by Alice Ward
I stared at the mother for a solid five seconds before turning my attention back to the young girl. “It’s about finding confidence in yourself, Emily,” I said gently. “Don’t do it for a boy, or for your mother, or for anyone else, or it won’t last. Do it for you. It’s a lifestyle change. And I promise you, it’s not as terrible as it seems.”
Emily lifted her head and studied me, doubt clear in her dark eyes.
I gave her a gentle smile. “Believe me, I know. I used to be unhealthily overweight too, until I discovered that eating well can not only taste good, it can be very satisfying.”
Mrs. Aker stared at me, eyes narrowed. “You were fat?”
People didn’t believe it, considering that I was now a petite size two. In addition to working out, I followed a strict vegan diet. It wasn’t for everyone, but I couldn’t recommend it enough.
“I was clinically obese, yes,” I corrected, giving her a pointed look. “From the time I was very small through most of high school. No one supported me or told me that eating right could not only be easy, the food could taste really good.” I turned back to Emily, softening my voice. “I’m strictly vegan, but I have plans based on what fits you best. I’ll give you tips on ways to make healthy foods taste really good.” I winked at her. “Even good for that sweet tooth of yours. And you’ll find they’re simple to make, and they’ll give you so much more energy.”
Emily wrinkled her nose. “Are you sure?”
“I promise! You’ll be running circles around your mom,” I said with a laugh, tapping her knee. I pulled out a laminated counter card with the food requirements on it and pointed all the particulars out to her. “Why don’t you give it a try. I’ll give you a bunch of recipe ideas to get you started. And I guarantee if you start with it, it’ll make you feel like a new person.”
She still looked doubtful, but when she looked up at me again, a tiny gleam of hope was shining in her eyes. “Okay, I guess.”
I pointed to a small section in the corner of the card. “With this plan, you can eat a dessert once a day. Even Heigh-di-Hos, if that’s what you want. Just one though. The key is moderation, not deprivation.” I grinned at her as she nodded. “See? Not that bad.”
“Just one?” Emily asked, her voice small.
“Yes. And I want you to really enjoy that one. Take a small bite and chew it at least ten times. Taste the flavor, savor it. Then take another, chew ten times. Make it last instead of scarfing it down.”
This got Emily’s interest. “Why ten times?”
“Well, it’s ten times for soft food and up to thirty times for dense food like steak. The key is really breaking that food down so your stomach doesn’t have to do so much work and it can pass through your system more quickly. Plus, eating slowly lets your stomach ‘talk’ to your brain and let it know that it’s full. When you eat quickly, that communication doesn’t happen until you’re stuffed and miserable.”
Emily nodded. “That makes sense.”
Mrs. Aker took the card, as well as the other information I offered, and slipped it into her expensive handbag. “Well, I suppose we’ll give it a try,” she said, glowering at her daughter. “At this point, we’re at the end of our ropes.”
I gritted my teeth as I showed them to the door. “It would be wonderful if the entire family offered positive support to Emily as she adjusts to her new plan. And I still recommend that you remove the sweets from the house entirely,” I suggested gently. “I know this is Emily’s fight, but you know what they say about a shared burden.”
She exhaled a long-suffering breath. “I suppose.”
I wanted to strangle the woman. “Remember, thin doesn’t equal healthy. One in four skinny people are metabolically fat, which is just as unhealthy as being obese. Just because you and your children have a more robust metabolism than Emily doesn’t mean that the chemical laden foods you’re feeding them meet their nutritional requirements.”
Mrs. Aker looked like I punched her in the face before nodding and stepping through the door. I got the feeling it was in one ear, out the other, but I’d work on her attitude as I worked with her daughter long term.
When I waved goodbye to Emily, she seemed down again. Well, no wonder. A mother like that probably wasn’t doing her any favors, kicking her while she was down. My parents, who were both workaholics and never around when I needed them, hadn’t been much better. All I wanted to do was pull Emily into my arms and give her a great big hug.
When they were gone, I brewed myself a cup of apple-cinnamon tea before pulling out my laptop. I sat back on the sofa, opening a document for my latest project — a proposal to the Manhattan legislators, urging them to get their act together when it came to school lunches.
There was an open forum on school lunches coming up at the Children’s Hospital, and my supervisor had granted me a fifteen-minute window to present there. A thousand people who had a hand in providing lunches to the city’s schools would be there to debate the issue. It was an honor because all of the other presenters on our side of the issue were physicians or PhDs, but I’d been so passionate when I talked to him that he agreed I should be on the lineup.
I was nervous about the presentation, but the thought of what was going on in our city schools was the real reason I stayed up nights. A good percentage of children in the city relied on school lunches and breakfasts for their nutrition, and if we kept forcing crap down their throats, I’d see more and more kids like Emily coming through my door. And the ones who couldn’t afford my services? They’d graduate from school nutritionally deprived.
My fingers raced over the keyboard as I jabbed in a few sentences, feeling my outrage growing as I thought back to Emily. So many kids these days were suffering, and it broke my heart because I knew it would only lead to depression, body-image disorders, and low self-esteem. We, as adults, didn’t make it easy to be healthy. No, all we ever did was throw shit like high fructose corn syrup and simple carbohydrates down their throats. We favored quick, easy, and cheap instead of fresh, wholesome, and good-for-you.
When I finished the letter to my district’s senator, I read it over and smiled. It was impassioned and intelligent without being too preachy, at least I hoped that was how it came across. Now, I just needed to finish the proposal and practice my fifteen-minute speech that I’d deliver at the open forum.
Growing up, I’d always been the shy wallflower, like Emily, the girl who didn’t want to attract attention. These days, I wanted to ruffle feathers. Well, certain people’s feathers. I wanted to call attention to a cause, not myself.
I sat back, rubbing my neck. All that passion had produced massive tension in my neck and back.
Nothing that couldn’t be solved by a quick jaunt on the ellipticals. I texted Leah, my best friend. Want to hit the gym in twenty?
Hell yes, Leah texted back, almost immediately.
Leah could always be counted on to accompany me to the gym. She was almost as big of a health freak as I was, though she was the type who was so effortlessly thin I should’ve hated her. She also worked at Children’s Hospital, but in the physical therapy department in the east wing. We met in college and had been friends ever since. I rarely ever went to the gym without her, because it was so convenient, right next-door, a five-minute walk for each of us.
I found her in the locker room, already suited up in her tank top and workout capris. “How was your day?”
“Stellar,” I said, rolling my eyes and rubbing my temples as I kicked out of my heels.
“That good?” She grabbed a bottle of water from the bench and took a sip, a smile playing at her lips.
“Sometimes I think parents want their children to fail,” I said with a sigh, unbuttoning my blouse and wiggling out of my skirt. “It feels like all I ever see are parents who are putting unrealistic expectations on their kids, wanting them to be models of perfection to compensate for the shortcomings in their own lives. It’s depressing.”
Leah leaned against a bank of lockers a
nd coiled her long, curly mane of blonde hair up into a bun at the nape of her neck. “That sucks. I don’t know how you do it, Jule. Seriously.”
“Yeah. I mean, take this one girl. She’s not making bad eating choices on her own. Someone stocked the pantry full of Heigh-di-Hos.” I shook my head as I slipped into my workout clothes, then tied on my sneakers. “Maybe if her mom took the time to be a parent to her child and stopped undermining her, this wouldn’t have happened. And yet she puts all the blame on the kid. I feel sad for that young girl.”
I went to the mirror and looked at myself as I gathered my own blonde hair into a ponytail. I was cute, not pretty, nothing to write home about. I scowled at the mirror. Here I was, years later, still thinking negatively about myself.
Say something nice.
When I first started to seriously attempt to lose weight, that had been my deal with myself. Once a day at least, I had to look in the mirror and say something nice about the way I looked.
At first, I couldn’t. I just stood there, berating every single part of my body until one day I noticed that I had the kind of full lips people spent a lot of money to have. So, they became my mantra. Then I started complimenting my eyes. My hair. I stopped biting my nails and complimented them.
As I started feeling better about more parts of me, it became easier to accept that I wasn’t all bad. And when I stopped hating myself, I started making better choices. Now, my body was slim, the model of fitness, but that old habit of berating myself still snuck in from time to time.
It’d been a long time coming, shedding all the extra pounds I’d put on by rebelling against a mother who insisted on my nanny feeding me cardboard and tofu for dinner every night. No, most of the time, when I was away from school, my snacks had consisted of a soda and a bag of Doritos. It wasn’t until a few months before college, one-hundred pounds overweight and totally sluggish, that my life changed. While trying to decide what to major in, I took Nutrition 101, and it opened my eyes.
Six years later, here I was, a Certified Clinical Nutritionist. I couldn’t lie, it was my dream job. As much as I complained to Leah, it was only because I felt the pain of my clients so deeply. This was my passion. I wanted everyone to embrace the healthy lifestyle I lived and loved.
“Ready,” I said to Leah as I grabbed my own water bottle.
The gym wasn’t crowded today. We were able to snag two ellipticals right next to each other, in front of the windows overlooking busy Broadway.
As she set her elliptical for the typical sixty-minute jaunt, and I set mine, she said, “I guess it’s not a good day for either of us. I nearly got myself clocked by a twelve-year-old paraplegic.”
“Really?”
The poor kid. I felt stupid for complaining about my obesity woes when poor Leah had people with real life-threatening injuries to take care of.
She nodded. “It’s always the same. You get pushback first, before gradually, acceptance. I’m sure you’re familiar with that. The key is to just be firm and persistent, and eventually, they get the message that you’re trying to do good.”
I started to advance into the first uphill phase, and I calmed my breathing so I wouldn’t exert myself too quickly. Nutrition issues may not have been as immediately life-threatening as a car wreck or the other things Leah had to deal with, but they were no less serious. “Yeah. I have to get my butt in gear to present at that open forum. The obesity problem in schools is getting out of hand.”
Leah laughed. “You need to loosen up, girl. You’re wound so tight.”
“What? No, I’m not. It’s true. The obesity problem…”
I trailed off when I realized Leah wasn’t paying attention. She’d heard my sales pitch enough to recite it herself, anyway.
Okay, maybe I was wound a little too tight.
I increased my pace and looked over at my friend. Leah was smiling as a muscular, body-building type took the machine next to her. As he dropped his phone into the cupholder, he gave her a smile — no man could resist Leah’s charms. She was tall and statuesque and deadly when it came to the opposite sex.
She looked at me and mouthed, He’s hot.
I nodded. Oh, yes, he was. And his body was clearly his bright and shiny temple. The only thing I’d found, though, with men like that, the type who kissed their biceps good night, was that they didn’t have eyes for anyone but themselves. I had yet to find a man who was the total package — who took care of himself and cared about his fellow human beings. That man probably didn’t exist.
Go for it, I mouthed back.
She reached over, grabbed his phone, and jabbed in her number, easy as that. The guy grinned. “Text you later.” With a wink, he went over to pump some iron.
She smiled at her phone. “Brock. That’s his name. That’s a sports reporter name if ever I heard one.” She deepened her voice. “Brock Winters, reporting from KABC in New York. How about those Mets?”
I laughed.
“I’ll give him until tonight. If not…” She made like she was snipping with scissors. “Don’t give them an inch or they’ll take a mile. This is hardball.”
I only wished dating was that easy for me. It wasn’t that I was picky, or a pushover. I didn’t even have the chance to be any of those things. I just wasn’t… Leah. Men didn’t swarm around me like bees. No, I thought I was inadvertently wearing man-repellant perfume.
“So, will you go out with him if he texts?”
“Not right away. Besides, you know I have that conference in Vegas all next week. I’ll string him along until after that. The more string you put out there, the harder they try to pull. Always make them pull.”
Yet another little nugget of dating advice from Leah that I’d file away to use… never. The opportunity never came up.
Frustrated at myself, I pushed harder on the elliptical, my hamstrings straining with the effort.
“You really need to go for it,” she said, increasing her speed too.
“I go for it every day,” I panted between breaths, knowing exactly what she meant by the word “it.”
“No. Mostly you just hide from it. When was the last time you got some, girl?”
I cringed at the question, thinking back to high school, the first and only time I’d ever gotten “some.” That time, though nearly seven years earlier, had shaped and was still shaping all my encounters with men. Leah knew I had issues when it came to trusting men, but she didn’t know the half of the reason why. And she didn’t know how truly pathetic my sex life was. For a twenty-three-year-old single girl, alone in the city, I actually thought some nuns got more action.
Sweat was starting to bead at my temples, so I switched on the fan, hoping it would drown out her voice. “Not having this conversation!”
She shrugged. “You should still date, at least.”
“No, I really shouldn’t. I have too much on my mind. How do you expect me to make a difference in the world if I’m thinking about men?”
“Everyone could use a breather. Even you, the future conquering hero of childhood obesity. I mean, even Abraham Lincoln took time off for nookie.”
I stared at her. Seriously? “And you know this, how?’
She grabbed her phone out of her cup holder. “Look. I have the perfect guy to set you up with. He’s cute and sweet, and—”
“Married?” I rolled my eyes. Because the last guy she’d set me up with had three kids and a wife in New Jersey, something I found out when he showed up and was still wearing a wedding ring. “I’m not going on any more blind dates that you set up.”
“No, this guy is legit. He had a breakup a year ago and has been struggling to get back into the dating scene. He’s my brother’s college roommate’s… someone. Cousin? I forget.”
I gaped at her. “You forget? Have you even met the guy?”
She shrugged. “No, but my brother said he’s legit.”
“Le-ah.” I gave her a look. “Your brother is thirty and still thinks beer is a food group.”
&
nbsp; She backed off, thank god. I was in no mood to argue this. She knew some of my history. She knew that I’d never actually had a real boyfriend. All I ever had was a series of boring or self-absorbed losers who paled in comparison to a good book and a bubble bath at home, by myself. The few men I did like always disappeared after the first date, as if I’d been giving off warning signals to stay away. It was enough to give me a complex. After all, I’d once read that you attracted the type of man you deserved. Did I really deserve a string of total assholes I wouldn’t even wish on my worst enemy?
“I don’t know how you do it,” she sighed as our time dwindled down, and we went into cooldown mode. My muscles were straining, happily worked over, and I was breathing hard. It felt good.
“What? Be single? It’s simple, when you’ve dated the human refuse I’ve been privy to. Alone is the much better option.”
“But you keep on trying. You don’t give up,” she said, her glass-half-full spirit shining through. “Don’t you want to find someone?”
I shook my head. Nope, I didn’t want a guy. Didn’t need a guy. Had just about sworn off guys forever. Guys. Phooey. Worse for my health than Heigh-di-Hos.
Well, most of the time. Sometimes, when I laid in bed in my lonely apartment watching Netflix, I wished I had someone to talk to other than Hobbes. I loved my cat, but I sometimes wished for someone who would stir my mind, maybe even like the same quirky things as me. Things like classic books and R&B music and whatever. But those guys simply didn’t exist.
Besides, this wasn’t the time. Now, I had to hit the shower so I could go back home and finish that proposal. The children of this city depended on me.
After work, I took the subway to my apartment in Queens, thinking of all the wonderful words I could pour into my proposal for the upcoming open forum. I jogged up three flights of stairs to my apartment, something I always did to make sure my ass stayed high and tight. I opened the door, flipped on the lights, snuggled Hobbes, and made myself a dinner for one of curried lentils and brussels sprouts.