He has reached the point where he cannot control his cravings even though he desperately hates being fat and wants to lose weight. In order to set him up for success, you need to help him by not providing temptation. Are there classes of foods where he can control himself? Prepared foods are a particular bugbear for many. Not only are they highly palatable, but they are so quick to serve that someone with impulse control issues can be eating them in less than a minute. Having to cook something, cut something, or prepare something really slows down the snacking. That's the comparison I was planning on making as well. He has reached the point where he cannot control his cravings even though he desperately hates being fat and wants to lose weight. In order to set him up for success, you need to help him by not providing temptation. ETA: Scarlett, I'm really hoping that you don't read these posts as a series of attacks. It is absolutely nothing personal for me and I doubt for anyone else, but rather trying to come up with analogies to explain why your dss is just unable to control himself and needs the extra help at this point. It would seem like he should/could be able to "just not eat it" since it works for you. But some people are just wired differently as far as impulse control and it's probably exacerbated by not having learned those skills in childhood. I am speaking from the experience of someone who struggled with obesity during my entire adult life and was only able to succeed by changing my environment.

Not never. Just only occasionally, for a special treat, and in a single-serving container. The cost per unit really got to me, until I realized that by buying the family size bag for $3 instead of the single-serving bag for 50c, I was not really saving any money, because buying the larger bag just meant that I was going to eat $3 worth of potato chips instead of 50c.

If there is something specific that you can see that he absolutely cannot control his portion size on, you really need to not buy it. It doesn't matter whether it's due to boredom, cravings, carbs, or anything else, he needs to not have that temptation in front of him. Maybe later he can phase it back in. I would never, ever, ever have been able to lose weight, had I not completely banned items such as potato chips, cookies, and popcorn from my place. I simply cannot make myself eat a few chips and shut the bag. I will not stop until the bag is empty.

In a later post, she said BMI was above the 95th percentile and weight was off the charts -- you probably missed it because it's the first post on page 2.

Yeah, this is where I think a dietitian would be a really good idea. The dietitian should be able to help you and him come up with a plan of some way that doesn't involve counting points (as he clearly doesn't want to do that) but involves gradually shifting to a more healthy diet including reasonable food in reasonable portions -- but one that will fit into your lifestyle and not leave him continually ravenous. I am so sorry for both of you that you are going through this. :(

You know, reading these posts makes your earlier posts make so much sense to me now. So, ok. Firstly, I think the way that's appropriate to address things with a 7 year old is very different from the way it's appropriate to address things with a 15 year old. Secondly, you have a lot less control over anything than he does, and you're not going to be able to do anything without his buy-in. He's already taking food into places where he's not supposed to, and he's old enough to do this with or without your say. He needs a medical professional to talk with him, clinically and without shaming or blaming, about how his excess weight is going to affect his health in future, including but not limited to excessive wear and tear on joints and the heart. I also think sessions with a dietitian with experience in pediatric obesity would help. I don't have enough experience to say where to go next, but an experienced dietitian is going to be able to come up with a lot more ideas that he might actually follow than anything else. You might also consider counseling. But if he won't participate in nutritional or psychological counseling and just keeps buying and eating candy in his room, there really isn't going to be much that you can do.

Swimming is actually one of the least effective exercises for weight loss for this reason. Something about being in the water, I'm not sure what, but it makes you HUNGRY.

I'm really not seeing people suggesting completely not addressing it, but rather to move cautiously and kindly and making the focus on health rather than specifically on weight. If the family does regular exercise, doesn't keep sweets in the house, doesn't eat between meals, and doesn't eat a lot of highly processed food, and the child is still managing to stay overweight, it is highly unlikely that a diet will work either. At this point, it is likely that there is either something physiologically wrong, or that there are some serious eating issues that probably need to be addressed by a licensed professional.

OP, as far as personal recommendations, whole-family activities that can be enjoyed by adults and kids alike are the way to go in my opinion. It is easy to say "well x exercise is better than y" but if you joyously do y and need to be dragged to do x, which one is better? Weekend hikes are a great way to get outside if your family would find it fun.

But there are ways and ways to address it. A whole-family focus on eating healthier foods in reasonable quantities, not eating if you aren't hungry, on desserts being special treats rather than after every meal, between-meal snacks being primarily for sustenance rather than because we want sweets, movement as part of getting your heart rate up, healthier ways of dealing with emotions rather than diving into a bucket of ice cream? Sure! But a focus on weight rather than a focus on a healthy lifestyle, especially if directed at the one overweight kid, can lead to a seriously disturbed relationship with food and body image in some cases. There are a lot of people who will talk about how damaging and upsetting it was when their mother started confiscating desserts and counting their calories while they were a preteen, while their siblings were offered seconds. And it didn't lead them into being slim adults. It led them into adults who eat everything in sight because their mother's well-meant efforts were the wrong way to approach it. It's wise of OP to tread cautiously.

I have not reduced meat but I feel a lot better after reducing processed foods and massively increasing vegetables. p.s. I know your title says vegetarian, but in your post you did say vegetables, so that's why I responded. I'm also gonna add (in a funny way) that when people hear about a lot of the vegetable dishes I make, they say "Oh, you're a vegetarian?" No, that was a side dish, I just like my veggies!

The opposite? You mean they have their facilitator witness intoxicated parents verbally abusing their children and a child begging for help and they immediately report it? Oh, good. I'm glad to know that employees (probably mandated reporters) who are willing to turn a blind eye in order to make sure that an abusive parent can continue homeschooling are rare.

1) Some people call programs like singapore math "new math" because it's not how they were used to doing math. 2) Discovery can actually work reasonably well when it's got a good element of drill and is taught by a qualified and knowledgeable teacher. Unfortunately, it usually doesn't and isn't.

In addition to this, the other books by Diane Duane are some of my favorites. They really explore the Romulan and Vulcan culture. Also, The Final Reflection by John M. Ford, if you can find a copy, is a great TOS book.

Be cautious about that. For example, a really good bio prof I know uses no specific textbook because he has his own textbook that he has written, plus many web-based resources and a reference reading list that he regularly updates. A couple of my classes have no formal textbook listed because the textbook that I use is open-source, so the students can buy a copy from a print-on-demand place, print it themselves, or just use the PDF on a tablet. I really like this textbook so far and it saves my students a tremendous amount of money as even if they print their own copy it's $10.

Yeah that part is dumb and the numbers are pretty worthless although I rarely see someone who was actually good with a :( But the actual written reviews may have gems in them.

Best way but unfortunately the hardest way would be to find some people who took their prerequisites there and transferred to decent schools and ask how well they were prepared by this CC. If you know any local employer, you can also ask them about employing people who went to that CC. You can look at reviews for places like ratemyprofessor but take them with a grain of salt. Reviews such as "best professor ever" are rubbish. Reviews such as "made math so easy" can be mixed, because sometimes it's a gifted explainer and sometimes it's someone who's just making the class easy. But look for gems such as "I didn't realize how much I learned in professor Smith's precalculus class until I took calculus" or things like that. I'll try and get more later.

Sounds horrific. How can you know whether you've done it right if you never see your homework again? In some cases it definitely is a study skill set that's lacking. This is something that I can address. There are a lot of people who write on reviews that they thought they knew how to study until they got to _____. I get some "I've never worked harder but I've never learned more" on evaluations.

Depends on the CC. Some students who transfer here from specific CC's are really well-prepared and are able to do just fine in subsequent classes. Others who transfer from different CC's are ridiculously underprepared by the prerequisites they took at the CC. For example, someone who supposedly passed college algebra at a CC who cannot plot a graph such as y = mx + b or factor a quadratic such as 2x^2 - 3x - 2. It is very saddening. The CC's are now receiving the same pressure that the high schools have been, to put everyone immediately into college math and provide 'support', while still passing a reasonable percentage, with the expected results. But hey, we're getting those students through with associate's degrees! Bah.

Absolutely. Unfortunately there's no way for me to police that other than by completely flipping the classroom and making them do all their work in front of me, and those are exactly the ones who wouldn't watch the videos to successfully flip the classroom anyway. They are going to fail and there's nothing I can do. I do talk to the whole class about how using resources like that to check your work is fine and dandy, but using resources to do your work is going to set you up for failure on the tests.

The reason that I know they're not looking is because (at about this point in the semester) when they finally realize they're failing after they fail the second test, they come to see me to ask for extra credit, I ask them about the notes I've been writing on their homework and they tell me that they never looked at it. I do agree with you and I always had made the assumption that they read it later but once I started hearing from them I realized that they did not.

Yeah, pretty much everything online is stupidly bad for content-rich multi-step problems or anything where the process matters. It's like trying to assign online homework for "compute the derivative using the limit definition"

Furthermore, a lot of admins love it because it lets them "narrow the achievement gap" by being able to justify assigning a lot of passing grades to the students who really don't get it, which makes the school look a lot better on paper. Furthermore, since even the bright kids aren't learning as much, they aren't as far ahead so again they are "narrowing the achievement gap". I read an article a bit back (lost it now) where an elementary school had switched from Singapore Math to Everyday Math because even though their lower achievers were doing better with Singapore Math, their higher achievers were doing dramatically better and so their achievement gap was widening. This is going to be exacerbated in any curriculum that teaches well, because some kids will just always get it more quickly than others. So incredibly frustrated. It's like tying babies' legs together because the others in their class aren't ready to walk yet.

Even without this, the big reason I started using online for at least part of it was that what I saw, week after week, was people doing a majority of the homework problems wrong, receiving their paper back, not even looking at the grade, stuffing it in their backpack and going back to do the next week. By the time they turned it in and I had it graded and returned (my turnaround time is typically very fast), they'd forgotten or stopped caring. With the online, at least they have some idea that they're getting it wrong while they're doing it. It's why I'm using it now for most of the 'quick answer' type of questions. Unfortunately I have to teach the students I have instead of the students I wish I had.

Quite honestly, if I were only exposed to the local homeschooling group near where I am now I would be a naysayer too. I have had a lot of students come in with very poor knowledge of algebra. But it's the former homeschoolers (who seem to follow an unschooling or rather a nonschooling philosophy around here) who have students who have apparently never seen a variable. I am not kidding, I have never had students before who had no idea about what to do with something like x+3 = 5. A few of them have talked to me about how they had never done math. They just read books. They're lovely and articulate kids and they do fine in any class that isn't STEM. Even though they haven't written much in the way of papers, their reading is extensive enough that they do fine. But their math preparation is so bad that it's really hampering them. PS output is bad. Whatever they're doing is worse, as far as math goes. Also, remember that most PS teachers (especially elementary/middle school) only rarely see anything but the students for whom homeschooling has not been successful and the parents have finally given up and enrolled them. They don't see the successful ones, because those tend to homeschool all the way through unless forced into school by external considerations.