Weight Problems and Children (continued)

Monitor Meals Outside the Home

Find out more about your school lunch program, or pack your child's lunch to include a variety of foods. Also, select healthier items when dining at restaurants.

Set a Good Example

Children are good learners, and they learn best by example. Setting a good example for your kids by eating a variety of foods and being physically active will teach your children healthy lifestyle habits that they can follow for the rest of their lives.

Additional Help

If you need to make changes to your family's eating and exercise habits, but are finding it difficult, a registered dietitian (RD) may be able to help. Your doctor may be able to refer you to an RD, or you can call the National Center for Nutrition and Dietetics of The American Dietetic Association at 800-366-1655 and ask for the name of an RD in your area.

If your efforts at home are unsuccessful in helping your child reach a healthy weight and your doctor determines that your child's health is at risk unless he or she loses weight steadily, you may want to consider a formal treatment program. To locate a weight-control program for your child, you may want to contact a local university-based medical center.

Look for the following characteristics when choosing a weight-control program for your child. The program should:

• Be staffed with a variety of health professionals. The best programs may include RDs, exercise physiologists, pediatricians or family doctors, and psychiatrists or psychologists.
• Perform a medical evaluation of the child. Before being enrolled in a program, your child's weight, growth, and health should be reviewed by a doctor. During enrollment, your child's weight, growth, and health should be monitored by a health professional at regular intervals.
• Focus on the whole family, not just the overweight child.
• Be adapted to the specific age and capabilities of the child. Programs for 4-year-olds are different from those developed for children 8 or 12 years of age in terms of degree of responsibility of the child and parents.
• Focus on behavioral changes.
• Teach the child how to select a variety of foods in appropriate portions.
• Encourage daily activity and limit sedentary activity, such as watching TV.
• Include a maintenance program and other support and referral resources to reinforce the new behaviors and to deal with underlying issues that contributed to overweight.

The overall goal of a successful treatment program should be to help the whole family focus on making healthy changes to their eating and activity habits that they will be able to maintain throughout life.

Created by the National Institute of Health. NIH Publication No. 97-4096 and NIH Word on Health, June 2002

Update Date: 10/23/2007. Updated by: Daniel Rauch, M.D., FAAP., Director, Pediatric Hospitalist Program, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY. Review provided by VeriMed Healthcare Network.