“Do you know how bad that stuff is for her?” a fellow parent asked me upon seeing Bea bust open a package of miniature Oreo Cakesters I’d been delighted to come across in the supermarket. The comment was made in a friendly way, as though maybe I really didn’t know and she could be helpful and clue me in.
“Well, it fits in her diet, and I want her to get to have some junk food like other kids,” I answered.
“You should at least give her snacks that aren’t processed,” the woman suggested.
“Her health priority is eating less, not eating healthier,” I said. And it sounded idiotic even to me.
I’m obviously no expert on natural eating, and I admit I don’t know whether certain ingredients are to be sought out or avoided. (To wit: is soy lecithin a good thing or a bad thing? How about citric acid? I know omega-3 fatty acids are really healthy, but don’t they sound like they wouldn’t be?) However, it seemed impossible to me that all these organic foods peddled to kids (and their parents) were entirely free of anything bad.
It turns out that the USDA permits dozens of non-organic ingredients in processed products labeled “organic.” Carrageenan—which has been linked to ulcers and gastrointestinal cancer—is in many popular brands of organic cottage cheese and soy milk. Brown rice syrup—which can contain high levels of arsenic—is used as a sweetener in some organic cereal bars.
I’m the last person to be holier-than-thou about food ingredients. I’m not deriding these chemicals or the products that contain them. I would happily eat an organic cereal bar (and now that I write about it, I sort of wish I were eating one right this minute), and I would feed one to my child. I’m just saying that making kids eat only organic food doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not also ingesting some questionable ingredients. And the messages we parents get about how to best nourish our kids are often perplexing and contradictory.
Ironically, I felt like a really good mom when I met Bea after school one day and gave her a 100-calorie three-pack of Hostess mini cream-filled cupcakes. As she ate them, another kid—one with no weight problem or dietary issues—saw her chomping on those little cupcakes and let out a jealous wail. A normal-weight kid who could eat whatever he wanted was jealous of Bea’s snack! Yay, me!
What struck me as hypocritical was that even parents whose day-to-day food choices for their children are very healthful do generally relent sometimes, allowing indulgent birthday treats or occasional fast-food excesses. I don’t know many parents who really refuse their children processed foods 100 percent of the time. So let us people with weight problems have our kicks where we can get them! Bea wanted so much to be “normal” that processed foods were a small price to pay to help her feel that way.
I’d get flak from the other side, too—parents who felt (as I do) that summer ice cream cones and cookie chasers to birthday party cake slices are an inalienable right of childhood, and that by putting any limitation on Bea’s consumption of those items, I was being callous. No matter how much effort I expended tailoring Bea’s weekly food plans to allow participation in classroom treats and social celebrations, there always seemed to be a parent who felt I was cutting Bea off one Twinkie short and, in doing so, curtailing her childhood joy.
There it is, plain and simple: I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. Some might have looked down on me for “letting” Bea become overweight. But then they offered their scorn when I decided to do the only thing that science and medicine agree is the best treatment, the thing that will decisively reverse her problem: that is, put her on a diet. Of course, it’s not just me and it’s not always about food. A working mom is judged negatively for letting someone else raise her kids, but a stay-at-home mom is accused of sacrificing her self-worth and providing an outdated role model for her children. Let your kids watch TV or play video games, and you’re rotting their brains. Refuse to let them do so, and you’re an oversheltering tyrant. You can’t win.
There are healthy children who eat junk food all day and are still healthy. There are also unhealthy children who eat only natural, organic fare and are, sad to say, still unhealthy. As I said earlier, some things are just genetic. Not everyone who gets lung cancer smokes, and not every smoker gets lung cancer. Since letting a child eat some processed food is not definitely going to doom him to ill health, I see no reason to systematically deprive my healthy kids of it.
But I wondered: Was defending my decisions about what she should eat worth suffering this social unease? Worth making friends feel uncomfortable? Worth making Bea the subject of a public debate? Should I have just kept my mouth shut and let Bea eat the socially appropriate food of the moment, be it the Niçoise salad, the M&Ms, the cookie, the ramen soup, the calorie-packed organic snack? If so, what effect would that have had on her willingness to accept the limits I set in the future? And what cumulative effect would those little allowances have had on her weight over time?
I wasn’t going to allow us to find out.
CHAPTER 8
“I hate this doctor, and I want to punch her in the face,” Bea declared.
We were sitting in the nutrition doctor’s waiting room. We’d been on the program for a couple of months, and I felt things were generally going well. Bea and I had been sticking closely to the regimen and had both lost about five pounds. For me, that rate of loss was unprecedentedly slow, but for Bea, it seemed right and I was proud of her progress. And for a child with no concern for his weight, David had an impressive level of dedication to the program. He would often ask if something was “healthy” before he ate it, or ask me to guide him in a choice between two foods (“Which is more healthy, penne or spaghetti?”). He sometimes took the stairs to our fourth-floor apartment instead of the elevator, and once he even climbed a small ski slope in lieu of riding the “magic carpet” conveyor, for the express purpose of pleasing our nutrition doctor.
Yet they both passionately hated these appointments. I figured it was normal, and analogous to a patient/therapist relationship. The work is difficult, so sometimes it can be hard to like the person overseeing it. We take out our frustration with the process on the doctor.
“I like her,” I replied.
“Well, I didn’t hate her at first,” Bea admitted. “But the appointments are starting to grow drearier and drearier and drearier.”
She was putting it mildly, I think. Bea’s and David’s attitudes toward our weekly appointments had disintegrated from mild intolerance to downright contempt. If Bea didn’t much like the doctor or the associate we’d met on our second visit, she—and I—were even less excited about the third member of the doctor’s team, who met with us on occasional weeks. This third woman, while friendly and enthusiastic, made the appointments she led feel like a day at school with an inept substitute teacher. The nutrition lecture we were supposed to receive never came when she was in charge. She didn’t provide concrete answers to the questions I asked about food choices or feeding strategies, instead tossing the query back into my court with a less-than-helpful, “Well, what do you think?”
When we met this third woman about a month into our visits, I could sense that Bea felt uneasy that yet another person was hearing our food-related problems, writing notes about the previous week’s triumphs and stumbling blocks, discussing her weight, seeing what the scale said when she stepped on. It was weird to try to pick up the thread of our journey with three different people on alternating weeks. To not have one person who would follow our progress, know our history, and understand the family dynamic was decidedly awkward.
Check-ins with the nutrition doctor herself were always more productive. But even with her, there was an incident one afternoon that bothered me. On the way to the appointment—as always, at four o’clock on a Friday—the kids had eaten their snacks. David had a slice of pizza. Bea had a green-light-size bag of Cheetos and a banana. Afterward, she complained that she was starving.
I knew that the scale was waiting for her and that it would either reward or disappoint our efforts
of the preceding week. Bea had, as ever, worked hard to stick to the program. There had been the daily arguments over desired snacks I refused to provide, portion sizes she deemed insufficient, or treats given out at school that she had neglected to mention in time for them to be deducted from her after-school snack. But she had been a trouper, and I knew her willingness to adhere to the program wouldn’t continue for long without the satisfaction of seeing a decrease in her weight. If she had another snack—even a piece of fruit—we were adding water weight that was going to cloud the results.
“Please, Mommy, I’m starving!” she pleaded.
We had arrived at the nutrition doctor’s office building early. I couldn’t deflect the request with the “we’re running late” argument. We had plenty of time to spare to get something to eat.
“Can’t you just wait until after the appointment?” I asked Bea. “Twenty minutes? Then I’ll get you something?”
“No. I’m starving!” she implored me.
I felt deeply torn. My child was in distress, and it was within my power to help her, but I was withholding relief because I wanted her to have a gratifying weigh-in a few minutes later. It felt heartless, but was it so ridiculous to want to get an accurate and encouraging read on her weight? There was one occasion a week on which we could gauge how we were doing and be reminded that all our hard work was leading us steadily to lower weight and better health. Giving in on a snack now meant jeopardizing our weekly affirmation that we were making progress. I saw Bea’s face as she stepped on the scale every week. I knew that what it said mattered to her. Was its readout this week important enough to ask her to hold out another half hour? To me, absolutely. To her? Obviously not.
I gave in. We popped into a deli across the street from the office. I was happy to see they had a large array of cut-up fresh fruit. David selected a container of mango. Bea opted for a large container of watermelon.
It was probably about two or three cups of watermelon—maybe twelve ounces. Which is three-quarters of a pound on the scale. It’s not fat weight, it’s water weight. But if you step onto a scale holding a box of watermelon, you’re going to weigh more than if you aren’t holding the watermelon. Putting the fruit in your stomach is just another way of carrying that weight. That’s just physics.
After Bea polished off the watermelon, the nutrition doctor came out to greet us. She first measured both kids to see if they had grown—their height was unchanged—and then put Bea on the scale.
“She just had some watermelon,” I blurted out as the numbers settled on the scale. Bea’s weight had gone up about half a pound.
“We’re going in the wrong direction,” the nutrition doctor said, not unkindly.
“I think it was the watermelon,” I noted.
We took our seats.
“So what happened this week?” the doctor asked.
Now, it’s very possible that those were the words she used to start every appointment. But this week I took it as an accusation.
“Nothing happened this week,” I snapped. “Bea’s been great. She was just really, really hungry, so she just had a giant thing of watermelon. That’s why it looks like she gained weight.”
Bea was sitting quietly in her seat, looking downcast. I couldn’t bear for her to think her efforts weren’t being acknowledged, that her dedication was being questioned.
“You know, Bea and I have been talking about how the scale isn’t always going to go down every week,” I continued. “That sometimes it will go up because of how she eats, or sometimes it will just go up for no reason, and that that’s part of the process, and she shouldn’t feel bad about it. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that?”
As the nutrition doctor explained the vagaries of body weight, I continued to interpret her every word as a response to some sort of presumed weight gain. Maybe I’m projecting here, but I felt like she was telling Bea not to worry about the fact that she had overeaten this week and gained weight. It was bound to happen. It was part of the process. From Bea’s expression, she seemed not quite chastened but definitely disappointed.
I, however, was sure she hadn’t actually gained weight.
As the appointment wound down, I asked the doctor pointblank how much weight Bea had to lose before she reached a healthy weight. I had been eager to know, of course, but had resisted asking because I knew it wasn’t a politically correct question. I’m not supposed to be focused on pounds, first of all, but rather the more obscure metric of BMI. And I felt like I was supposed to perpetuate some kind of modern charade that even though they weighed her every Friday, the scale didn’t matter—that how we felt, how our clothes fit, and how many miles we could run were the true barometers of physical health.
But I’m extremely number-focused. To me, weight was numbers: what the scale said, how many pounds I wanted to lose, how many calories I could eat. I know I’m never going to look like a supermodel. So I have to take the subjectivity out of it, just pick a number that I think is attainable and maintainable, and go for that.
As for Bea, I wasn’t trying to make her slender. That wasn’t my job. I just needed her to be healthy. So I wanted to know where that category began for her. I was concerned that, without a number as my finish line, I wouldn’t know when to stop, and I’d end up trying to make her thin instead of just not overweight. Or that I’d get tired of the process, and give up before we’d gotten to a truly healthy weight. I was fine with replacing calories with “green lights,” but the lack of a concrete, numeric goal for Bea’s weight made it difficult for me to grasp what we were in for. I wanted some kind of understanding of where we needed to end up.
The nutrition doctor explained that she doesn’t like to talk about numbers. People become too fixated on them, she said. And anyway, with kids, they’re always growing and so the goal is constantly moving. She told me that it was better to concentrate on making positive changes and not think so much about the numbers. She was absolutely right. I totally got it. I still couldn’t stand it.
“Makes sense,” I said. “I guess I just wanted a sense of how long a road we should expect this to be.”
She looked down at her chart and waited until Bea was looking away before catching my eye conspiratorially. She mouthed one word to me: “Long.”
It was a lighthearted way of communicating a difficult piece of news, and I wished at that moment that my husband were there to help provide some support and levity. When Jeff used to come to these visits with us, we’d sit in the waiting room with me grumpily deflecting the kids’ demands that we go home and never come back, and he was able to lighten the mood by cracking just the right joke. He was able to add just enough silliness to get us through with a smile. Just by his being there, the appointments felt a little bit like special occasions.
But we’d excused Jeff from these appointments after the first few weeks. I felt it was ridiculous for him to leave work early every single Friday so he could sit with us for twenty minutes in the nutrition doctor’s office. It was causing too much upheaval to his schedule, and other than comic relief, he wasn’t really contributing all that much to our time there. We’d agreed I’d take the kids on my own.
Jeff remained engaged in Bea’s progress and supportive of the plan we’d adopted, but around the same time he stopped coming to the appointments, he also stopped following the diet himself.
After we’d been on the program for a week, he had stepped on the scale at home and he was heavier than he’d been at our initial weigh-in at the nutrition doctor’s office. He was not pleased.
“It’s the fruit,” he said, blaming the program’s permitted late-night binges on grapes and oranges for the apparent weight gain.
At that time, Bea had taken off almost a pound. I didn’t want Jeff’s disappointment to throw us off course. “Give it a little more time,” I said.
“It’s the fruit,” he said definitively.
He wasn’t explicitly giving up, but he did not follow up that reproach with a plan. I felt pre
ssure to keep him on board, but I had nothing constructive to suggest. I just hoped he’d hang in there and that results would be forthcoming. But after another week or so, even though the scale did indeed start heading downward, he gave up counting his traffic lights.
Jeff and I often approach parenting as a divide-and-conquer proposition. For example, I have never once cut my children’s nails. It’s just something that he does, so I don’t even think about it. Now, surely Bea’s health and diet are more important and complicated than her nails. So it made sense that Jeff had been an integral part of acknowledging her issue and setting the family off on a path to address it. But in terms of the day-to-day management, he felt confident that if I had things under control, he didn’t need to be very involved.
I didn’t expect otherwise. But it did sometimes get problematic.
For example, Jeff had no idea how many green lights Bea was allocated at any given meal. And if he was, say, making her a pork chop, I’d have to remind him to weigh it, look up the calories in an ounce of pork, and do the math. Only then would he realize that he needed to cut the chop in half for it to be the right size for Bea.
“I don’t translate food into calories, and certainly not into ‘green lights,’ ” he explained. “It’s a pork chop. It’s protein, it’s good, it’s ‘the other white meat.’ That can’t be bad.”
But too much of a good thing could be bad. He himself had greeted our doctor’s permissiveness of fruit with much suspicion. And I couldn’t disagree with him. I still very strongly suspected that the amount one ate, more so than what one ate, was of paramount importance to weight. While the Atkins revolution had taken an impressively persuasive stab at my long-held axiom—claiming as it did that you could basically eat any caloric amount of proteins and fats as long as you eliminated carbohydrates—I was still fearful of any program that allowed unlimited consumption of anything, even fruit.
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