The Heavy

by Dara-Lynn Weiss

  If my child were diabetic, I wouldn’t expect Department of Education food to adapt to his needs. But if a group preparing food for my child’s school came in and told of the growing number of diabetic children in New York City schools and said they were there to serve that population, I’d be thrilled, and then want to see documentation of the actual sugar content of their meals. By the same token, if an organization is claiming to be fighting obesity, it seemed fair to ask them to back up that statement, not only with facts showing how bad things are, which are all too easy to come by, but also with data showing how they’re addressing the problem.

  The woman couldn’t provide nutrition information for the food or tell me how to find it. Her reaction seemed to indicate that no one had ever asked this question before. She said she’d look into it. I never heard anything about it again.

  With that one query, I outed myself to many total strangers in my community as the mother of an obese child. I felt it gave me special accreditation to speak on the topic. Like a black person opining about affirmative action or a lesbian speaking out about gay marriage. I was in it. My opinion should matter! So I became the mom with an agenda, an issue that was so specific to her child that discussing it seemed like a waste of everyone else’s time. And I learned how little I mattered.

  At Bea’s school, healthy food offerings weren’t limited to lunchtime. I started receiving emails explaining that chefs would be working with the kids to create healthful meals during class time. There was a day when they were going to make flatbread pizza, another when they’d cook vegetarian chili. Of course, the emails assured me, there would be no nut products, so nut-allergic kids could safely participate.

  Parents of nut-allergic kids have a tremendous and stressful cross to bear, and I do not begrudge them any of the cautions they are afforded. A severely allergic child can indeed die from a nut. Many schools, including David’s, do not make special accommodations for kids with nut allergies. Most restaurants, bakeries, food carts, and concession stands don’t, either. It’s up to the parents to protect their children as best they can when they aren’t able to be there when the child is eating.

  But there are a lot of other kids dealing with complicated dietary restrictions—kids with hypertension, vegetarians, kids who eat halal or kosher food, those who are gluten or lactose intolerant, and the overweight, to name just a few—whose parents also need to exercise vigilance to safeguard their children when they’re inside school walls. Of course, an obese child’s life is not immediately threatened by the presence of fattening, caloric food. However, obesity brings with it very real health problems—including mortality.

  After receiving a few of the announcements about the in-class cooking series from the director of Bea’s school, I replied to one of her emails. I asked her if the school could provide nutrition information for whatever it was the kids were making. I mentioned that it would also be helpful to know how many calories were in the new lunches served in the cafeteria, since this information had not been made available. I explained that there were many special days in which kids were invited to sample new menu items, and that I always had to ask Bea to sit out these occasions and stick to her bagged lunch from home. If I knew what was in the meals, I could maybe let her try them, like other kids could.

  The director wrote back quickly. She assured me that she had forwarded my inquiry to the correct person, and an answer would be forthcoming.

  That was the last I heard about it. So I tried a different tactic. I wrote to one of the parents on the committee overhauling the school food and nutrition programs. She was very nice and immediately responsive. She felt that the information I was seeking was probably of interest to many other parents, too, and she wrote to someone within the hierarchy of the healthy lunch program, seeking answers. No information came back.

  Making my way through the bureaucracy of the school food system, I followed up directly with people from the organization coming into the schools to make the food. They said that nutrition information for the school lunches they prepared from the DOE’s SchoolFood ingredients had to come from the SchoolFood program, and the DOE was unwilling or unable to provide it.

  After several months and a dozen emails, I was finally deterred. I couldn’t identify anyone who was responsible for providing nutritional information. So I gave up on working the system and took matters into my own hands, looking up nutrition information for everything on their menu using online calorie databases. Comparing those results with the original DOE’s SchoolFood menu revealed that while the new program’s food is way more health-conscious (less frying, more whole grains, etc.), it provides no caloric improvement at all over the usual public school fare.

  Take this tempting offering: “Chicken Sabroso, Spanish rice, baked ripe plantains, black bean and corn salad, salad bar, and assorted milk.” First of all, we need to contend with what “Chicken Sabroso” really is. I love Mexican food and live in a culinary melting pot, and I’ve never heard of it. I trust it’s delicious and nutritious, but I don’t know what’s in it, so I’m unable to guess at the calories.

  Let’s be generous and assume it’s three ounces of totally plain grilled chicken. Not very sabroso, I know. Let’s also assume that each meal includes a quarter cup of rice, a quarter of a baked plantain, and three ounces of black bean and corn salad. Tasty and healthful, and a definite nutritional improvement over regular school lunch. But it’s over 400 calories, excluding milk and salad bar and any other extras.

  Another day’s offering was Rachael Ray’s Yum-O Cheesy Mac & Trees, which banks over 500 calories per serving (again, information I have only because I found the recipe somewhere else online and added up each ingredient’s calories). All the new-menu lunches I researched, from black bean and cheddar quesadillas to ham and cheese wraps, clock in at the 400- to 500-calorie range.

  I know, I know—calories are not the be-all and end-all of healthy eating. But calorie reduction was at the core of the system we’d adopted to help Bea lose weight. And neither regular school lunches nor their healthful alternatives fit the bill.

  I’m really okay with letting school lunch be something only normal-weight kids can eat. I’d just prefer obese kids to be left out of the justification for nutrition overhauls that don’t necessarily reduce calories. Is it a worthy goal to offer more healthful lunches to healthy-weight kids? Absolutely. Is it a solution to childhood obesity? Not yet.

  I had given it my best shot and just couldn’t see a way for Bea to partake in school lunch. Which is not to say another parent in my position couldn’t have approached the issue more effectively. I could have volunteered my time to spearhead a low-calorie lunch initiative. Or I could have worked closely with Bea to prepare her to make the very limited and specific choices that would have enabled her to eat from the school’s lunch offerings every day. But those weren’t the right choices for us. So I made her lunch every day. And she liked it.

  CHAPTER 13

  For overweight kids, the world is awash with temptations and threats. As Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention opined, “If you go with the flow in America today, you will end up overweight or obese, as two thirds of Americans do.” Even if Bea avoided school lunch, she wasn’t out of the woods. More challenges awaited.

  At 9:30 a.m., a scant hour after they’ve arrived at school, the kids in Bea’s class are trotted down to the cafeteria to eat the snacks they’ve all brought from home.

  When we’d started the program, Bea got a green-light food as her morning snack. Along with a piece of fruit, I’d throw in a 100-calorie snack bag, or maybe some hummus and carrots. When I decided I had to cut back on the number of junky 100-calorie packs I was giving her every day, I split one serving between lunch and snack, instead of giving her a full one for each. Now I felt I needed to take it a step further.

  I know that as a person loses weight, her newly smaller body requires fewer calories to maintain its size, so calories need to be redu
ced for weight loss to continue. I had expected that, as time went on, I might have to adjust Bea’s food intake downward. Bea was losing less than half of the doctor-approved half pound per week. When we’d begun, the nutrition doctor had said that if weight loss stalled, we would reduce her daily calories. I felt like I had room to make some cuts. So I shifted her morning snack to be fruit only.

  “Why was there only fruit in my snack today?” she asked the first day it happened.

  I wondered how much to tell her about my seemingly whimsical decision. Should the snack just disappear “because Mommy said so,” or should I explain the physical and metabolic changes she was experiencing and describe their impact on her rate of weight loss?

  “I think fruit is a good snack by itself,” I said. “This way, you can have a little treat as your afternoon snack.”

  This was a specious argument, because she had eaten a treat as her afternoon snack from day one, but for whatever reason, she didn’t push back on it.

  Part of why I felt confident unilaterally cutting out calories is that I felt like these missed treats were constantly being made up for in unexpected ways. On any given week of the thirty-six she’s in school each year, one of Bea’s twenty-four classmates was probably celebrating a birthday, which means it’s cupcake time. The year after we started this regimen, Bea’s teachers made the incredibly great decision to group kids’ in-class birthday celebrations together. All kids in her grade with September birthdays would be feted on the same day, with one treat, one class interruption, and one singing of “Happy Birthday.” It’s a great idea. It saves time, parental inconvenience and expense, and thousands of calories every year. I was especially happy I hadn’t had to be the one to suggest it or lobby for its adoption.

  While I’d hoped the policy applied to the whole school, it unfortunately did not. When Bea reached fourth grade, the teachers had a different plan: Not only would each child’s birthday be commemorated individually, but the kids would celebrate each one together as a grade, not as a class. So now there would be forty-eight opportunities for cupcakes, instead of the twelve we had to contend with the previous year. Forty-eight cupcakes at an average of 300 calories each (the count for a classic small vanilla cupcake at Crumbs Bake Shop) equals 14,400 calories a year. Unless kids account for those calories elsewhere through reduced eating or increased activity, each can expect to gain more than four pounds per year, just from school birthday observances.

  But during the first year of our struggle, we contended with the birthday celebrations of just the twenty-four kids in Bea’s class. Every time one came up, I was reminded of a parent orientation session I went to at a very progressive, arty preschool Bea attended for a year when she was three. The teachers and administrators were talking about policies for school birthday celebrations and how they wanted parents to bring in healthful, non-sugary, non-processed foods to commemorate birthdays.

  One of the school’s founders stood up and proclaimed, “Let’s raise the bar on cupcakes.” My husband and I thought it was the most twee thing we’d ever heard. But on Bea’s birthday, I obligingly brought in a cornucopia of fruit plus bamboo skewers so the kids could thread their own kebabs, and they were perfectly happy. On other birthdays, kids celebrated with banana bread or zucchini muffins. No one rebelled or even complained. The norm shifted effortlessly, and every family along with it.

  Which made me realize now: That preschool founder guy was right! Why should we be teaching kids that every celebration involves mainlining glucose? Why aren’t we instead challenging them—and ourselves—to come up with a festive but more healthful alternative?

  Along with birthdays, there are the myriad other in-school celebrations that inevitably involve food: holiday parties, end-of-the-year celebrations, pizza or ice cream handouts to reward the kids for some achievement. Even if the food at these occasions is well-balanced, which many parents see to it that it is, it still needs to be accounted for in Bea’s diet.

  Most of these school-initiated occasions are announced in advance, and so Bea and I could plan around them. When there was a Valentine’s Day party, I correctly predicted that candy would be rampant, so I eliminated about 100 calories elsewhere and told Bea she could pick one piece of candy to eat.

  When French Heritage Day came around, with its attendant croissants and brioches, I was informed via email. In addition to a brief Francophilic performance in the auditorium, the celebration would be focused on a parent-prepared buffet in the cafeteria at lunchtime. I’d intended to discuss it with Bea, strategize, and maybe tell her she could look at everything and pick one or two things to eat. But I forgot, and she went in unprepared.

  When I picked her up from the school bus later that day, she reminded me that it was a special day: “Today was French Heritage Day.”

  Oh, God, I thought.

  “What did you have at the buffet?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level.

  The list began. “A small chocolate mousse …”

  Okay …

  “… two pieces of Brie on crackers …”

  Here we go …

  “… steak on a baguette—two pieces of that …”

  Huh?

  “… a mini quiche, and a breadstick. A small one.”

  Um …

  “And that’s it.”

  “Are you sure that’s it?” I asked, my tone not betraying the irony I felt in asking.

  “Oh, right: two little pieces of chocolate.”

  Got it.

  Mind you, this was on top of the lunch and snack I had sent with her to school. By my calculations, the calorie count was near 800—half her day’s intake!

  “Did other kids eat that much?” I asked, genuinely curious. After insisting briefly that they had, she adjusted her estimate to confess that other kids probably only had between two and five samples, not nine or ten.

  My mind raced as I tried to figure out how I could possibly salvage the situation. It was Friday, so our week’s permitted red-light indulgences had long since been used up. Her French Heritage indiscretion had more than overdrawn the balance in her food account for the rest of the day.

  She’d enjoyed the Gallic treats at about one o’clock, so I knew she’d get hungry. I had to come up with a plan. I decided she could eat a salad with nonfat dressing for dinner, with some fruit for dessert. I figured I’d throw in a little whipped cream with the fruit, just to show her I wasn’t upset with her. I knew that wouldn’t be a lot of food, and I explained to her that it wasn’t her normal dinner, that she’d had a lot of extra food at school, so we were going to have a really light meal that night.

  It was the most severe food-cutting move I’d ever considered, but I went ahead with it. I knew she had ingested more than enough food to make it through the rest of the day. A child who eats 700–800 extra calories at lunch is not going to starve to death if she does not get dinner. Even if she hadn’t eaten all that extra food, she was hardly going to suffer malnutrition from skipping one meal.

  Bea’s diet was, among other things, a test of her maturity and accountability. As we went along, I was figuring out what was reasonable to ask of her. She knew I let her get away with some deviation from the program and that ordinarily she could expect more guidance from me when confronting something as unexpected and calorically complicated as French Heritage Day. But she had a food budget and knew what it was. This had been an unplanned test of how she could handle such a situation, and it hadn’t gone well. I wanted to make it into a teachable moment.

  I think it served that purpose. When Spanish Heritage Day was observed many months later, I had learned enough to remember to discuss it with Bea in advance, and she had learned enough to stop after sampling two dishes.

  “So? What’d you eat?” I asked that afternoon.

  “A small taco and a couple of tortilla chips,” she reported.

  I gave her an approving high five. From our previous slip, progress had been made.

  From a long-term perspective, my
hope was that the rigor I was enforcing upon her would eventually become second-nature habits. At least for now, 500-calorie school lunches and in-class pizza parties aren’t going anywhere. At this point, thanks to the positive nutritional changes many schools have made, the schools aren’t doing such a bad job feeding our children. It was Bea who had to adapt, and it was my job to be her ever-vigilant ambassador and counsel.

  The efforts I had to take to steer Bea through these obstacles were overwhelming. I was no supermom. I hadn’t signed up for this. But I was doing my best to rise to the challenge and not back down.

  I was fascinated by what I had learned. I kept finding myself yammering to friends about the divide between healthy eating and weight-loss eating and how efforts to address the childhood obesity epidemic had it all wrong. People could talk all they wanted about organic foods, less computer time, and whole-grain whatever. But for an obese child, losing weight is not that easy. The cold, hard truth, it was now obvious to me, is that the Herculean task of helping an overweight child required, at the very least, an acknowledgment that the child has a weight problem, and a willingness to reduce his caloric intake. It was also crucial that someone—probably the kid’s parent—worked his or her hardest to help that child on a strict and consistent basis.

  To me, the national fear of telling overweight kids that they have a problem was a huge contributor in the obesity epidemic. And the even-bigger fear of introducing the idea of a diet to a child, of actually feeding him less food, was compounding the problem.

  Until we were willing to acknowledge this disease and confront it head-on rather than dance around it and talk about “moving more” or “adding in more fruits and vegetables,” I explained to anyone who would listen, nothing was going to change for these kids.

  I felt I could help be an agent of this change. I was passionate about this issue, and as a loving yet no-nonsense parent of an obese child who was actually losing weight—who better to try to get the word out?