I suspect that some of you who have purchased this book are jumping right to this chapter for answers. How do I get a five-year-old to eat vegetables—any vegetables? How do I get a hostile fifteen-year-old to want to come on a weekend family hike? What about all the time my kids spend away from home—how can I control those hours?

The Family Is a Team. I continue to emphasize the team concept because when you diet or try to make a major change in habits, solitude can be a stumbling block along the way to long-term success. You and your family need an environment that involves everybody working toward the same goals. Kids and teens especially need this support.

Mealtime Is Family Time. Eating meals together allows the family to unite at the end of the day and share with each other—so good for mental health and self-esteem. Kids who eat with their families tend to get better grades, gain less weight, and are less likely to value peer group over family opinion. So when you begin to adopt the habit of eating together as a family on a regular basis, it may even overshadow poor food choices. The very act of coming together has profound health benefits. Research has shown that:

Let’s Negotiate. Negotiations are important with youngsters and teens because when it comes to food and habits that are already ingrained, you—the parent—will need to look for changes that may not be black and white. You need to pick and choose battles, decide what is really an important behavior change milestone, and what habits or behaviors can be given a pass. You’ll need to negotiate new tastes, new meals, and new behaviors creatively—don’t just force issues. Be willing to talk it through. “Let’s make a deal” may become part of your daily vernacular.

No Means No. The “No” word is really hard for most parents, but it is crucial to the HFL program. Ideally, you will want to determine in advance which rules (and there shouldn’t be too many) are absolutes and which are up for negotiation. Most parents also don’t realize that there are many, many ways of saying No. You silently say No when you don’t bring certain foods into your pantry and fridge; you also say No when you are active and not sitting in front of the TV; you clearly say No by pushing the bread basket aside in a restaurant—but especially when you hand it back to the waiter to remove the temptation to graze on it mindlessly.

Mistakes and parenthood seem to go together—we all make them and we hope our kids survive! But let me make the HFL program easier for you by outlining some common mistakes so you can avoid them as you help your kids create better nutrition and activity habits:

Diet-obsessed parents, moms in particular, can create a rigid environment that backfires and actually causes their children to hide eating, hoard food, and ultimately gain weight. A mother who constantly berates her child or who condemns her own personal body image is not practicing HFL principles; she is modeling dangerous behaviors that often lead to serious weight and behavior issues in their kids. Studies from the American Dietetic Association and Harvard Medical School reveal that girls who observe their mothers dieting frequently are likely to be acutely aware of their weight and may get a disordered message about the need to be thin. These messages can backfire and lead to out-of-control eating, overeating, hoarding, and other behaviors intended to defy the healthy principles their mothers are espousing. Or they can result in the need to constantly strive to lose weight, like Mom is trying to do. Parents, especially mothers, need to understand that even the youngest children receive body image messages from their parents’ direct behaviors. Even though we want our kids to be of normal weight and healthy, a mother who is too rigid can actually create an environment that leads to overweight children. Lead by example—sit down with the kids to eat a healthy and balanced breakfast, eat healthy snacks with them, take a walk with them—it can be one of the most important life (and HFL) lessons a parent can model to a child.

Ask a parent why Dylan has a bag of Cheetos^® and a fruit drink in his hand as he goes off in carpool in the afternoon, and you’ll hear something like: “I just didn’t have time to get anything else on the run and he has to eat something.” This isn’t a time problem—it’s a priority problem. If one of our primary values is not making sure our kids have healthy food most of the time, then we are not meeting one of our core responsibilities as parents: the safety of our children. The consequences of not learning the difference between a red and a green traffic light are easy to grasp—you could cross the road at the wrong time and be struck by a car. The consequences of not learning the difference between Yes (green light) Foods and No (red light) Foods are more subtle because cholesterol accumulation and elevated blood sugar levels are “hidden.”

It’s important to note that one of the important failures of the whole nutrition regulatory picture may be the inaction of your pediatrician or family doctor. Many physicians are still unwilling or unable to engage in discussions with parents about lifestyle choices, excess weight, and the health impact they have, especially if a) the parents themselves are overweight or appear sensitive to these issues being discussed, b) the parents are unwilling to dialogue about their child’s weight issues, c) they feel it will cause parents or the child pain or humiliation, or d) they feel the family will leave the practice.

Your children’s TV habits affect them in a variety of ways. If they are watching TV, they’re not moving, so they are missing opportunities to burn off calories. If they are watching TV while eating, they are not engaged with their food and may overeat because they are not conscious of how much they are eating and subsequent satiation. Also, advertisements are designed with your child in mind. Your children will clamor to buy fast food that comes with a toy, to buy cereal that has their favorite cartoon figure on it, to buy the luscious high-sugar, high-fat food they can almost taste through the screen. They’ll want the foods that come in the pretty packages, the ones that have mail-away offers, the ones their favorite celebrities are touting.

Earlier in the book, I mentioned TOFIs—people who are “fat on the inside,” meaning their fat deposits are accumulating around vital organs. Kids can certainly fall into this group and appear quite slim to the naked eye. But they may be developing fatty plaque in their arteries, or mild hypertension, or the beginning of insulin resistance. These problems would typically remain undetected unless your doctor specifically tested for them or there was a catastrophic health event.

Getting your kids moving is a big part of creating an HFL lifestyle. Kids need a minimum of ninety minutes of high-energy movement daily. That can mean disciplined exercise plus fun activities plus anything else you can think of to keep them in motion and not sitting: helping with housework, washing the car, mowing the lawn, walking to and from school, choosing the stairs rather than elevators or escalators at the mall. I think every child should be on a sports team or involved in a discipline like karate for the exercise and self-esteem benefits they offer. Teams are a good way to get them used to making exercise part of their lives.

Asking questions is another great technique for engaging with kids, both for parents and physicians. Examples include:

You need to understand what your kids face when they leave home every day, especially older teens, who have easy access to outside food. Unless the food program at their school has undergone a dramatic shift, most school lunch programs offer high-fat, processed foods in large portions with high-fat dressings, chips, and juices on the side. Kids are moving less in school, so unless they are on a sports team, they are not burning calories during school hours. They have access to fast food and convenience stores and all the other kids are eating this food, so your kids will be anomalies if they decide to follow HFL guidelines outside the home. They’ll be watching their friends downing high-fat/high-sugar blended drinks, sugary sodas, doughnuts, burgers, fries, chips, and other No Foods daily.

Pediatricians know that babies initially self-regulate when it comes to appetite and eating. You cannot get them to eat another mouthful if they are full—they will spit out the food. But in their second year of life, toddlers begin to respond to cues other than hunger and fullness. Social cues begin to come in to play. If Mom is giving me more and it tastes really good, well then, I’ll have more. If everyone else is taking seconds, I want to be like them. Because the huge growth spurts that a child has experienced will slow down a bit at this age, anything that messes with the innate hunger/fullness cues can lead to abnormal weight gain. Toddlers actually need fewer calories per kilogram of body weight than infants, but from the way most American parents feed their kids and agonize over so-called picky eaters, it’s clear they don’t know that.

As a parent, you can use the information from this chapter to help you approach the subject directly with your child or to enlist the help of a doctor or health professional. Remember that you, as the parent, want to help them out, not single them out. If they are not ready, all you can do is continue to try to involve them in the HFL program and model the behaviors you want from them.

I asked you a question at the beginning of the book: are you brave enough to face reality, abandon denial, and embrace the fact that your family is not in a healthy zone?