Instead, she tells kids simply to cut back on, rather than give up entirely, foods they enjoy. Or if they are eating three pieces of fried chicken, cut back to two, or one big piece. All it takes to start reducing high blood sugar in many people is a weight loss of 10 pounds. Parents also have to engage in that delicate dance of knowing when to step in and when to recognize a child's right to make her own decisions. That can be particularly difficult since most teens and near-teens are extremely impatient to exercise their independence.
Parents have much more control over what their younger children eat.
But Dietz and others believe that parents still hold a lot of dietary cards and that it's up to them, in fact, to involve the whole family in more healthful eating. Focusing on the adolescent alone is only going to make the problem worse. It's not up to the adolescent to modify the home environment, but to the family. Dietitian Loranger agrees, saying that a child's ego is more likely to remain intact if the whole family is involved. She notes that some parents come in and say the whole family can't be fed the same way because one kid is thin and one is overweight.