The Heavy is a work on nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2013 by Dara-Lynn Weiss
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-345-54135-2
www.ballantinebooks.com
Jacket design and art: Misa Erder
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Notes
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all healthy-weight kids are alike, and every overweight child is overweight in his or her own way. What follows is my family’s story. Some names—including those of my family members—and identifying details have been changed. Conversations, events, and quotations have been reconstructed to the best of my recollection. Other people involved in the story, including my daughter, Bea, will have their own perspectives on things that likely differ from mine. This book represents my personal experience, and my particular point of view.
—Dara-Lynn Weiss
It was a picture-perfect autumn Saturday. I was walking hand in hand with my daughter, Bea, on a quiet downtown block dotted with cute boutiques and trendy restaurants. Suddenly, something in a store window stopped me dead in my tracks.
“Oh, my God,” I muttered breathlessly.
Following my gaze, Bea squeezed my hand tight. We stood still for a minute, taking in the sight before us: row upon row of pastel-hued, buttercream-frosted, expertly decorated cupcakes. Some had cute little flower appliqués. Others bore a playful smattering of sprinkles. They were beautiful.
“Can I have one?” Bea asked.
“No,” I answered quickly. A mother’s reflex, based on any number of ingrained, “good” parenting tenets: setting limits, the avoidance of sugary processed foods, and protecting her appetite for dinner among them.
“Share one?” she ventured.
Well played, Bea. With those words, she had turned a kid’s innocent request into an opportunity for mother/daughter bonding. A chance to connect over our shared love of—obsession with—the indisputably empty calories of cupcakes. Once I was cut in on the deal, I saw the value of the proposition. I grinned at her, and we giddily went inside.
We feasted our eyes on the contents of the display case. Chocolate frosted, red velvet, or classic vanilla? I didn’t even have to ask. Classic vanilla, obviously. Where cupcakes are concerned, Bea and I are invariably on the same page, and vanilla is our shared favorite. I bought one.
I took the cupcake from the woman behind the counter, and handed it down to Bea for the first bite. Her big brown eyes widened, and her lips parted in an expectant smile, revealing a prominently missing front tooth. I watched the crumbs collect on her lips as her teeth sank into the thick layer of frosting, and down through the fluffy wall of cake.
My turn: I closed my eyes for a second, savoring the flavor of the delectable treat but more so the exquisite pleasure of spending time with this delightful child. At nearly seven years old, she still thought most of my stupid jokes were funny, and the unselfconscious abandon with which she emitted her hearty laugh made me try all the harder to provoke it. At nearly seven years old, she still generously shared what was on her mind, and I never knew what amazing, hilarious, fascinating thing she might say next. At nearly seven years old, Bea was so easy to please. Why would I begrudge her this simple delight?
If passersby had looked into that cupcake shop window, they would have seen a gleeful little girl enjoying a sweet bite of childhood and a mother happily aglow in the small experience.
If they had children themselves, they might have recognized the kind of ineffable, joyful moment that makes parenting so special.
But our idyll was about to end.
CHAPTER 1
The pediatrician walked briskly into the examining room, grabbed the folder from the pocket on the door, and looked at the chart. Bea sat on the examining table in her underwear, her arms crossed over her body.
“She’s four foot four and ninety-three pounds,” the doctor read. Like all observations she’d made about Bea’s health during the previous seven years, this one was made matter-of-factly, almost breezily. But I knew what was coming.
“I need to get some help with her weight,” I said, preempting the inevitable reprobation.
“I think it’s time,” the doctor agreed.
This was a moment I’d dreaded, and now that it had arrived, my heart sank. I’d chided myself about Bea’s eating in the months leading to this annual checkup. The pediatrician and I had discussed Bea’s escalating weight at our annual appointments for half her life. A year earlier, at the pediatrician’s urging, I’d acknowledged that the problem had gone too far, and I’d promised to deal with it.
I’d tried. I’d failed miserably. In the intervening year, my little girl’s height had increased normally, while her weight had spiked a stunning twenty-three pounds.
Bea’s weight was now equivalent to someone my height (just under five feet four inches tall) weighing 175 pounds. Her blood pressure was 124 over 80, up from 100 over 68 a year before.
There was something about seeing those numbers written into Bea’s permanent health record that triggered something primal in me. My reaction was the same as if I’d been told Bea had a potentially fatal allergy, or diabetes. Her weight pattern was no longer a simple parenting hurdle; it was a medical crisis. Something was threatening Bea’s health, and I needed to protect her. I needed to figure out how to make the change happen.
If I can look back through time and pinpoint the moment I sat up straight and buckled down, it was then. I knew that I couldn’t let my own hang-ups (more on those later), my parenting shortcomings (plenty of those), my fears of screwing Bea up (always, always), my concern about other people’s reactions (ingrained, hard to ignore), and the overwhelming difficulty of the task stand in the way of helping Bea become a happy, healthy child. I didn’t want my daughter to suffer the health hazards, the emotional pain, the social stigma of being overweight. The buck had to stop there. Even if Bea was only seven years old.
Bea was born an alert, happy, beautiful little girl. She was healthy and met every milestone of physical and intellectual development heralded in the baby books on or before schedule. My only disappointment when she was a baby was that she wasn’t a bit chunkier. The first grandchild born to my parents was my niece, at that point the single fattest baby I’d ever seen. And she was scrumptious! Giant eyes with never-ending lashes blinking languidly onto tumescent cheeks. Her sausage-link arms and gargantuan thighs were a total delight. We all wanted to bite her rotund belly, which no shirt seemed able to contain, and on which she rested her chubby hands with Buddha-like calm. Then she grew into a healthy-weight child, and her infant deliciousness was just a cute little footnote. So I’ll
admit that at first I was the tiniest bit let down that Bea’s limbs didn’t wrinkle with excess adipose tissue and that her stomach was flat.
Bea had barely been around a year when her brother David was born. They were pretty easy kids. Bea in particular had a maturity and easygoing nature that made my husband, Jeff, and me suspect we were getting off easy in the parenting department. She didn’t cry much. She was a reliably good playdate. She talked in full sentences by age two, could read books at age three, and scored in the very top percentiles of every test we subjected her to for the purposes of kindergarten admission.
At home, her unabashed goofiness—often exhibited in improvised dances and high-volume singing—made her little brother laugh so hard he’d nearly choke. She was game for anything and would get excited about even mundane activities such as drugstore shopping or pushing someone’s baby in a stroller. Basically, she is a better child than I deserve, a fact my mother jokingly reminds me of constantly.
I was quick to deflect any implication from other people that our parenting had much to do with any of our children’s accomplishments. When someone asked what Jeff and I did to get Bea to sit quietly at a dinner table at age two, or for David to learn how to send emails at age three, I would assure them we hadn’t “done” anything. “They just came out this way,” I’d say.
The differences between David’s personality and temperament and Bea’s further disabused me of any notion that our nurture had much to do with how they were inclined to act. My husband and I were, after all, parenting them both the same way (or trying to), and though they were both awesome, there were marked differences.
For example, Bea would instantly learn the words and movements to a song in music class, while David would spend that time tinkering with the technology, figuring out how to work (and blast) the stereo system. Her weakness was bossiness, his was short-temperedness. They were both sensitive and loving, but her affection took the form of a generalized fondness for people, whereas his was a very focused and fiery passion. She preferred playing with boys, while his best friends were girls.
When it came to food, both were good eaters but, again, different. David had clear ideas about what he wanted. A less diplomatic way to say this: he had (has) very precise, narrow tastes in food that, while fortunately incorporating all food groups, were (are still) dauntingly specific. While Bea would happily eat whatever we fed her, David had to have one of the exact vegetables he would tolerate (broccoli, carrots, corn, or Brussels sprouts), one of the two proteins he liked (chicken or beef), and definitely lots of pasta. He would rather starve than eat something he didn’t like.
Right or wrong, early on I adopted the theory that kids’ essential natures were basically imprinted on them at birth. Sure, somewhere deep in my heart I sometimes took secret credit during proud moments, and also wondered smugly if other kids’ misbehavior—a classmate’s inability to share, a friend’s uncontrollable temper tantrum—were the results of mistakes in their upbringing. Judging someone’s parenting is all too easy.
But overall, I believed (still do) that my kids’ interests, intellectual capacities, overall health prospects, and dispositions were all in there from the start and couldn’t be significantly modified. My husband and I felt that it was our responsibility to help our kids along by constructively molding whomever they naturally were. I couldn’t expect David not to stand up during music class and blast the stereo. But when he did, did I laugh and praise him for his independent spirit? Did I gently but firmly redirect him back into the circle? Did I grab him and remove him from the class? (I chose the middle option.)
When Bea wasn’t sleeping through the night, did we let her cry it out, or did I get up and soothe her back to sleep every time she awakened? (For me it was an inconsistent combination of both.) When David refused to eat the tofu stir-fry the rest of us were enjoying, did I cook him the penne he wanted, or did I give him the choice of eating what we were having or going without dinner? (Mea culpa again: I usually wimped out and made him the pasta.)
I look back on my early new-mom worries with some amusement. Our kids eventually learned to sleep through the night (though as toddlers they were both tough to get to sleep before ten or eleven sometimes), and I trust that one day David’s taste buds will wake up. But even as I know that no one misstep will completely make or break our kids, I tend to take each new decision point seriously. Raising a child is, after all, a pretty major responsibility.
Fortunately, Jeff and I generally are of similar mind. We are crazy about Bea and David, but we try to impose limits and order. Not necessarily so well (see cooking pasta to make peace and delayed bedtimes above), but we try.
THE NOT-AT-ALL-TERRIBLE TWOS
When Bea and David started eating actual meals, I did what was expected of modern New York moms and fed my children healthful, well-balanced meals that reflected the latest knowledge of nutrition. Long gone was the USDA-approved food pyramid of the 1970s, which, to my youthful delight, rested heavily on a wide foundation of starchy carbs and included a picture of ice cream in the “dairy” category. Now our carbs have to be whole-grain, and anything with more than five ingredients or an additive your child himself can’t pronounce is suspect. You even have to stress out about what kind of water you give him—and it should be in a reusable bottle, but not a plastic one!
Breakfast was not spectacularly nutritious in our home—we ate bagels fairly often, and cereal the rest of the time. But lunch always had a protein in the form of ham or turkey, a piece of fruit, carrot sticks or cucumber slices, and some kind of healthy-seeming organic-ish snack, such as Pirate’s Booty or whole-grain pretzels. And never anything other than water to drink.
Dinners consisted of protein (meatballs, chicken cutlets, broiled fish filets), a small side dish of pasta or rice, and vegetables prepared without fat. After-dinner snacks varied from a cheese stick to crackers to a frozen fruit pop to a banana. There was no junk food in our house. At that point, my husband and I had nearly complete control over the kids’ diets, and we saw no reason to introduce overtly “bad” foods quite yet.
Parents today can be pretty sanctimonious about what they’ll feed to their children, and while I certainly cared about preparing healthful and nutritious meals for my family, in my mind I mocked the moms who were overly concerned with the organic lineage of their kids’ food. At a party celebrating Bea’s graduation from the two-year-olds program at preschool, I watched as a little girl asked her mom whether she could have an all-natural frozen fruit pop. The mother inspected the ingredient list and said no. I am not sure what the objectionable additive was, but it set a pretty high standard for what that kid was allowed to eat. I think she was permitted a clementine, and that was it. I would never have expressed my feelings to this woman—her kid’s eating was her business, as far as I was concerned—but the extent to which she was controlling it seemed absurd.
On the other hand, I also silently disdained the moms who let their kids drink soda or eat fast food. I cringed when I saw fellow mothers on the subway hand their babies a bottle full of some garish pink beverage. And as for parents who had fat kids? Well, the theory that kids are who they are from the start and “just come out that way” went out the window on that one. This was their parents’ fault. A lack of discipline or a failure to set limits was at play. These people were either actively feeding their children badly, or passively letting their children feed themselves badly. Either way, logic told me they were to blame, and they were harming their innocent children.
As Bea’s weight stayed in the healthy range—maybe even a bit below average for her height—I felt good about the food and activity choices I was making for her, and sometimes looked down on the moms of fat kids the same way I looked down on the moms of poorly behaved kids: maybe the way Bea had turned out was just luck—probably it was just luck—but maybe, just maybe they were doing something wrong, and I was doing something right.
Another thing I was sure we were doing right: Jeff and I di
d not discuss food and eating in terms of “fattening” or “calories” in front of the children, and I would recoil when anyone else did. Those words had been thrown around casually by parents—including mine—in the 1970s and 1980s, but now they felt too loaded. Those weren’t terms little kids should hear. Since she was a girl and thus, in my mind, more prone to insecurity about her body, I felt Bea needed particular protection from that kind of talk.
At lunch one day in a diner in Queens with Bubby, my grandmother, Bea was enthusiastically chowing down on a piece of my chicken. Bubby gently touched her arm to slow her down.
“Don’t eat so fast. You’ll eat too much and get fat,” Bubby said.
I was horrified. “What the hell, Grandma?” I blurted out. “She’s two years old!”
THREE YEARS OLD AND GAINING
It was during the year after Bea turned three that our little girl started to bulk up. With her increased age came additional opportunities for urban exploration and socializing, and with that, exposure to previously unseen cuisines, including junk food.
The first time I ordered Bea her own meal at a restaurant, I was pleasantly taken aback by how voraciously she ate. Fried chicken with peas and potatoes, it was. She pincer-grasped those peas and fed them into her little mouth with tremendous patience, and chewed up more of the chicken than I would have expected for someone so small.
At birthday parties, she sucked juice boxes dry, ate every morsel of the pizza and cake, and enthusiastically consumed whatever candy happened to be in her goody bag. I wasn’t bothered by it but did notice that the other little guests didn’t do the same. Every block in our neighborhood seemed to feature a cupcake shop, a smoothie joint, a pizza place, or a hot-pretzel vendor, and as we walked, Bea peppered me with entreaties for snacks. Her brother didn’t. She loved all foods, including dishes that I found inedibly spicy (chicken with hot peppers) or weird (grilled octopus). She complained constantly of being hungry. She polished off adult-size plates of food. Other kids didn’t.
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