Now what?

The teen is, in my admittedly biased opinion, a pretty good looking kid. He has thick brown hair and his father's blue eyes. He's just shy of six feet and is still growing. We think he's going to end up well over six feet tall.

Unfortunately he also weighs nearly 300 pounds.

This has been a problem for years now. He'd come to see us for summer visitation with clothes that were always too small for him. By the end of the summer they'd be too big for him. We didn't make any special effort to help him lose weight, it just happened.

I don't know what things are like at his mom's house, so I can't credit the weight loss to my cooking, or all the time playing with his friends, or because we limited video games. I honestly don't know what went on at his mother's that caused this. But after two months here he'd go back to start school. The next time we saw him, usually at Thanksgiving, all the weight he'd lost over the summer was back with interest.

It was worrisome, but not really a hindrance - until last summer. A friend of the husband's offered to give the teen free flying lessons. He was very excited. This was going to give him major bragging points with his friends come autumn. Unfortunately, when he showed up for his first lesson he couldn't fit into the plane. The seat and the cockpit were just too small for him.

It was heartbreaking. It frightened me half to death.

The husband's family could be poster children for heart disease. He's the first man in three generations on both sides of his biological family to make it past 45. Reasonably fit men, out of shape men - every one of them just fell over dead one day from a heart attack. I'm convinced the only reason the husband is still alive is the years he spent in the military, exercising every day. I obsessively monitor his heart health. He can't miss a single dose of his blood pressure medication without hearing about it. I'm too frightened I'll lose him.

So here we have this kid in his early teens, with a teen's appetite for junk food and a fatal family history. It's imperative we do something, but what? While it used to be easy to encourage good eating decisions, he's pretty resistant to eating anything not high fat/high calorie anymore. (Oh, he'll eat dinner, but he complains the whole time!) Naturally he's also resistant to gentle invitations to go for a walk; it's not exactly easy for him to move around.

We finally have a chance to teach him to have a healthier lifestyle and I don't know how to do it. Weight loss isn't going to happen unless he actively participates. I can't force him to go to a doctor or avoid candy and fast food, and I can't make him get up and moving. But how do we help him want to start on the hard work of losing this weight? How do we help a "don't tell me what to do!" teenager without pushing any buttons?