The Heavy (15 page)

I knew it was important for me to set aside my strongly held belief about the futility of exercise for weight loss and see to it that Bea had more activity in her schedule. One day Bea suggested she might be interested in taking karate. I went on the Internet and lucked into finding a traditional Japanese karate dojo right around the corner from our apartment.

We went one Saturday morning, and it was perfect. The place was a bright, minimalist studio, and the sensei who ran it was like a Hollywood version of the ideal karate instructor: firm but kind, disciplined and encouraging, serious but with a subtle sense of humor.

And Bea loved it instantly. Maybe it was the fact that it didn’t require more aerobic capacity or coordination than she has, so she didn’t feel like a moron doing it, as I so often did when I’d drop in on some random spin class with a friend. There was also an academic component to it, perfecting the movements in each kata and
memorizing the Japanese and English names of each stance, block, strike, punch, and kick. The clear benchmarks for progress and graduation to a new belt level—with the stripe of colored tape applied to the old belt when promotion was imminent, and a formal and very real test to pass before getting that new belt—also appealed to her.

Here, at last, was perhaps a sport—an exercise, some movement—that she would embrace and that I could stand. She agreed to go at least twice a week. We joined the dojo. I finally felt good that, between gymnastics and karate, Bea was getting formal regular exercise a few times a week.

I definitely considered that neither class provided the most efficient way to burn calories. But I’ve explained why that aspect of the activity wasn’t important to me. I simply wanted to send the message that physical activity is good. And this was a great way to do it. During those hours Bea was moving and enjoying it, and at least that time wasn’t being spent eating.

“You’re up about half a pound,” the third-string nutritionist lady noted pleasantly when Bea stepped on the scale.

“I don’t know if that reading is really accurate,” I interjected. “She usually wears leggings. Today she’s wearing jeans.”

“It’s okay,” the third-string nutritionist said. “Sometimes the scale goes up.”

“Well, yes,” I said defensively. “But in this case, I really do think it’s the fact that she’s wearing jeans.”

Upon arriving at the nutrition doctor’s office that March day, we’d been greeted by the nice but ineffectual third nutritionist. But she wasn’t alone. There was yet another new woman sitting in with her, apparently learning the ropes. This was the fourth person Bea, David, and I had met in this office. Yet another person who didn’t know us or our history but who was going to be privy to our weigh-ins and hear our personal details. For me, it wasn’t a
big deal. And David seemed to take it in stride. But Bea was visibly withdrawn.

As Bea had prepared to step on the scale, I’d noticed that she was wearing jeans. Not legging-type jeans: real, heavy denim jeans with buttons and a zipper and pockets. I knew right away this was going to affect what the scale said, and I encouraged her to take them off before weighing in. She refused. Understandably, she didn’t want to take her pants off in a room full of people, including one near-stranger and one complete stranger.

In case you’re wondering, I’ll skip ahead a bit and tell you that I went home that night and got on the scale holding a pair of Bea’s leggings, then got on a second time holding the jeans. Yes, I really did this. And guess what? I was a pound heavier with the jeans. So my concern that the jeans weighed more than the leggings was not unfounded.

The mood had turned sour from the discouraging weigh-in, although we’d arrived feeling positive. I was proud of our new exercise regimen. We’d made it through our Mexico vacation with admirable restraint, more or less keeping to our daily and weekly targets despite loads of temptation. To lighten the mood, I changed the subject.

“We just got back from Mexico!” I announced.

“How was it?” the third-string nutritionist asked.

“Great,” I said. “Everyone was really awesome about staying on the program. Bea worked really hard and did a great job.”

“It’s okay. It can be really hard to eat right on vacation,” she said, her voice dripping with understanding. My blood pressure started to rise. Why was this woman not getting it?

“She did great on vacation. She actually should be commended for how she did. I really think it’s the jeans.”

“How did you do on vacation, David?” she asked.

Silently Bea walked out of the room.

She went into the waiting room and started putting on her shoes. I waited a few seconds for the nutritionist to stop talking to David, whose vacation food choices were really kind of beside the point. I expected she would follow Bea to the waiting room to talk to her privately, or at least call out to her and ask what was wrong. But she did nothing of the sort. So I went out there.

I sat next to Bea, who was looking down at the floor.

I overheard the nutritionist continue the appointment with David. “Did you try any Mexican food?” she asked. I could not believe that conversation was going on while Bea had stormed out and no one had even blinked.

“Are you okay?” I asked Bea.

“No,” she said.

“Are you mad?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I totally understand. Do you want to leave?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Let’s get out of here.”

I went back into the office to fetch David.

“We’re going to go,” I announced. “I’ll call the office about scheduling the next appointment.” And we left.

I expected to receive a call from the main nutrition doctor over the next few days. Surely, I thought, the third-string nutritionist had told her that a patient had been upset enough to storm out of the office. Obviously, she would be concerned and would call to see how Bea was doing. No such call came.

“What should I do?” I asked Jeff.

“You shouldn’t go back. That doctor is annoying,” he pronounced in his typically blunt way, which I found so amusing and
also clarifying. “You understand how to do the program, so do it. I don’t think going to those stupid appointments is what’s going to help Bea lose weight.”

Indeed, it had been an ongoing challenge for me to drag the kids there: David got little out of it, and Bea had twice left feeling bad because of how an apparent (if illusory) weight gain had been handled. They were delighted by the prospect of not going to that office every Friday.

For me, it wasn’t such an easy decision. I liked the program, and I even liked the nutrition doctor. And we were losing weight. I worried it was foolhardy to try to continue without the structure and guidance of a nutritionist’s supervision. As with Weight Watchers, as with Alcoholics Anonymous, there was benefit in going to a meeting.

But Jeff’s argument was legitimate: this was something we needed to be able to do on our own. The goal was to take over the reins and maintain a healthful way of eating without the supervision of a professional. Maybe that time had come.

We didn’t go back.

The goal of any behavioral change is to do something you can live with independently. With our formal ties to the nutrition doctor severed, I wanted to make sure we were eating in a way that was sustainable for the long term. I wanted to make the program our own. I felt suddenly empowered to make some adjustments.

One of my first executive resolutions was abolishing unlimited late-night fruit snacks. I didn’t like how the requests were escalating later and later into the night, how I felt compelled to drag myself out of bed to wash and slice a piece of fruit because Bea had languidly called out from her room for an apple—something that was now happening two, three, four times a night.

I’d wrestled with the fruit ban. Fruit and vegetable snacks had always been “free,” un-fraught, and it was nice to be able to be relaxed about one food group. But I decided some limits needed to be set; it seemed to me that the volume of our fruit intake could, in fact, set us back.

I was careful not to extend this limitation to other times of day. Between after-school snack and dinner, Bea regularly had three or more pieces of fruit, in addition to those she had at school, and I was fine with that rate of consumption. But I felt it was fair to “close the kitchen” at a certain point. I understood from talking to parents of normal-weight kids that they did it. So I figured I could, too.

Another area I felt needed work was Bea’s relationship to food at school. From cafeteria fare to birthday cupcakes to class pizza parties, every day was a minefield. It was easy for Bea to feel isolated as the girl who couldn’t eat what the other kids ate, but letting her partake without restriction seemed impossible.

There are millions of obese kids in the United States, but for whatever reason, we don’t know any of them personally. I wish now that Bea and I could have looked just beyond our circle of friends—to the playground, the neighborhood, the buses and subways of New York—and seen that we were not alone. But at the time, all I could notice was that Bea’s social group was comprised almost entirely of wiry children who ate whatever they wanted, or blithely left half their lunches uneaten due to lack of interest. There was no other kid Bea knew going through the same struggle.

I knew she had moments of feeling left out, because she told me so.

“I feel cut off from the other kids, because I feel like they don’t have to go on a special diet,” she told me. “They don’t have to do something special. Just because I have to makes me different.”

And while youth culture today wonderfully encourages kids to celebrate their differences, this particular issue is usually left off the acceptance agenda. I wanted desperately to minimize this feeling of being “cut off,” as Bea put it. So I began by examining the behemoth of all school food: cafeteria lunch.

Anyone who’s spent time in a school cafeteria knows the lunch line is not for the weight conscious. I get it—in the school setting, in addition to the expediency of not bothering to make things low-calorie, there’s actually an argument to be made that lunches
should
contain lots and lots of calories. The school population is mostly made up of non-obese kids who are growing, need to be attentive in class, and probably run around a lot. On top of that, some of them come from low-income families that can’t afford enough food. These kids need to get hefty amounts of calories for their lunch money.

Thus, far from having calorie maximums for school lunches, there are actually government-mandated calorie
minimums
. Which, you may be surprised to hear me say, is as I think it should be. The underweight, very active, or poor should not have to suffer smaller portions and fewer calories because Bea and others like her are overweight. When I buy a pair of pants, I know I’m going to have to get them shortened, because I’m petite, and pants are designed to accommodate the tallest potential customer. Once manufactured, pants can’t be lengthened, but they can pretty easily be hemmed. I’m not thrilled about it, but I accept it. School lunch was similar: it was fair that Bea should have to adapt her behavior to a situation that was not calibrated for her specific nutritional needs.

I did feel that the calorie minimums were excessive, however, even for many healthy-weight kids.
During that year, the USDA required that school lunches for grades K–3 contain at least 633 calories, and grades 4–12 needed to get at least 785 calories. And that didn’t include the salad bar.
It bears noting that subsequently, these minimums were reduced, and maximums were introduced for the first time, with New York adopting a minimum/maximum range of 550–650 calories. But I couldn’t see how those numbers
could ever line up with Bea’s under-300-calorie lunch requirement.

Initial attempts to let Bea eat lunch like a normal kid had backfired just enough for me to be scared off school lunches for a while. When we first started the traffic light program, I had continued to allow Bea to partake in school lunch once a week, on “pizza Fridays.” I didn’t want her to feel alienated, and she had explained its appeal in such poetic terms that I felt it was important to let her keep enjoying it.

“Do you still want to have pizza at school on Fridays?” I’d asked her.

“Yes!” she’d responded. “The cheese kind of melts in your mouth and the tomato sauce kind of blends in with everything.” When a food is described so adorably, how could I not try to oblige?

But fast-forward a couple of weeks to an early appointment with the nutrition doctor, when Bea had asked a question that alarmed me.

“So if I have pizza at school,” she had asked the doctor, “can I also get something else? Like a cold corn salad?”

Thinking about this exchange now, I chuckle. A cold corn salad? That’s my Bea. Not french fries, not an ice cream sandwich—a cold corn salad. She’s so endearingly random. But at the time I was secretly rolling my eyes:
No, you may
not
have a cold corn salad. You’re getting pizza, and you’re trying to negotiate a side dish?
An insidious “salad,” with its inevitable oil, lavished on corn, which banks over 130 calories per cup?

The nutrition doctor had fielded the query well. “No,” she explained. “If you eat a slice of pizza for lunch, that has to be all you have.”

But Bea’s question confirmed for me that we were flirting with
disaster by letting her get on that cafeteria line in the first place. Queuing up to snag her pizza confronted her with dozens of other choices, all of which had to be declined. Bea had been demonstrating amazing strength and resolve when provided with adequate guidance, but she still had the typical lapses in nutritional judgment that were appropriate to a seven-year-old. She wasn’t ready for the responsibility yet. So I started sending her to school with a pre-made lunch on Fridays, and our experiment with pizza Friday abruptly ended.

Bea was fine with the shift. In the funny way that kids have of changing their minds from one staunchly held point of view to an opposing one, she had decided that school lunch was gross and that she preferred the lunch I made her.