More alarming was that my seven-year-old seemingly had not grown in seven months. I was haunted by the possibility that all this calorie restriction had somehow stunted her growth. All those moms who had tsk-tsked at me when I’d denied Bea additional food, saying, “Come on, she’s still growing, let her eat”—maybe they were right! Was her diet responsible for her stagnant height during a year when she should have been sprouting a couple of inches?
Plus she wasn’t even losing weight! What the hell? No growth all year, and barely any weight loss through her entire time at camp? Something was very wrong.
Yet it seemed like every person who saw Bea that summer commented on how tall she had become. I insisted they were wrong, assuring them that I had measured her. It must just be that she was slimmer than she used to be, so she appeared taller. But she most definitely was not taller.
I shared my concern with Jeff. He told me I was overreacting, but was it possible that I detected a flash of worry in his face? I considered taking Bea back to the nutrition doctor, or at least to her pediatrician. I looked online and confirmed that Bea’s caloric intake was indeed sufficient to sustain normal development and growth. I felt a little better after that. But eventually I decided to ask a professional.
I sought the guidance of a family friend who is a physician. He smiled at my worry and assured me that it wasn’t possible that I had delayed Bea’s physical development. I was relieved, but I was still perturbed by the standstill she had reached in both her height and her weight loss.
The new season and warmer weather gave me high hopes for increased family outdoor activity. We started having a picnic dinner once a week on a blanket in Central Park, eating our usual food and then climbing rocks, visiting a playground, or just walking around for an hour.
Bea’s playtime with friends migrated outside, and I encouraged her to spend as long as she wanted running around with them. When the ice-cream guy showed up, we chose the Sno-Cones, which we discovered have only thirty calories and no fat.
When Bea started summer camp in late June, she weighed just over eighty pounds, down thirteen pounds from where she’d begun. I still visited the CDC kids’ BMI calculator periodically to try to figure out where she should end up. She was still overweight, but moving closer to the 85th percentile, under which her weight would qualify as healthy.
My latest calculations involved what I might expect her height and weight to be at the end of the summer. By then, I reasoned, she’d surely have grown an inch, so she’d be four feet seven inches. And if she weighed seventy-eight pounds, according to the CDC she would be at a healthy BMI. We were so, so close!
My focus on this particular number was irrational for many reasons. First, it’s a fairly arbitrary quantitative point. Seventy-eight pounds, I’d be satisfied. Seventy-eight-point-two? No. And of course, that’s pretty silly. Also, these categorical determinations were based on percentiles, which is to say, the relative position of Bea’s BMI number to that of other children of the same sex and age in the United States. But weren’t many other children in the United States overweight? It struck me as odd to base these distinctions on a percentile number that reflected a progressively worsening profile as American kids got fatter. I looked into the issue and learned that these categories had come under fairly recent review. In 1994, an “expert committee” had recommended cutoffs for BMI-for-age at the 85th percentile, which was designated as being “at risk for overweight,” and at the 95th percentile, which was considered “overweight.”
In 2007, another expert committee recommended retaining the cutoffs but renaming them “overweight” and “obese,” respectively. They felt that “the term ‘obese’ more effectively conveys the seriousness, urgency, and medical nature of this concern than does the term ‘overweight,’ thereby reinforcing the importance of taking immediate action.” So the CDC was indeed keeping up with the times.
Unlike adult BMI percentiles, the kids’ percentiles take age into consideration. I found the strict classifications to be a handy anchor in turbulent waters. But they could also get a bit maddening. For example, a four-foot-six, seventy-eight-pound child who is eight years and five months old is considered overweight. But a child who is the identical height and weight but eight years and six months old is considered to be at a healthy weight.
I had to set the goal somewhere. The borderline of healthy weight was as high as I was willing to go. I couldn’t possibly go through all this and still have a government website tell me Bea was “overweight.” I had to stick to the number as unyieldingly as I stuck to our daily food budgets and our weekly weigh-ins; otherwise, I feared, we’d never make it.
So the goal was seventy-eight pounds. With six weeks of day camp ahead, during which Bea would be running around in the playground every day, swimming once a week with her camp group and then a second time in a lesson I arranged for her, I was confident we’d get rid of those two pounds with no problem.
Unlike the previous summer, Bea’s camp that year was a bring-your-own lunch affair, so I didn’t have to worry about her overeating in a cafeteria situation. The camp provided two snacks per day—graham crackers, apple juice, fruit. After a bit of a snag in the beginning, navigating the right combination of these, Bea got the hang of it (water, not juice; fruit at both snacks, graham crackers at only one). Occasionally I’d come to pick her up and find they’d surprised the kids with Italian ices or some other frozen treat, but I tried to be cool about it. It was the summer, after all.
Bea was far more active than she was during the winter. She swam, she kept up her karate, she climbed the jungle gym. Her weight went down, but sluggishly. Despite all the exercise and disciplined eating, when her time at camp ended, she weighed seventy-nine pounds. She’d broken the eighty-pound mark, but it was not exactly the triumphant weight loss I’d hoped the summer would bring.
I looked back on all my decades of obsessive weight-monitoring and realized I had no explanation for what was happening with Bea. I’d previously considered myself something of an expert on weight loss (intellectually, if not in practice). But Bea had shown me how very little I knew.
My anxiety spilled over into how I approached Bea’s occasional blips of overeating. At the end of her summer program, she and her fellow campers put on a performance of Aladdin. On that day, all the kids stayed on after camp and had dinner there before the show started. The counselor had emailed the parents to let us know there would be pizza served. As usual, I told Bea that she could have one slice.
The show was terrific. Bea was adorable and full of stage presence, lighting up her scenes in a glittering Arabian robe with a comically oversized, puffy hat. Afterward I congratulated her on a great job. I hugged her and told her what my favorite parts had been. I complimented her costume, which she’d helped make. I marveled at how much they’d managed to do in only a few weeks. Later that evening as I lay in her bed with her, I asked how much pizza she had eaten for dinner.
“One slice,” she said, staring at the ceiling.
“Just one? Not one and a half? Maybe one and a bite?” I asked playfully. Still no eye contact.
Her little fingers started rising, one by one, to indicate how many slices of pizza she had actually eaten. Three fingers ended up in the air. Three. As it happens, I had seen the pizza they ate: mammoth slices.
Jeff was in the room, but I knew he wouldn’t relate to the frustration I felt at the sight of those fingers. He would shrug it off, maybe make a joke of it to Bea—and believe me, I’m grateful to have a spouse who can find humor in these things, so there weren’t two of us flying off the handle every time something didn’t go according to my meticulous plans. But Bea’s overeating by a factor of three made me feel like I was pushing this boulder up a hill by myself. It made me question why I was even bothering, and whether she was even on board.
We continued chatting about various and sundry topics, but I kept coming back to the pizza.
Were they half slices or full-size slices? … Medium-
size ones? I saw them, and they weren’t medium-size. They looked pretty giant to me.
It’s not like there was a cake, and you had a piece of cake and it was like a special occasion. Pizza happens a lot. And you just can’t be eating three slices of it.
Do you just want to give up this whole program? Do you even care?
I don’t know what the best strategy would have been in this situation. Admittedly, nagging was not it. But I was stressed and tired.
Then camp was over and Bea was taking a nine-day trip with her father and brother to visit her grandmother, who was spending the summer abroad. I was staying home to work. For the first time I was not going to be able to steer any of her meals or snacks, or make any of the dozens of spur-of-the-moment food decisions that pop up in any given week. Only Jeff, who wasn’t the ideal steward of Bea’s diet, and her doting grandmother, who was prone to spoiling the kids with food as grandparents tend to do, would be in charge.
I was freaking out.
CHAPTER 18
While I had previously considered myself a pretty low-key, low-maintenance daughter-in-law, my communications with my mother-in-law in anticipation of Bea’s trip abroad fell just short of frantic. Fortunately, my mother-in-law happens to be a dramatic personality and a florid email writer herself, and she apparently didn’t bat an eye upon receiving my reminders, requests, and recommendations.
I sent a list of necessary grocery items (skim milk, cereal, chicken breasts, cucumbers, low-calorie bread, turkey slices, fruit, fruit, fruit, fruit). I indicated what Bea could eat for each meal and snack, including calorie ranges and sample meals. I warned about potential pitfalls (if all they had was regular bread, Bea could have just one slice—the two-slice option was only if the bread was reduced-calorie; corn and potatoes did not count as “free” vegetables) and generally pleaded for all the adults to make Bea’s eating a priority so Bea wouldn’t have to fend for herself.
My mother-in-law was totally on my side. “I will be careful,” she told me over the phone. “I will do what you tell me.” Once they were gone, I found that Jeff totally stepped up to the challenge. When we spoke on the phone, in addition to telling me about the fun activities they’d done, he’d give me a blow-by-blow account of what they’d fed her, and it was generally on target. There was usually something slightly off, one little thing wrong—for instance, the lunch might be about 100 calories over what was ideal, he’d give her a morning snack that wasn’t just fruit, or there were a few bonus bites of dessert after dinner. But it sounded like things were going well. I was impressed and relieved that, in my absence, Jeff was taking the reins, even if he wasn’t doing it as exactingly as I would have.
The morning after they returned home, Bea got on the scale. She had gained 1.2 pounds.
Now, 1.2 pounds may sound like nothing to the average person. My weight can go up more than that just from eating a big dinner. But for Bea, who had been working so hard to chisel away at each pound, and for me, who wanted to see her cross a finish line that would remove her from the medical category of morbidity, it was depressing.
I made light of it. “Okay, well, you just got back from a big trip, no big deal.”
But I was confused. By all accounts, she had eaten carefully on this trip. Jeff had seemingly supervised her admirably. But my transfer of responsibility had resulted in backsliding.
I feared the moral of the story: that unless I was personally around to nitpickingly police things, this was going to be what we could expect. But I couldn’t control things for Bea’s whole life. I was going to need to let go. Like all parents, I wanted to place my trust in her at some point and let her take responsibility for herself. But this experience eroded my confidence.
The fact that her weight was back over eighty pounds made the relapse especially bitter. True, this was a completely arbitrary milestone—and 80.2 on my scale at home might very well be 78.8 on another scale—but it felt like a big step backward. My recent realization that she hadn’t grown above four feet six inches had pushed the hopes of accomplishing our goal further out of reach. To go from a weight in the seventies back to one in the eighties was even more dispiriting.
And it remained so for six more weeks, because that’s how long it took for her to get back down below eighty pounds. Six weeks! It would be October before we saw the other side of that number again. Those weeks were some of the hardest for all of us. I wanted to attribute the lull to the fact that she was finally growing, but I could see clearly, and feel quite palpably when I held her, that the belly I so loved was not getting any smaller.
I tried chalking it up to a weight-loss plateau. But this wasn’t my first time at this particular rodeo. I knew plateaus, and this one seemed too long, too intransigent. I began to doubt whether I was equipped to surmount this latest stumbling block. I felt my capacity to guide Bea was faltering, and my energy was sapped. This battle, with all its required attention to minutiae and carefully calibrated emotional supportiveness, was hard for me to sustain.
In my mind, I pushed back the timeline for achieving our goal to just after Bea’s eighth birthday. At that time, post-Thanksgiving but pre-Christmas, she would be going to the pediatrician’s office for her annual checkup, one year after I’d committed to getting help with her weight. It would be a nice anniversary on which to reach the healthy-weight milestone.
I went back to my old friend, the CDC BMI calculator, conservatively estimating that she’d be four feet six and a half inches tall at the time of her mid-December checkup, an annual growth of only half an inch. At that point, if she weighed seventy-seven pounds, she’d be a healthy weight. At seventy-eight, she’d still register as overweight. So seventy-seven became the new goal.
But we were all a bit fatigued, and it started to affect how we treated each other when food was involved. Jeff might walk in the door with Pinkberry frozen yogurt some nights, and if Bea was up late, all three of us would dig in while David slept.
“Why are we eating this?” I asked him grouchily on one such occasion, as I dipped my spoon in for another bite, battling Bea’s spoon for access.
“I think cheating is a fundamental part of dieting,” he explained. “It shouldn’t be eliminated from life.”
Increasingly, during our weekly dinners out at a restaurant, Bea would get into a bad mood. Hungry and annoyed that the entire bill of fare wasn’t available to her, she’d get irritable and say no to everything.
One night my parents took us out for dinner to someplace near their house, and I hadn’t been able to view the menu online in advance. I looked over the choices and started running down the list of possible options for Bea.
“Shrimp cocktail?” I asked.
“No, thanks,” Bea said wearily.
“Vegetable soup?”
“No, thanks.”
“Mini tuna tacos?”
Head shake.
“Grilled chicken?”
“No, thank you.”
“Share a burger with me?”
“Can I have my own burger?”
“No.”
My mom, like many others, tends to proffer unsolicited opinions. At this tense juncture, she decided to jump in and suggest something on the menu I’d intentionally omitted: the salmon.
Salmon is totally overrated, if you ask me. It is one of those foods that are super healthy, which too many people have taken to mean diet friendly. It’s not. Along with the yogurt and almonds I’ve already maligned, salmon is high in fat and calories, and in my opinion it’s not particularly delicious unless slathered with a caloric sauce.
In case you don’t know, a three-ounce portion of salmon has 156 calories and more than 6 grams of fat. By comparison, a three-ounce serving of top sirloin has 158 calories and more than 5 grams of fat. So go ahead and enjoy salmon’s abundant health benefits. But I don’t believe you’re doing your weight any particular favors by eating salmon instead of eating steak.
For whatever reason, my mother seems not to remember my theory when
scrutinizing a menu for things her granddaughter might want to eat.
“How about the salmon, Bea?” my mother suggested.
“Mom!” I replied sharply. “Can you not offer Bea something without asking me? If she wants the salmon, she has to share it with me, which she won’t want to do. It has a lot of calories.”
“I don’t know about that. Every time I eat salmon, the next day the scale is lower,” my mom assured me confidently.
“That’s great, Mom. Bea can’t have it unless she shares it with me.” At which point Bea slumped lower in her chair and got a grimmer expression on her face.
“She is miserable on this diet,” my mother muttered.
At that point Bea decided she would have nothing, thank you very much. To try to teach her a lesson, I said fine and didn’t order anything for her. Then, five minutes later, she decided she was ravenous, and I had a Pyrrhic “I told you so” moment before agreeing to split my burger with her, which had kind of been my plan all along.
Once she had some food in her, she was her usual happy and cheerful self. But those minutes of low-blood-sugar consultation were unpleasant, and so was I.
Even in my grumpiness, I acknowledged that I was not totally without support. Many friends had encouraged my efforts. My older sister had coached my niece and nephew on sensitive snacking when they hung out with Bea, and she considered Bea’s dietary needs when preparing food for family dinners. Bea’s grandparents had tried their best to understand and follow instructions on how they should feed her when I wasn’t around. Her teacher was undemanding when I emailed her asking for specifics about what kind of food was going to be served at a school event. Some of Bea’s friends’ parents gamely played along when I asked if the kids could have only fruit for a snack.
Nonetheless, I knew not everyone approved of my mission or methods. I felt constantly defensive, anxious about other people’s judgment, and concerned about how this whole thing was affecting Bea.
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