As a parent with three teenage boys and our oldest at 18, I’ve seen and experienced a lot to date. Still, the parental surprises keep coming: good, bad and indifferent. Recently our oldest son asked me to help him lose weight. I’ve tried to help him with weight loss before, but not under the circumstances or, frankly, pressure facing us today.

He’s been steadily gaining weight and it’s gotten to a point to where this is no longer wishful thinking like it was 3 years ago. Can’t say any more that he’d like to lose some weight like so many of us say when spring rolls around, he must lose some or could begin to start suffering some health consequences.

Weight is also limiting his job opportunities. He has been thinking about going into the service, but he doesn’t meet their current maximum height/weight charts. He had a meeting with a recruiter but backed that off so he could dedicate more time to getting into shape.

I’d do anything to help our children and would gladly take 50 pounds from him and figure out how to work it off myself, but that’s not within my powers. I’m not a spiritual person, but would consider being more spiritual if this would help. Right now, no ideas that are safe and sane are off the table to help reach these weight loss goals.

Start tracking calories, diet at the forefront
Last time I think a major reason we failed to stay on track is because we didn’t alter and track our diet. About every dieting plan on the planet involves keeping track of calories and food types. No excuses, we’re on it this time. It already started when we looked at the chain restaurants we like to eat at and shared back the nutritional links for our common haunts.

First thing done was getting us both set on daily tracking what we eat using TweetWhatYouEat.com and keeping track of our weight using traineo. There are a ton of different calorie trackers out there, I picked these two for us because they were new to me and have sharing functionality. This way he could view my progress and vice versa and, if he desires, get his friends online involved.

Exercise and the Wii
We’re keeping our eyes peeled for the Wii Fit and will be buying that soon. My son likes playing Wii Boxing and has been working out several times a day with that. You can burn some calories with that. We also bought him a bicycle and have made a plan to walk daily. For days when the weather sucks, we’re planning on buying a treadmill. We already have a stationary bicycle and the plan is to break that out.

I have a new deal going with him that every time there is a task that requires going anywhere (in walking or biking distance) to get on the scale and if he weighs the same or more than the last weigh-in, he has to go do the task. Yesterday that didn’t work in his favor, but today it did. This might seem a little corny, but seems to be reinforcing using the scale as an ongoing benchmark of progress.

Week #1 progress
This week so far I’ve lost 3.5 pounds and he’s lost 4 pounds. My goal is to lose 15 pounds and get down to 160 or less by my birthday in September and his is to lose about 75 pounds over the next year. That’s about 6 pounds a month or about 1-2 pounds per week on average, which from what I’ve been reading is a healthy amount of weight for an overweight person to lose. A diet where you are losing huge amounts of weight every week could have serious health consequences, so we’re taking things slow and steady, not trying for any dramatic drops.

If all goes well once I get to my goal weight, my plan is to build some more muscle strength and tone while I continue to work with him on reducing his weight. He’s got a lot harder job since he has more pounds to shed and it’s been several years since he’s been at the weight where his BMI level was normal, but I believe in him. I believe he can do it.

While I’m not planning on increasing my fatblogging frequency, I will try to pass along updates on our progress once in awhile as well as share back any tools, sites, services, etc., that help us in our journey towards shedding the pounds.

Watching and tracking what we eat plus daily activity and exercise is only the beginning.

What else can we do, or should we be planning to do, to accomplish our respective weight loss goals? If you’re reading and been successful losing weight before, especially if you have lost more than 50 pounds with some sort of (safe) plan, how did you do it?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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