us from seconds, or that I wanted to keep it for the next day),
We banned takeaways completely. We very rarely get them now, maybe once every 6 months.
I insisted on a long, brisk walk every day and we went swimming at weekends.
I stopped buying sugary breakfast cereals; all I have now are porridge, weetsbix, eggs and brown toast, etc.
Bought lots of fruit, and I always say 'if you're hungry, have an apple' .
Dinner is always homemade, cooked from scratch; lean mince, tin of tomatoes, chicken & veg, etc

It's a tricky age because their bodies are going through so many changes, and you've to be so gentle with them. But at the same time, I wasn't willing to stand back and ignore it.

I should say that those changes didn't make a huge difference, she's 15 now and probably still top of the healthy bmi range/borderline overweight, but at least she didn't continue to gain, which I've no doubt would have happened if I hadn't made changes.

I wouldn't cut down on portion sizes of the 'good foods' - when you do this, their metabolism simply slows down to compensate.

What you need to cut out is the sugary foods - fizzy drinks, too much fruit juice, chocolate, sweets, etc. If she's having quite a lot of those, I expect you'd see some results pretty quickly by removing them from her diet.