Sounds like your mothers is behaving like a typical parent. Most parents would like to see their children eat only healthy foods, get sufficient amounts of exercise, and drag them to the doctor at the slightest symptom of a cold. Children’s wellbeing is actually an effective emotional appeal that makes many advertisements successful and causes parents to spend x-amounts of money on foods fortified with a multitude of vitamins and other nutritional gimmicks that promise to keep their offspring well nourished. Parents also go into debt to finance their children’s dance, karate, or hockey lessons to allow them to stay physically fit. And don’t forget about the piles of doctor bills stacking up on the kitchen counter that include hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of coinsurance amounts needing to be paid for doctor visits that helped ensure the continued health of a beloved child. In short, a parent’s main task in life is to ensure her child’s wellbeing even if it means neglecting or not paying as much attention to her own. Before talking to your mother, you should consider her situation. What unhealthy habits in particular does she have? Is she not eating healthy or overeating? Is she not getting enough exercise? Does she have health ailments that require professional medical attention but she chooses not to have checked out or treated? After you have determined your mother’s needs, take the next step and make her aware of these, without sounding judgmental or critical. Ask her if she has noticed that while she was doing an excellent job ensuring everybody else’s wellbeing she was forgetting about her own. She may not even be aware that she is doing so unless somebody points this out to her. Next, let her know how important she is to you and how much you would like for her to change some of her current health habits. Give her examples on how she helps your family stay healthy and ask her to let the family apply some of these methods on her as well. For example you may say “Do you know how you always feed our kids fresh apples so they stay healthy? Well, what if every time you hand the kids an apple they can hand you an apple back and we’ll all eat fresh fruit at that time?” Use similar strategies that would allow your mother to become involved in a healthy lifestyle that can benefit the entire family. Most importantly, don’t take “no” for an answer. It will likely be a bit of a challenge to have your mother change habits that she probably has kept up for the majority of her life, but it’s definitely worth a try. If she resists, you can try to sneak in a few healthy habits every now and then. For instance, if she is not eating healthy, insist on handling dinner a few days out of the week and sneak in some healthy ingredients and leave out the less nutritious. If she’s not getting enough exercise, take her out on a shopping trip and take a stroll through the mall or a local shopping center. Walking is a great way to stay fit after all. Overall, there are little things you can do for and with your mother to help her stick to healthy habits. All you have to do is figure out which areas of her health you need to pay closest attention to.