[mdip]

My son is struggling with this right now and it's entirely my fault.

I've never been outside of 15 pounds what I weighed in High School and I was underweight in High School. As a man in his 40s, I'm in better shape than I was back then, lower body fat, slightly more muscle, triglycerides/LDL/HDL better[0].

I eat how a 10-year-old kid would eat if he didn't have parents. All of my breakfast foods (which I never eat in the morning) have cartoon characters on the box. Fruity/Cocoa Pebbles, Honeycomb, Cookie Crisp, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Krispies, Fruit Loops, Frosted Gluten-Wheats, (of course) Cap'n Crunch ... actually, worse -- I buy the Malt-O-Meal generic versions of each that come in the cement bags.

I can't think of the last time I drank water. I drink Coca-cola, instead. At least twice a week I make a half-gallon chocolate malt and consume the entire thing. Sometimes that's dinner. It's the only reason I own a blender. It's the reason blenders last about 2 years, tops, for me -- typically with dead motors or a shattered carafe[1]. I make the whole carafe for myself (the kids split half of one). I rarely eat Breakfast or Lunch. Dinner is something frozen and tossed in an Air Fryer or ordered. I often add a meal just before bed that consists of several bowls of one of the previously mentioned cereals.

I do none of this with any sort of planning. I get hungry, I find food, I eat it. If I'm depressed, I don't eat. If I'm busy doing something else I might forget to eat. When I'd travel solo for work, I'd go through my receipts and find out I ate twice at the airport on the way out/in, and spend an hour looking for meal receipts until I figure out that -- yes, I actually did only pay for three meals that week. Yes, one of those "meals" was an Arizona Peach Tea, half of which was left somewhere and for some reason I felt it necessary to both get and keep the receipt for the $1.00 purchase but at least the expense department will be satisfied ... if not a little surprised.

My 16-year-old son is having success with a restrictive Low Carb/No Sugar diet and I've found myself at a loss as to how to help him, but many of the things the author mentioned (short of a vacation I can't afford) have worked very well.

My observation is that the author's top two items are the most effective parts if you can do the first.

My alternative to the "vacation" for him is distraction. He's a lot like me: an indoor cat who likes computers and video games and doesn't like sports. I focused on things he really liked that were active and upgraded him -- he got a better VR kit and we upgraded the OneWheel[2]. He learned the first few days that when he gets hungry, the best thing to do is use one of those and the one that gets him out of the house is the one that works best. Though we could have taken a vacation for the cost of the upgrade, he wouldn't be putting in ten miles on it every day.

And I think that's part of it: finding something he loves to do which involves a lot of exercise. So far, that's the OneWheel GT (and I feel the same way). He uses the VR. It's about what you'd expect. The few games he enjoys aren't much exercise and the ones that are exercise focused aren't any fun. Luckily he doesn't get motion sick, but that was a pointless purchase for these purposes. And I assumed it would be: I've been through all of the previous attempts to make exercise fun with video games: Wii, every version of Kinect, various others dating back to the Nintendo floor pad with their weird Olympics game, both of which I destroyed in my youth. They usually make some form of exercise less effective while making "wanting to do that form of exercise" slightly more attractive for a brief period of time.

The optimal situation would be a game that can be played at home with low-cost equipment which "people want to play because it's fun to play" that happens to require a reasonable amount of physical exercise to use. Ideally, it'd be something that wouldn't be "more enjoyable with a more common control scheme", nor would physical strength greatly improve ones ability to master the game (so, like most video games, they're more mental strategy vs precision muscle memory) and would be multi-player. I've yet to encounter something that doesn't fall over on all of these points so badly as to make it worse than traditional exercise.

[0] I was a kid during a brief period when they advocated giving children as young as 10-years old cholesterol tests and then putting them on low-fat diets when they (generally) had "High Cholesterol".

[1] Which is only a problem if the carafe is for an ALDI Aisle of Shame $39 blender and finding a replacement is either impossible or almost as expensive. After every expensive blender I owned failed, I'd somehow end up finding a crappy one at ALDI figuring "The $200 one died quickly, might as well save the money this time."

[2] We had a Pint and we've gone through a few tires and about 9K miles on that one. When ridden hard, you come home soaked head to toe in sweat, but it's one thing that he enjoys as much as (if not more) than playing video games.

[cess11]

Sounds like you have an eating disorder and might benefit from therapy.

[mdip]

While I appreciate the advice and I've always felt my diet qualifies as an "eating disorder".

Here's the problem I have, though. I'm in my 40s and this is a circumstance of my life that I've experienced since I was about 12. When this topic comes up with family and friends, I hear "You can't eat like that, forever?" (I'm 40), "That'll catch up with you" (you've been saying that since I was 25), or "I used to be able to do that, too, when I was young." (you stopped being able to do that at 25). People of certain generations are so wired into the whole Cholesterol thing that even after I've mentioned my numbers they'll still reflex into "but, your heart!" (sometimes cutting themselves off with an "oh, I guess you're OK there, but ..." (and my HDLs and Triglycerides are fine, too)).

I have been seeing a therapist for about a decade now, and strongly recommend it to anyone. I started seeing one after a divorce over a decade ago and when that was worked out I started going about monthly despite not having a "thing going on right now that's prompting me to go", I find taking an hour a month and talking to a "disinterested third-party" about life is one of the reliable ways to get unfiltered truth. Obviously, it depends on the therapist and I've had a few that I feel like I'm paying someone to hear myself speak, but having someone who helps you see blind spots and give you honest feedback is worth the money when you find the right person. I never realized how valuable and rare that is. I had a realization a little ways into my career after I was living on my own: people will almost never tell you, directly, when something you're doing annoys, upsets or otherwise rubs them the wrong way[1]. If they do, you've been doing something so obnoxious to that person for so long that "now it's a big problem" and you may end up discovering you have damaged a relationship beyond repair without realizing it[2]. Most people won't even help a stranger out by informing them that they have a poppy-seed in their teeth out of fear the stranger will "be angry with them for noticing it." Over time, my therapist and I have gotten to the point where he has become a good source for identifying these blind spots (and is quite a bit better at delivering the news).

All of that said, about two years in the topic of my diet came up due to a large bag of candy being visible in frame during our video session. It worked out that I'd had a physical two months prior so I had my numbers handy[0] so after the initial alarm, I remember I got done explaining everything and he was staring at his camera almost like he had spaced out. I finished talking, he continued looking into the camera and after an awkward silence he said, "so .. that's it?" It's hard to get the effect writing it down because reading it, "it sounds sarcastic" ... and I got the impression the expression on my face might have been one of the "fart in church" variety. And after he quickly stumbled over an apology with a weird explanation that escapes me, he said something along the lines of: It's not any kind of eating disorder he'd ever heard of. People struggle with over-eating and varieties of conditions (anorexia, and friends) related to controlling their weight. And in a considerable number of cases the need to binge/purge or fast is something that's done in a subconscious attempt to fight an unrelated psychological trauma[3]. My "problem" is -- in a lot of ways -- the opposite. I manage my diet without any forethought or planning -- basically, subconsciously -- yet I have been within ten pounds of my weight as a teenager (which is ideal according to the flawed BMI scale but correlates properly with other medical tests). I do tend to not eat when I'm depressed or anxious, but it's not a conscious desire to control my diet -- it's, literally, "I don't feel hungry". And when that goes on too long, my body responds by making me too hungry to ignore eating. During the worst depression I've gone through I went from my heaviest to my lightest over a period of four months but it still amounted to being 10 pounds heavier than High School "before" to 10 pounds lighter and in both cases my weight was within the range of "ideal" for my height.

So, basically, trying to fix this with therapy has at least some probability of damaging my health. And fixating on what I eat needlessly adds stress to my life when "not fixating on what I eat" results in my health being fine. I would put exactly zero thought toward this problem -- for myself -- if my son weren't struggling to maintain his weight "following my lead."

[0] I always have to look them up separately to get a better explanation, the doctor usually says "your Cholesterol is fantastic, keep doing what you're doing" and moves on to the next thing. I have to ask for the numbers when they're good and there's no point in remembering them when there's nothing to fix.

[1] Except for the handful of individuals that only communicate in this manner. Most of the people I worked with in security were like this.

[2] The specific event that comes to mind was when I shared a large office with 5 other guys (two worked for a completely different division in the company). One guy, a few times a week, would get up from his desk, grab onto the shared office door and nearly knock it off of its hinges with how hard he slammed it shut. He'd then walk back to his cube a few feet away and resume work without saying a word. The first several times it happened, I thought it was an airflow situation or accident because I couldn't imagine an adult acting that way on purpose. This went on for two or three months before someone finally said "what the hell are you doing that for, dude?" It turned out that the AC chiller (we were in a datacenter) was right next to the door and was very loud in his cube. He was upset with how inconsiderate we were being leaving the door open as we came and went. What he didn't know was that we were leaving it open to be considerate because the far end of the room where three of us sat got a bit warm when the door was closed. We had cube walls setup in the shared office so the noise didn't affect us so we truly had no idea our attempt at being considerate was being received as some sort of passive-aggressive attack. Had he just said the words "could you guys close the door, at least when I'm here, because of the noise" we all would have complied (it wasn't that hot and despite the noise not being terrible in our seat, the heat wasn't as bad as the noise so we "mostly didn't care about the state of the door" we just wanted it to be in a "non-controversial state"). And once that was understood, the door remained closed. I don't read angry subtext and passive aggression well.

[3] I am not a psychologist but I had a roommate for a year who struggled with anorexia. She'd stop eating when she was stressed out and she learned that she does this out of a need "to exert control over something in her life" when she's experiencing high-anxiety. She'd experienced some trauma as a child that she felt was "the trigger" but everyone's circumstances are different.