Kids...

my daughter is at the other end of the spetrum. She is borderline under weight all the time. I have to try and give her extra calories, but I try and do it without her knowing as I don't want her to learn bad habbits and then find she has weight problems when she is older as she can't just eat anything. (i add milk, cream or cheese to her meals where possible)

But I think some of the things we did might work for losing weight

Use a smaller plate before you start - a little food on a big plate can make you feel that you don't have very much - with DD1 she would be put off if she thought there was too much on her plate.
I would dish up a portion and then remove half of it and keep it to one side. I would tell her I expected her to eat whatever is on her plate for the first bit. If she ate it all and still wanted more I could give it to her.
For you this could make her feel like she is having more, even though she is just having what she needs?
We have a family rule that we always stick to. We never have any chocolate before lunch. It is an occasional afternoon treat.

Or reduce her portion sizes gradually.

Cut out any snacks - its simple but can be difficult to achieve - you just have to not buy them, if they are not there they can't have them.
Have fruit available as an alternative snack
if my dd decides she is hungry an hour after eating --quite normal for her, I will first offer her a drink as kids often mistake being thirsty as hungry.
Then I offer fruit - but nothing else.

over the school holidays as she runs about and is more active then I give the treats more often, boxes of raisins or dish of grapes, orange segments or tinned fruit in juice not syrup.
I also water down fruit juice by 50% and both kids prefer it that way.

I would suggest changing things slowly one thing at a time, the fact you are here working on your life plan, would help her as well.
and then look at the best ways to get her moving more.

go for a walk together
wii or other tracking games
cycling/rollerskates
tramplinging
swimming

perhaps even talking about setting goals for distance, or time etc to earn non-food rewards - eg new game, new bike, family outing... adapt to suit your needs and circumstances.

Good luck to you both

I do not mean this to sound as harsh as it may come across, so I hope you do not take offense to this:

It is your job as her parent to purchase and provide her with healthy nutrition. This starts at the grocery store. Teaching her these healthy habits now will be what molds her for the rest of her life. I hear so many time from parents of over weight children that they feel they "must" buy the junk food for them, because that is the only foods they like, HELLO, of course they like junk food, come on who does not.

You have said that you hope that your own journey rubs off on her, well, one thing you can do is sit down with her and ask her to help you. Start teaching her about making better nutritional choices and you guys can do it together.

Now I have no idea what you feed your child or what you allow her to have, but just an fyi, juice is not as good for children as people once thought, well, unless you are actually making your own juice and drinking it right then. If you are allowing sodas, that is a bad choice for a child, not only nutrition wise, but for their teeth as well.

I hope that you are able to set some boundaries and stick to them. I know that being a parent is the hardest job in the world, but if you make these changes now, you will not have to deal with a very sad teenager, which is more heart breaking than telling a child that they can not have a little debbie snack cake or a soda.

Good luck.

I think one of the best things I have done is get an idea of how much they should be eating, and then stick to my guns around the stuff that is really going matter (starchy carb portion size etc.) Often its less than you might imagine. I quite like the fist size starchy carb portion (kids fists are pretty small), palm of hand (and thickness) of meat (as a maximum and again it looks small), and the rest vegetables for a main meal. Sweets/baking etc. in small quantities and very small portion size, so that if you do have those things fairly regularly, they are not adding heaps of extra calories every day. I am the master of tiny baking, so we have tiny cookie cutters etc. and one of my yummy (butter-laden) cocoa biscuits is only 10 calories, but adds a wee bit of a treat to a lunch box.

Getting a good grip of suitable portion size for kids is key I reckon, so wherever you can find that information, I would strongly recommend that. When I make the girls an icecream the scoop barely pokes out the top of the cone (and mine isn't much bigger) which is about 1/4 of the size that your typical 'kiddy cone' yields, and they know that a big icecream is a once a month or less thing, but that we can eat a small, home-size portion once a week or so, because we keep it a sensible size. I saw a thing on SuperNanny (in the UK) and she was saying that most parents gave their children about 3 - 4 times as much icecream in a serving as they should be, and that pretty quickly adds up if you're eating icecream more than once a month or so. Even saying that, we don't regularly have dessert, and its carefully thought about to fit in with our day. So if we've had a particularly active day, or a particularly light dinner for some reason, then we might finish with a small icecream, but 80% of the time, our main dinner is sufficient and we don't need anything afterwards.

The other thing I remind myself is that kids eat for some of the same (non-hunger) reasons we do; boredom, tired etc. Often, when my girls are really tired they get to the end of dinner and day "I'm still hungry," so I usually say "Have a glass of water, wait 20 minutes and see how you feel then, because sometimes your body confuses tired or thirsty with hungry." I don't think they have ever come back after twenty minutes hungry. Once they get busy, and give the food time to go down they find they are actually full.

You talk about breaking that cycle of Mum struggling and carrying on down through the generations and that is exactly where I'm at too! We talk about being fit and healthy, and we talk a little bit about maintaining a healthy weight (but not directed at anyone in the family or anyone we know), just as in "This is one of the things that help us to stay fit and healthy, along with regular exercise, sufficient sleep and a healthy, varied diet."