When I showed up, I watched the last few minutes of class. After having found a succession of leotards too uncomfortable at the beginning of the semester, Bea had opted to wear a T-shirt and leggings to every class. As she stretched and jumped alongside a dozen normal-to-underweight girls in sleek gymnastics outfits, their images reflected in the mirror that spanned the wall of the studio, I wondered if she felt different. Was her decision to forgo a leotard truly a comfort-driven decision, or was there some element of wanting to hide her body?
My heart swelled as I watched her gamely execute her calisthenics, occasionally tripping over her feet but recovering with a big smile. As class ended, she ran over to me, and I enveloped her in a proud hug. As I helped her put on her shoes, she resumed eating the snack she’d apparently started before class: a cup of ramen noodle soup.
I know it seems like a total overreaction, but at the time I was so thrown by the sight of this cup of noodles that I almost couldn’t focus my eyes on Bea’s shoes.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“It was my snack,” Bea said, pausing from her slurping.
“You cannot eat that,” I said, quietly but sharply. “Why are you eating that?”
“Okay, okay,” she said, putting down the noodles. We stood up to leave, and I mumbled a distracted thank-you and goodbye to Bea’s friend and her babysitter.
“Sorry,” Bea said as we walked down the hallway lobby.
And then I felt totally stupid. It wasn’t Bea’s fault she had eaten some noodles her friend’s babysitter had given her. It wasn’t the babysitter’s fault that she had incorrectly surmised it was a reasonable snack. Maybe it was my fault for not having sent Bea to class with something to eat. Maybe it wasn’t anybody’s fault.
Moments before, the fact that Bea had sucked down a 300-calorie soup seemed to upend everything we’d been working for. But Bea’s sweet, totally unnecessary apology made me realize I couldn’t make her feel bad about it.
“I shouldn’t have gotten so upset,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sorry.”
We walked past a table where a couple of young students were hosting a bake sale to raise money for their gymnastics team.
“Oh,” Bea said, gesturing to the baked goods for sale. “I also had a cookie. I had a dollar in my backpack. And I asked the girls, ‘What on this table costs a dollar?’ and they said, ‘Everything is a dollar!’ So I got a cookie.”
It makes me laugh when I think about it now, but at that moment it sure didn’t seem funny. I felt defeated. The cookie bumped her snack up to a red light. She’d exceeded her snack allowance by the same amount of food she was allotted for dinner.
I didn’t make her feel bad about the cookie, but I had to account for it somehow. I felt the day starting to crumble nutritionally, and with it, the week. It was like when I was in high school and worried about blowing an exam. I rationalized my panic: that one test would affect my grade that quarter, which would affect my annual report card, which would affect my grade point average, which would affect my chances of getting into the college of my choice, which might affect my future career. These mistakes had a way of snowballing in my mind. I had to figure out how to correct our course.
So back at home, after a brief hesitation, I scraped the pasta off her dinner plate, leaving her only a small piece of chicken and vegetables to eat. I didn’t do it as a punishment—I believed she ate those noodles innocently (the cookie was another story, but I let that count as her afternoon snack). I had to be the tough one and enforce the rules. Ramen and cookie for snack equals no pasta with dinner. It was an important accounting, not just for her as the eater of the food but also for me as the server of the food.
I vowed to make an effort to be understanding about her occasional errors in judgment. I had to remember she was a kid and that I was asking for adult-size levels of maturity and responsibility from her. But I did feel it was important to teach her that she can’t go through life expecting grown-ups to make all her food decisions for her. She needed to take all she had learned about herself and food over these months and say no when it’s appropriate, or be willing to trade out something else later.
But tension could arise even when I was the one making the food choices. Because, quite simply, our family’s decision to make Cool Whip Free and Diet Coke part of our children’s diets rubbed some other parents the wrong way.
CHAPTER 7
During one of my early reconnaissance missions to the supermarket, I discovered sugar-free whipped cream, which, at only five calories for two tablespoons, seemed like a minor miracle. It turned our boring bowls of strawberries into towering parfaits for a scant ten or twenty additional calories.
When I needed something with a little more staying power—something I could send to school with Bea’s lunch so she could dip berries into it—I graduated to Cool Whip Free, which didn’t melt after being dispensed from its container. This preternatural tendency probably has something to do with the confection’s synthetic composition. I confess I found its hardiness a little spooky. But it jazzed up Bea’s lunch bag so much, enhancing the prospect of eating berries—again—while the kids sitting next to her scarfed down candy or snack bars. It wasn’t a staple of her diet; she ate just a dollop of it every couple of days. And each tablespoon of this unmeltable substance had only 7.5 calories, so I welcomed it into my home. It served a purpose.
Cool Whip Free became part of a dessert I devised in which I plopped a spoonful of the stuff into a mini phyllo cup (17.5 calories each), with a juicy blackberry, pair of blueberries, or section of strawberry on top as a pretty and colorful garnish. I called these “mini fruit tarts,” and they looked really cute and tasted pretty good. Sweets-averse David showed his typical lack of interest in them, but Jeff admitted they were decent. Most important, Bea liked them, and, perhaps absurdly, I was quite proud of them.
Late one afternoon, Bea and I decided to make a batch so that she could bring them in for a celebration they were having at school the next day. I knew there would be lots of tempting, fattening offerings available, and preferred Bea to have a lower-calorie option. We were out with Bea’s friend and her mom, and we stopped in at the grocery store to get the necessary ingredients. Bea picked up the Cool Whip Free. I couldn’t find the mini phyllo cups.
Time was ticking, and we still had to make these little tarts (admittedly quick, but time-consuming in volume enough for the class). With an inflexibility born of my intense focus on getting this task done, I couldn’t imagine coming up with a similarly diet-friendly alternative at that point.
“Okay. We have to go to the other store,” I decided. I was pretty sure they’d be in stock at the giant supermarket many blocks away.
I was trying to get Bea on board with the plan to leave her friend in order to pursue mini phyllo cups when the friend’s mom intervened.
“What is it you guys are making?” she asked. She took the Cool Whip Free from Bea’s hands and started selectively reading off the ingredients. “Water, corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oil, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavor, modified food starch, xanthan and guar gums, polysorbate 60, polysorbate 65, sorbitan monostearate, sodium hydroxide …”
“Okay, thanks,” I said, allowing a hint of my annoyance to seep through my smile. I had an hour to concoct a low-calorie snack for Bea’s entire class and didn’t appreciate the health lecture.
“Bea, why would you want to eat all these chemicals?” she asked. She was being playful, but she was definitely trying to impart a nutrition lesson that I figured she felt I had failed to teach. Maybe she was even implying that she resented my foisting these unhealthful ingredients on her child, who was Bea’s classmate and who would be present at the next day’s event where my mini fruit tarts were to be served.
I said we had to check another store for the missing ingredient. I took Bea’s hand and we left the supermarket for the judgment-free aisles of the other store, where we bought our mini phyllo cups,
Cool Whip Free, and berries in peace.
I understood where my friend was coming from. And though I was irritated that she would try to make Bea (or me) feel bad about what we were eating while knowing full well that we were on this weight-loss program, I had to remember that just a few months before, I had not been that different from her. I had made food purchasing decisions based partially on the healthfulness of the product. If I could get something organic at roughly the same price as the non-organic, I chose the former. If there was a whole-grain version of something that looked about as tasty as the more processed variety, I went with the whole grains.
No doubt, processed foods are a worse choice nutritionally than whole foods. And I am not immune to concern about the possibility of long-term health risks associated with our population’s consumption of preservatives and artificial sweeteners and coloring agents. I did not actively seek to add artificial ingredients and fat or sugar substitutes to my children’s diets. But I also didn’t shy away from them when they showed up in foods that made Bea’s journey a bit easier and more kid friendly.
No normal child can entirely avoid being exposed to junk food. It would have been unrealistic to ask Bea to follow a diet devoid of carbs and processed foods. I mean, where would we have drawn the line on “processed” anyway? White rice? Grape jelly? Canned tuna? Hummus? It’s hard to know, as an average consumer, when things really start to get ugly from an ingredients standpoint.
Based on our lifestyle, Jeff and I chose a weight-loss program that allowed Bea to eat everything in restrained amounts, because that was a way to teach her how to manage real-world eating for the long term. It would not have made sense to try to exclude the kinds of foods that a growing number of parents look down on as “bad” or “unhealthy.”
Since beginning this diet, I had found my priorities shifting. Instead of looking for whole grains and organic ingredients, I now compared calorie content, fat grams, and portion sizes. I paid some attention to fiber, but only because I knew it would keep Bea fuller longer, and possibly aid in the process of getting the food out of her body once it was digested. The 80-calorie all-fruit frozen pops I had previously bought (and continued to buy for David) seemed hulking and ignorant compared with the slender 20-calorie sugar-free Popsicles I now purchased for Bea. I wasn’t happy that the reduced calorie content also brought with it maltodextrin, aspartame, artificial flavors, red 40, yellow 6, and blue 1. But I accepted them because the snack better served the purposes of our larger goal.
In the stumbling-across-information-that-will-prove-your-own-hunch department, it was around this time that I found an article that had been published a few months earlier on CNN’s website with the headline “Twinkie Diet Helps Nutrition Professor Lose 27 Pounds.” It described the ten-week, 1,800-calorie-a-day junk food diet undertaken by Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University. He not only lost weight and body fat, his “bad” cholesterol went down, and his “good” cholesterol went up. He ate some healthful food and took vitamin supplements, but two-thirds of his calories came from snack cakes.
In the article, Haub was careful not to advocate this diet as any kind of model others should follow in the interest of health. It did, however, illustrate the importance of portion control and calorie reduction when seeking weight loss, and that fewer pounds on an overweight body will improve overall health. A spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association was quoted in the article as saying, “When you lose weight … even if it’s with packaged foods, generally you will see these markers [such as cholesterol and blood pressure] improve.”
Haub also said that he didn’t think dieters should seek a “total removal” of junk foods from their diets in favor of fruits and vegetables. “It may be healthy, but not realistic,” he said. I loved this guy in that moment. I had lived by these tenets in my own life, and had, over the long haul, maintained a healthy weight. Bea had become obese on a healthful diet. Her father struggles with his weight, even though he almost never eats highly processed foods. This article confirmed my confidence in the proposition that it’s better to lose weight by eating some junk food than to eat only healthy foods and be overweight.
Look, diet fads come and go, but there is no debate that someone who burns more calories than he takes in will lose weight. You can achieve that energy balance in any number of ways, through excluding certain food groups or increasing activity. But the bottom line is, if you want to lose weight, you’re going to have to eat less. Calories matter.
But you shouldn’t think I was completely cavalier regarding nutrients. My confidence in my choices was occasionally shaken. For example, one day I was looking up recipes I could make for Bea using my dependable Cool Whip Free, and I found a blog posting written by a seemingly un-crazy, un-sanctimonious person about how unhealthy this product was. She criticized its use of both corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup as two of the top four ingredients, and then explained that what really made her throw out the tub forever was the presence of a small amount of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which contains trans fats.
She complained that Kraft indicates on the nutrition label via an asterisk that the amount is “negligible,” and indeed, as the blogger explained via a link, if a product has less than 0.5 gram of trans fat, it can consider itself trans fat free even if it’s technically not.
Now, I can’t tell you what exactly trans fats are or what they do, but I know that everyone hates them, they’re being banned by cities all over the place, and they have some negative impact on cholesterol. So, sure, I’m on board with avoiding them. They were, in fact, one of the few things our nutrition doctor told us we should never, ever eat. Whoa, okay then—out with the Cool Whip Free!
But wait … let’s take another look at that food label. As it turns out, Cool Whip Free’s fourth ingredient is “hydrogenated vegetable oil,” not the partially hydrogenated kind the blogger cited. Awesome! Let’s put that tub back into the freezer!
Not so fast. According to the Mayo Clinic, fully hydrogenated oil doesn’t contain trans fat, but if a label says “hydrogenated vegetable oil,” as my Cool Whip Free does, it “could mean” it contains trans fat. Um, so what exactly does that mean for my light frozen whipped topping?
I still don’t know. My research did nothing but confuse me, and though I made no formal policy decision in response, I found that while I continued buying fat-free Reddi-wip whipped cream, my practice of buying Cool Whip Free ended, and with it, the era of the mini fruit tart and make-your-own fruit parfaits in Bea’s lunch bag. The incident served to remind me of how utterly perplexing and misleading nutrition information can be for the average consumer trying to make informed and nutritious choices for her family.
Let me be clear: I am not going to stand up for processed foods and advocate that they must be a part of a well-balanced diet. However, there’s no getting around the fact that they proved extremely useful in motivating Bea to stick with her program. Sugar substitutes help cut the calorie content of things my child likes to eat, so I sometimes bought foods that contained them. Bea’s health issue is not one specifically proscribing the consumption of sodium or cholesterol or lactose. Her issue requires the avoidance of excess calories. So sometimes I chose a low-calorie Snackwells cookie, with all its additives and imitation sugars, over a more wholesome but higher-calorie oatmeal-raisin alternative because, ironically, it was a better health choice for Bea.
In case you weren’t aware, that’s a wildly controversial position. Having been on both sides of the opinion spectrum regarding healthful foods versus processed foods, I completely understand the repugnance some people feel about feeding junky food to kids. There’s a reflexive judgment made about a parent with an overweight child when that child is seen eating junk food—even if that food, unbeknownst to the casual observer, has been carefully chosen for its lower calorie content and motivational properties.
On a playdate during one of those early weeks, I handed Bea her 100-calorie pack of
yogurt-covered pretzels while her friend ate a Whole Foods apple cereal bar that, no question about it, was more nutritious than Bea’s snack, but also was 40 percent more caloric.
“Does Bea want a cereal bar?” her friend’s dad asked. “I have an extra one.”
“No, thanks,” I answered, in unison with Bea’s resounding “Yes!”
“Bea, you have your snack,” I reminded her.
A snapshot of the scene creates a discomfiting picture: the heavy kid eating the processed, packaged snack, and the thin kid eating the wholesome, Whole Foods–brand snack. The mother of the overweight kid stubbornly refuses the more healthful snack, insisting on the nutritionally inferior one. What does this portrait imply to the average person witnessing it? That each parent’s chosen snack has contributed to his or her child’s weight status. That if the fat kid’s mom listened to the thin kid’s dad, the fat kid might look more like the thin kid. But only a parent of a child who struggles with the scale knows how oversimplified that is.
This sort of moment occurs constantly for us. I can’t defend nutritionally deficient low-calorie processed snacks against higher-calorie nutritious ones to anyone. I have a different gut reaction to seeing a parent give a child a packet of organic baked brown rice chips than I do to seeing one hand her kid a bag of Funyuns. I also have a different emotional response when I see an overweight kid eating a king-size Kit Kat, and when I see a thin kid eating a king-size Kit Kat. I just do. I knew there were societal judgments that went along with giving an overweight child processed snacks, because I was guilty of those judgments as well. But I had to ignore them.
Usually the parents who knew Bea and me well were the least judgmental. It was the moms I met at the playground or chatted with only occasionally at school who would pepper our discussions with sanctimony. If they overheard me refusing Bea a second serving of lunch, they’d mildly note that kids are still growing and suggest that I should let Bea eat if she was still hungry. They’d criticize the size or quality of Bea’s snack, unaware that it was the result of a great deal of thought and planning.
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