Anthony is fat--or at least chubby, but certainly approaching "fat".  He doesn't exercise on his own, of course, and lately he lies down a lot on his bed and watches old Disney VHS tapes since he broke the DVD player in his room.  But I have an idea to slim him down: Each of the other four of us in the family will take turns getting him to copy an exercise he or she is doing.

Anthony copies much of what I do, and he also complies with others if told to do whatever it is that they are doing.  To test the exercise idea out, I had Anthony stand opposite me behind a couch. My wife briefly objected to me putting my hand on the couch for stability, correctly noting it would lessen the intensity, but I was actually doing it for Anthony, knowing that he would mimic me and he would not be able to do the exercise otherwise on his own. Then I told him to squat down as I was doing.  He clearly is not used to doing that, and, after five or six times of him huffing as he followed my lead, he refused to do any more.  He also got a little upset when, after he sat down, I tried to get him to raise his legs from his seated position.

Going forward, we will have to arrange times for him to join each of us in our exercise, whether it be out for a brisk walk, ascending and descending stairs in rapid order, or anything else we can think of to get him moving and breathing a bit harder.  We do have to be careful though: we have already tried in the past to get him to jump on our mini trampoline, and he gets upset fairly quickly over that.  We will have to push him, but not push so much that he flies off into a rage.