But I was preaching to agnostics. None of my friends had overweight kids. Now that Bea had successfully lost some weight, most of them agreed with my rants and applauded me for what I was doing. But no one in my circle was really going to benefit from what I had to say.
Then an idea came to me at work. Instead of my having to adapt the recipes in the TV cooking shows I worked on, to make them low-calorie enough for Bea, what if the show itself did that? A program for people with overweight kids that demonstrates how to make normal, family-friendly recipes that are actually low-calorie! No one was doing that! It’d be a really useful show. A crucially important one. A gold mine! So I brought the idea to my boss, a smart, experienced television producer who has three grown children of his own.
He listened to my pitch and gave me a verbal pat on the back for my enthusiasm and effort, but he passed. “As a producer, I would never make a show that used the word diet and children in the same breath,” he said. “I just hate the stigma of the word and I don’t want to pass it on to another generation. I don’t use the words fat or diet in my house. When I was a kid, my mom’s experience with different diets ingrained in me a belief that diets don’t work.”
The comments stung a little bit. I suddenly lost a bit of confidence in my insistence on owning those terms. For my family, I was defining diet as a long-term, ongoing adjustment to how we deal with food. But the rest of the world still saw diets as temporary, inevitably ineffective measures, with the lost weight invariably returning when the dieter resumed her normal habits. I believe that diets do work—you just can’t ever go off them.
My boss further explained that he had already tried selling networks on similar ideas, to no avail. “It’s a tough slog. TV wants sensationalism—it wants Dance Moms or Toddlers and Tiaras,” he said, invoking the names of two series that had gained notoriety (and huge ratings) that year for documenting the antics of dreadfully overbearing adults and their exploited children.
He did note that there were a few heavy hitters in the intersection of television and food who were already addressing this issue pretty effectively, such as Jamie Oliver and his Food Revolution, or Rachael Ray’s Yum-O organization.
Of course, I’d heard about these chefs’ efforts. I own the Jamie’s Food Revolution cookbook, and I recognized Rachael Ray’s Yum-O organization from the appearance of some of its meals on Bea’s lunch menu. I’ve used both of their recipes when cooking for my family. But in every instance I’ve had to cut the serving sizes in half, leave out some of the called-for oil, or in some other way adapt the recipe to be not only nutritious—which is certainly is—but also lower-calorie.
After my discussion with the producer, I looked at these chefs’ initiatives anew, to see whether I had misjudged them. I hadn’t. Jamie’s broccoli preparation has 100 calories per serving, and his carrot salad has 188. I wholeheartedly advocate for kids to eat more broccoli and carrots, and if a healthy-weight kid who is averse to eating those vegetables is willing to do so if they’re tarted up with lots of added fat, great. But at those calorie levels, it doesn’t make sense to recommend those particular preparations to obese kids. A dinner consisting of Jamie’s chopped green salad followed by one piece of his barbecued chicken with a serving of potato wedges on the side comes to 540 calories—too much for Bea. For her purposes, I can cut everything in half, and it’s perfect. And so I do. Apparently no one wants to make a cookbook—much less air a television show—where the dinners for kids come in at 270 calories.
I appreciated my boss’s candor, and I knew he believed that I was doing what I felt was right for Bea. But it was clear that he was uncomfortable with the idea of putting a child on a diet. Few people without an overweight child could really relate to the decisions Jeff and I had had to make. No one who wasn’t in my shoes could quite understand why I refused to let Bea have a spontaneous treat with her friends or eat a salad after she’d finished dinner, or that I’d prefer she drink Diet Coke instead of organic orange juice. I understood, because I used to be like them.
CHAPTER 14
One winter day I picked up Bea from school so we could go visit a friend’s new baby. As we walked down a cold, windy street to the subway, I asked Bea what she wanted for a snack.
Her big brown eyes widened hopefully as she looked up at me and asked for hot chocolate. I don’t understand Bea’s love for hot chocolate, being averse to hot beverages and the practice of drinking calories that might otherwise be chewed. But I understand that, for whatever reason, kids just love it. And on that frigid, gray afternoon, I wanted to say yes. I wanted to create a moment where the two of us could sit huddled together with Bea warming her mittened hands around a steaming cup of sweetness after a long day at school. We stopped in at the nearest Starbucks.
I knew the hot chocolate served at Starbucks wasn’t going to be quite as diet friendly as the 50-calorie sugar-free packets I kept at home, but I hoped that I could control the portion size and get it down to under-100-calorie territory. I looked up at the calories posted on the menu as I ordered. The kids’ hot chocolate was not listed as a discrete item. The menu read, Kids’ drinks: 120–210. That span covered milk, apple juice, and hot chocolate and was not sufficient information. If the drink was 120 calories, I could pour out about half an inch of it and let Bea finish the rest. If it was 210, I had to make her stop halfway. It was actually a fairly significant span.
As the barista prepared Bea’s drink, I flipped open one of the nutritional-information pamphlets positioned on the counter. Again, no specific calorie count was provided for the hot chocolate. Hm. According to the laws of the state of New York, this place was required to post the calorie content of its beverages. To my mind, they weren’t doing such a hot job.
“Excuse me,” I said as the barista placed the frothy, steaming cup of hot chocolate on the counter and I passed it along to Bea. “Can you tell me how many calories this has?” My tone was cordial, and I let Bea start sipping away before getting the information. But I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be a satisfying exchange.
“Sure,” he said, and looked up at the overhead menu I had first turned to for the information.
“It’s not there,” I said.
He grabbed one of the nutrition information pamphlets. “Not there, either,” I said. “I checked already.”
Bea blew into the small hole in the plastic lid of her drink, trying to cool it down, oblivious to my inquiries. Fortunately, there was no one else waiting to distract the barista from this task.
“Do you want me to check in the back?” he asked.
“Yes, please,” I responded. “I know it’s somewhere between a hundred and twenty and two hundred and ten, but it’s kind of important for me to know.”
He retreated through the swinging door behind him. Bea kept drinking. Minutes passed. Many sips of this beverage, with its mysterious calorie count, were consumed.
The barista returned. “I wasn’t able to find it,” he said. “I could check on the computer.”
“Can you, please?” I said.
He went back behind the swinging door again. Bea continued drinking. I was starting to be late to visit my friend. With every passing minute, more of the hot chocolate was disappearing from the cup, and I didn’t know at what cost.
Finally the guy came back out again. “Okay, so it’s two hundred and forty calories.” What? “It’s two hundred ten for the hot chocolate and thirty for the whipped cream.”
“What whipped cream?” I asked. “I didn’t ask for whipped cream.”
“It has whipped cream,” he said.
I grabbed Bea’s cup and pulled the lid off. There, floating on the surface, was a bobbing cloud of whipped cream.
“She can’t have this,” I said gloomily. I felt upset at the position I was now in because of this counterperson’s careless assumption. Now I had to be the bad guy, because he had made an unauthorized addition to the drink we’d ordered.
I knew he thought I was crazy, getting te
nse over thirty calories’ worth of whipped cream. Well, I rationalized, what if Bea had been lactose intolerant and he’d added milk to her tea? Why did I not have the same authority to get upset? For the umpteenth time, I felt as though the needs of overweight children—to know how many calories are in something, to not have extra fattening things added without their knowledge—never occurred to regular people.
I was frustrated, not that others didn’t care, but that I somehow expected them to intuit our needs and address them. This was Starbucks, I’d ordered a hot chocolate; what did I expect?
I looked at the half-full cup in my hand, knowing I couldn’t hand it back to her. Calorically speaking, her snack was over, though I was aware she wouldn’t see it that way. I felt trapped. I tossed the remainder of the drink in the trash, and we left.
I hailed a cab to get to my friend’s house, because we were now too late to take the subway. Unpleasant and familiar feelings of self-doubt came over me.
I turned to Bea, who hadn’t said a word since we’d left Starbucks.
“I’m sorry.” I said. “I know that guy was trying to help, but they should have that information. And he shouldn’t have added whipped cream without asking me,” I said.
“It’s okay,” she replied.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to finish your hot chocolate. Was it good?” I asked.
She got a dreamy look on her face and licked at the faint traces of whipped cream on her upper lip, and we laughed grimly.
The incident haunted me for days afterward. I didn’t like how I’d acted. It wasn’t right to sacrifice Bea’s drink to teach a lesson to a barista I’d never see again. But should I have let her finish the hot chocolate? I really didn’t know.
A few weeks after the Starbucks incident, Bea and I went to lunch with her dad on a day she had off, while David was in school. We met on the street near Jeff’s office, in a vortex of food choices of varying levels of appropriateness for Bea. There were a half dozen delis, a McDonald’s, a Chipotle.
My husband suggested Chipotle. I wish. I love their food, but while I was on Weight Watchers I had done a calculation of what my vegetarian burrito bowl amounted to, and the results weren’t pretty. Given that I required guacamole and cheese to be happy with my bowl, I was looking at over 700 calories. Maybe if I split it in half? Not even.
Bea wanted McDonald’s. Believe it or not, that would have been fine with me. We don’t go to McDonald’s very often, but every time we do, I am increasingly convinced of its viability as a diet-friendly destination. People trying to stick to a particular nutritional regimen need two things from their restaurants: options and information. McDonald’s offers both.
Of course, McDonald’s is famous for such offerings as the Angus Bacon & Cheese burger, with 790 calories, 39 grams of fat, and 86 percent of the U.S. Recommended Daily Intake of sodium. Or the 570-calorie chocolate shake. But if you ask me, people who vilify McDonald’s efforts to make its offerings more nutritious are being unduly harsh. McDonald’s hasn’t supersized anything since 2004, and there are many items that can satisfy the calorie counter and the nutrient seeker alike. The four-piece Chicken McNuggets has only 190 calories. There’s a 150-calorie fruit-and-lowfat-yogurt parfait. Happy Meals come with apple slices and scaled-down kid-size fries. There’s an array of salads, and the nutritional content of every item they serve is readily displayed. We could do well in a place like that. But Jeff wasn’t in the mood.
We finally settled upon a place that had just opened, whose tag line indicated its mission was “de-junking fast food.” The concept was to build your own burger by selecting your desired patty (beef, lamb, egg, veggie, turkey, etc.), bun, and add-ons from a range of choices. The nutritional information for each item was published plainly on the menu, which was available on paper, and on iPad tablets throughout the seating area. How perfect for us!
We reviewed the choices carefully and negotiated the specifics of our order. The establishment, in all its health-consciousness, provided me with a receipt that displayed not only the name and cost of each food item we’d ordered, but also its calorie content. Kind of cool. Except that, as I examined it, I realized the numbers did not match up to what we’d seen on the menu. The bread, for instance, was forty calories more on my receipt.
I felt I was being given an opportunity to redress the ways I’d mishandled the calorie information incident at Starbucks. I was not going to serve Bea her lunch and then take it away from her as she was eating it upon discovering it contained more calories than I’d been led to believe. This time was going to be different.
I went back up to the counter and requested a reconciliation of the divergent numbers. The counterperson called over the manager, who phoned the chef in an effort to solve the mystery. When the chef didn’t pick up, he dialed the restaurant’s staff nutritionist. This all took quite some time, and our food came out before the calorie investigation was complete. I ditched half the bun on my plate and Bea’s to compensate for any overage, and we ate. I don’t even remember what the staff nutritionist’s answer was. I’d worked around the problem with Bea in mind, instead of letting my frustration with the difficulty of getting accurate calorie counts ruin our experience. While I’m sure the staff at this place thought I was as crazy as the Starbucks guy did, I like to think they—and Bea—found me considerably more pleasant to deal with this time around.
But it was yet another reminder of what we’re up against, even in places that, on the surface, appear to be on our side. Healthful, I had to keep reminding myself, does not equate with diet friendly. Even though the place was overstaffed with customer-service personnel and even had its own nutritionist, a question from someone who truly cared about calories couldn’t be quickly answered.
Things were predictably worse at places that weren’t so health-oriented. At the Mediterranean place my parents loved, I’d had my instructions that no oil be added to my vegetables ignored. At a local burger restaurant, my request that Bea’s five-ounce kids’ beef patty be reduced to a three-ounce kids’ beef patty was flatly rejected. And frankly, restaurants can’t adapt to every diner’s needs, so it makes sense that they can’t be receptive to my requests, which are so detailed as to make Meg Ryan’s in When Harry Met Sally look flexible. It’s really not the restaurants’ job to adapt their portion sizes and recipes. It is mine.
I did it all the time for myself. When Jeff and I go out to eat, if we order the same thing, we’re served identical plates of food. Of course the restaurant doesn’t make an accommodation for the fact that he’s twice my size and more active than I am. I wouldn’t expect them to. It was fair that our family, and especially Bea and I, should have to adapt to the realities of a world that is not constructed around the needs of children with weight problems.
But when you ask the waiter to bring out only a half portion of pasta and wrap up the other half to go, and he says the kitchen won’t do it, and then you ask to speak to the manager, and she says fulfilling that request is difficult because they’re really busy but she’ll try, and then the waiter hates you and the kitchen messes it up anyway and you have to send it back until they get it right, and in the meantime, everyone in your party has practically crawled under the table with mortification … well, sometimes that’s what I went through to get Bea’s dinner on the table.
Frustrated by these constant roadblocks, I complained to a writer friend over lunch. I explained how challenging it was to feel I didn’t have a clear voice in these situations. I knew that each individual moment—getting upset about something as trivial-seeming as a few extra tablespoons of whipped cream, for example—made no sense to someone without an understanding of the big picture. I couldn’t find a way to express what was at stake.
“You should write about it,” my friend said.
“I know, right?” I replied, chuckling. But a moment later I realized she was serious, and she had a point. A book could serve as a way to explain to the world why I was doing what I was doing. I could help
people to see what I was seeing, and maybe help them better understand what the world was like for overweight kids and their families. I could write about how I had thought we were all supposed to be on the same team in this anti-obesity effort, but that I’d been disappointed to find so many people willing to disregard, question, or judge the intentions of a regular mom trying to help her obese child.
A book could impart my experiences to other parents like me, and maybe even include my little low-calorie recipes and give advice on how to handle school celebrations and friends’ birthday parties. I could let parents know that they can broach this topic with their children, with openness, honesty, and love. I wanted to give other families the confidence to do what I’d been made to feel so uncertain about doing: help an overweight child lose weight.
The book wasn’t necessarily going to be explicitly prescriptive—I was obviously no nutrition expert, and what had worked for Bea wasn’t necessarily going to work for anyone else—but it was certainly going to be exhortative. All parents take responsibility for their kids’ health and instilling in them good eating habits. For parents of obese children, this duty is brought to a whole new level above and beyond what is typical and expected.
I didn’t know what to call it. One night, Jeff suggested that perhaps the title should be as straightforward as I felt addressing the issue should be. He suggested, “I Put My Kid on a Diet,” and I added, “… And So Should You!” Yes, after six months of helping my daughter lose weight with moderate success, I felt I was ready to share with the world my personal solution to childhood obesity. Maybe it was an attempt to subdue all my real-world uncertainty with the bluster of an absurdly omniscient book title. But the more I talked about it, the more excited I got.
My writer friend was encouraging. She called her book agent, who was intrigued. Through that lucky connection, I suddenly had the opportunity to prepare a proposal for an actual book that would encapsulate all I had learned and accomplished with Bea.
The Heavy Page 14