“Well, no, of course you haven’t changed your whole life. But you’re not overweight anymore. You did fix that. That part of you is in the past.”
Her body tensed in my arms. She began to tear up.
“Just because it’s in the past doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” she said.
Like my friend with the cancer diagnosis, the outcome of Bea’s diet was, to her, not a victory, or even really an ending. She understood, even though I hadn’t, that it was glib and reductive to act like her experience was one worthy of glee. Her maturity in realizing this, and her intelligence in articulating it, filled me with pride and sadness in equal measure.
If I wondered why Bea couldn’t revel in her success, I needed only to look at myself. No matter how well I controlled my eating, I still had feelings of fear and guilt around food. No matter how many pounds I lost, another diet was just around the corner. Regardless of how far I had come since my younger years of obsessive dieting and negative self-image, I still had a complicated relationship to my body. And even if my eating and weight issues had evened out as I got older, I had spent many years being victimized by them, and I knew that was a tragic waste of energy, time, and self-esteem.
I am not an alcoholic, but I feel like I understand the mind-set of a sober alcoholic. You are managing your disease and have it under control at that moment. But it’s still there in you. You think differently than nonalcoholics do, and you need to monitor your environment and your decisions differently. You must manage your behavior more stringently than someone who does not share your addiction. It will always be a part of who you are. There are similarities with being overweight. You can manage your weight, control your eating, even become thin, but that tendency is still inside you.
I had believed that I could set Bea on a different track, that I could “cure” her of being overweight by changing her eating habits before her self-image dimmed so much that she came to think of herself as a fat person. But I was too late. Or maybe it was never possible. She had indeed changed her body and her lifestyle, but the metamorphosis was bittersweet, because it had cost her some of the innocence of her childhood.
Who Bea was—who I was—hadn’t essentially changed. There’s no way for food-focused people like me, my husband, and my daughter to walk through the city and not think instantly about stopping at the mini cupcake shop (or, in Jeff’s case, the falafel truck). We can only try to control whether we allow ourselves to go there and, if we do, how many of those amazing little treats we pop into our mouths. Being able to exert that control is a huge step forward. But the essential challenge of our attitude toward food and our “normative discontent” with our bodies hasn’t gone away; I can’t imagine it ever will. Bea realized that without my having to tell her.
It felt strange, but maybe it’s psychologically to be expected, that as we reached her weight loss goal, all these emotional issues were coming to the surface. Suddenly we were confronting feelings of sadness and insecurity that Bea had locked away as she did the work of taking the weight off. Having reached the finish line, we were both taking a moment to look back. Some of the pain and frustration of Bea’s predicament as an overweight child was bubbling up.
Meanwhile, I felt as anxious as ever. The pediatrician had told me we could stop, but I’d spent the last year refusing to stop. It was hard to halt that momentum. Plus the conventional wisdom rang in my ears: losing weight is easy (though millions of people would beg to differ); it’s keeping it off that’s hard. We were about to enter a phase that promised to be every bit as challenging as the one we’d just completed. We were by no means done.
CHAPTER 21
A month into the New Year, I was eager to introduce a “new normal” around Bea’s eating. In response to the pediatrician’s approval of her weight, I felt the time had come to loosen the reins slightly.
Bea ate the exact same breakfast and lunch as she had before. Her post-breakfast morning snack was still only a piece of fruit, and her afternoon snack was still only 100 calories or fewer, in addition to fruit. Dinner was the same size as before, but I reintroduced olive oil to our salad dressings. I also started preparing vegetables with a little oil—our green beans might have a pat of light butter on them, and our beloved Brussels sprouts were roasted in olive oil again, instead of just blandly boiled.
On the weekends, if we passed a bakery, we might have a little cookie or mini cupcake, which previously I would have accounted for more carefully. If Bea wanted a bite of her dad’s turkey burger or her brother’s pasta, I didn’t stop her. I let her skip karate two or three times.
The changes we made were tiny, but apparently they added up. Bea’s weight started to climb. At the end of January she was at 78.8 pounds. A mere week later she weighed 79.8. That jump was so significant, I was sure it was some anomaly due to water weight, and I was prepared to write it off. But the following week, the scale hadn’t moved. And a week later, she was up to 80.6. Another pound and a half gained in a month, for a total of three pounds regained.
A little weight gain was to be expected. But three pounds was worrying. And Bea had traversed the psychologically significant (to me, anyway) eighty-pound mark in the wrong direction yet again. I removed all the reintroduced oils, cut out extra snacks, and required full attendance at karate. We got the weight back down to just under eighty.
But three weeks later, she’d gained two more pounds. I found the pace and extent of the weight gain inexplicable and scary. Once again I considered the possibility that she was just growing. But the visible growth of her belly refuted that theory.
One night, after she’d eaten a lot of fruit, Bea observed her protruding stomach.
“I’m fat again,” she said.
Those words hit me like a ton of bricks. My immediate response was panic that I had put that thought into her head. I knew that she had called herself fat many times before I’d put her on a diet. But this was the first time she’d used that word since she’d lost the weight.
It was particularly jarring to hear her self-rebuke on the heels of a period of weight gain. If she’d said it when she was at a more securely healthy number, I’d have chalked it up to attention seeking, perhaps even compliment fishing. But was she making a sincere self-assessment of her body, which indeed had migrated back, technically, into the “overweight” category? Had I created a situation in which, anytime she gains weight, she’s going to think she’s fat?
Either way, I refused to tolerate her talking that way. There was little sympathy in my response, because I didn’t want to encourage her to use the word fat self-deprecatingly in expectation of my indulgently refuting her. I was firm. “You are not fat,” I said. “You’ve just regained a little weight, and we’re going to be more careful.”
It seemed that the level of vigilance was going to have to be stricter than I’d hoped. But hadn’t I been the one who wanted to return the word diet to its original meaning of a continual, habitual way of eating? Didn’t I believe that the only way diets worked is if you never went off them? Why hadn’t I realized that this was just the way it was going to be? We put in the effort, and brought the weight back down again.
We’d won a battle, but the war raged on. This diet wasn’t over.
This realization that Bea’s way of eating couldn’t really change marked a major shift in my attitude. I didn’t feel the same panic about reaching one particular goal. I accepted that we were in a pretty good place and that the process was ongoing. I didn’t feel any time pressure. I became more relaxed about week-to-week ups and downs and occasional nutritional lapses. It was just life now. The focus of my efforts now had to be transferring responsibility for sustaining the habits from me to Bea.
I didn’t get so stressed out in social situations or if we ate out somewhere. Partially it was because now that Bea was at a healthy weight, I could publicly discuss her food choices with her without incurring the judgments of people overhearing us. We were just a boring mom and a regular kid having a mundane co
nversation about nutrition. Finally we were normal.
Bea’s weight stayed pretty stable, at or near the healthy mark. Limited as her daily menus seemed, they were necessary for maintaining her weight. It was not how she wanted to eat nor how her body naturally tended to eat. Which was all the more reason she had to eat this way. This was it. This was Bea’s lifestyle now.
One of the most noticeable shifts was Bea’s attitude toward her body. That measure of our work had shown great improvement. She carried herself with pride and even a little extra kick in her step. She dressed up for a party or donned a bathing suit without hesitation.
I began to feel good about what we were doing—and even my role in it. It occurred to me that maybe I could help other moms in my situation. I knew how universal this quagmire was, how uniquely helpless parents feel when they see themselves as having to choose between denying a child the joys of childhood or letting them barrel toward bad health. I still felt that for me to write an instructive book for moms of overweight kids, with weight-loss tips and family-friendly recipes, was ludicrous. I was no expert; the missteps, fumbles, and frustrations of the past many months had demonstrated that quite clearly. But I could tell my story and share Bea’s experience, and maybe our personal narrative of what we’d gone through could be as inspiring as the guidebook I was not competent to write.
As my friend’s book agent helped me adapt my proposal from a how-to book to a memoir, he also shared the thrust of my story with an editor at Vogue. And just like that, the editor suggested I write a piece for the magazine. Vogue was interested in what it was like to undertake a weight-loss effort for an obese child when doing so proved so unexpectedly controversial—including the embarrassing and low moments that illustrated how hard the process was and how challenged I had been.
I was thrilled by the opportunity to get my story out in front of such a large national audience of women. I had never written an article for a magazine before, but even in my inexperience, I was aware of the considerable irony in writing about weight in a magazine that glorifies an unhealthy standard of female thinness. But it made a perverse kind of sense to me: maybe Vogue was just the right forum in which to write about how women like me sometimes need to put aside their insecurities—which fashion magazines had played a role in solidifying—in order to help their own children with health-threatening weight problems.
My article was to be featured in the “Up Front” section, which may well be renamed “Upper-Class White People’s Problems.” Its contents generally consist of essays by well-to-do women about their tribulations. Sometimes it’s something as serious as a chronic illness or the loss of a child. More often the articles center on romantic entanglements, spiritual quests, or luxurious efforts at self-improvement.
The problem I was writing about was not really one that affected rich people all that much. Overweight and obese Americans are disproportionately found in poorer populations. There’s a statistical correlation between obesity and lower socioeconomic status. I wasn’t sure whether Vogue’s readership would necessarily relate personally to my issue, but I felt the magazine provided a reputable, respectable forum in which to present it.
The column’s lengthy, first-person format would allow me to tell our story and get this issue out in the open: how taking on Bea’s weight problem made me the subject of unexpected judgment, hypocrisy, and isolation. How parents of obese kids fear damaging their children so much that they are paralyzed, unable to even broach the topic, leaving their children floundering. How schools, other parents, everyday food situations, and even healthful-eating initiatives inadvertently set obese children up to fail.
Vogue also wanted to photograph Bea and me together. When I shared that news with Bea, she was excited. But then one day she wasn’t so sure.
“If you are not comfortable with this article, tell me, and I will not write it,” I told Bea. “It is not a big deal at all. It is not worth it to write it if it will make you feel bad.”
“No, I want you to. I just don’t know if I want to be in the picture,” she said.
Her concern shook me enough that I reconsidered the idea of writing the essay at all. I’d previously mulled the cons of immortalizing Bea’s struggle in print but had convinced myself that they were outweighed by the pros of talking about this publicly in a way that confronted our hurdles and celebrated her resilience. People wrote about all kinds of issues with their children. Why should obesity be any different? Any recounting of our experience was only going to convey how incredible Bea was.
I thought that, as a society, we’d moved beyond blaming people for their clinical diagnoses. We no longer think of kids with learning disabilities as stupid. We don’t think drug addiction is the result of weak will. Mental illness is not something we expect people to just “snap out of” or keep under control. These are diseases that require help and intervention. Yet there’s still a powerful stigma attached to obesity, as though it is at least partially the fault of the lazy, gluttonous person who suffers from it. I wanted to help smash that myth. But not at the expense of Bea’s feelings.
I called the editor and warned him that Bea was having second thoughts. I said I was open to the possibility that she might change her mind, but at this point we should prepare for the likely event that she would not want to be photographed. A father of two, he said he understood.
With the pressure off, Bea did an about-face and insisted she most definitely, positively wanted to stay in the picture.
I wasn’t sure what to do. Jeff felt we should let Bea have the final say but thought we should seek a professional opinion. I called a trusted therapist who has extensive experience with children and always provides reassuring, sane advice when we’re experiencing a challenging moment in our family. I explained the situation to him over the phone.
His response was quick and definitive. The magazine article must be written. And a book, too. The issue was an important one that nobody was talking about. It needed to be discussed, and given what Bea and I had gone through, I had a story to tell that was relevant and could be helpful to lots of other parents.
However, Bea should be left out of it, he said. She should not collaborate on the book, as I had considered. And she should not appear in the Vogue magazine photo. This was my work. Bea should be kept separate from it.
Good advice. Got it. Done.
“You’re not going to be in the Vogue photo, Bea,” I told her later. “I’m sorry I offered it as a possibility.”
She was crestfallen. “But I want to!”
I was adamant. “Sorry, no.”
Days went by, and Bea reminded me repeatedly that she really, really wanted to be in the photo. She said this was something we’d accomplished together and she wanted to be a part of it. Eventually my husband and I relented.
We should have stood firm. I should have listened to the therapist’s advice. But I imagined the article coming out, next to a big picture of … just me? The story wasn’t mine alone. Bea and I were a team. My article was not about the efforts of a mother, but the journey of a mother and a daughter. Leaving Bea out of the image felt wrong.
I also wanted to give Bea an opportunity to celebrate her accomplishment—something I felt she had not sufficiently done yet. I knew she would relish having her hair and makeup done, trying on dresses, and being photographed by a professional photographer. In the shallowest way, I wanted her to have a once-in-a-lifetime day where she could feel like a star.
I also wanted to send her a clear message: You have accomplished something so unusual that a world-renowned magazine wants to spotlight you. You played the most important, active role in getting where you are today. Even though you’re just a kid, you took responsibility for your health and made really difficult changes. You deserve recognition.
I probably protest too much. Whatever excuses I might make in defense of my decision to let Bea pose for Vogue are irrelevant. In retrospect, it was not the right choice.
On the Sunday night befor
e the Friday photo shoot, Bea and I lay in bed together, each of us with a laptop. She logged into the Twitter account she had set up months before and rarely used (in the same time frame, David had racked up seventy followers and had written more than 300 tweets). She decided to compose a message.
“Going to sleep. Stoked for Friday,” she began. I glanced at her screen surreptitiously as she typed, curious to see how she was going to describe the photo shoot to her handful of followers. “On Friday I have something at school called a teach-and-tell which is like a show-and-tell but you teach the class about something.”
The Vogue shoot didn’t even register. Good for her for having solid priorities.
That Friday after school, a photographer and his assistant arrived and rearranged our furniture while a fashion assistant wheeled racks of clothes into Bea’s tiny room. A makeup artist and a hairstylist laid out their tools on our dining table. Plastic black trunks filled with shoes took up the better part of our living room floor.
Bea looked insanely cute in everything they tried on her. I wasn’t such an easy fit. Even the collective powers of Vogue were hard pressed to find attire that flattered my idiosyncratic build. But the editor managed to pull out a multicolored sheath that looked good, so we went with that. As someone whose wardrobe consists entirely of black and gray clothing, I felt like a rainbow had thrown up on me, but how can you argue with Vogue’s taste? I was just excited to be there.
Since everyone asks, I’ll tell you: no, we didn’t get to keep the clothes.
CHAPTER 22
All hell broke loose when the Vogue article came out. From the reaction in the blogosphere, you would have thought that I had maimed my daughter.
I’d assumed the piece would generate a little buzz on the mommy blogs and parent-oriented message boards online. I knew some aspects of what I’d written would be controversial, such as the very idea of putting a young child on a diet, or my occasional choice of lower-calorie processed foods over higher-calorie organic fare. I was truly interested to see what people had to say about it.
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