Mom, I love you but.....

I'd put this on my personal journal on my website but there's less of a chance my mother will read this here and there for I won't risk hurting her feelings. I love my mother to death. I never realized just how much until I became an adult. I look back and see that my mother made so many sacrifices for her children, it must have been so difficult for her at times yet she always made sure we had fun. And I know all three of us put her through emotional hell at one point or another.

With that said I have a concern about my mothers weight. When she was single and my stepfather became single it was like she suddenly went on a diet and dropped all her weight. Now she got skinny, I'm talking she was asked to model for Jenny Craig because of the weight she dropped. Reason she lost the weight? Motivation. She saw something she wanted, did what she needed to do to attract him, baited, and hooked him. Now her husband is a big Italian guy. So he would take her out to eat at all these nice places and they both blew up a bit. Now my stepfather has been large as far back as I can remember him.

But the thing is my mother has had one knee replacement already and could probably get another one. Her doctors have told her to lose weight as it will help her. I've tried to encourage her to exercise because she needs to build up the muscle and the strength to support that knee. But she lacks the motivation. I think she wants to lose weight but just isn't motivated enough to do it. She joined weight watchers a few weeks back but she couldn't figure out how to determine how many points each meal was. She's got short term memory loss so even after I explained it to her very easily she quickly forgot it. So I offered to go shopping with her and label everything she bought with the number of points it was so she could easily identify them. That never happened and she isn't doing that diet anymore.

Now I don't mind that my mother is big, so long as she's happy. But I'm concerned for her health and I know that if both my parents lost some weight they'd be happier. Then I have the selfish reason of when I get remarried. I never had that dance with my mom at my wedding. I kind of alouped and since I was DF'd at the time my family wasn't there. So being able to dance with my mother at my wedding is something that would be very important to me.

So I open this up, I need any suggestions to tactfully help my mother realize she needs to lose some weight. She complains her knee is killing her but she doesn't exercise. She just sits around the house watching TV and doing cross word puzzles. I've encouraged her to walk around the block with the dogs but she doesn't do that. Any ideas?