The Heavy (20 page)

It was a daunting challenge to impart to Bea the idea that my refusal to let her be an unhealthy weight was different from a desire to make her thin. I knew she probably didn’t grasp the difference, especially since my weight was healthy, but that fact did not exempt me from being disappointed that I wasn’t thin. While I tried to stop expressing negative feelings about my own body out loud, I also tried to make sure Bea knew I loved hers.

I was focused on Bea, but in dieting alongside her, I was losing weight consistently, too. It was gratifying to see that by regulating my eating for the sake of setting an example for Bea—not allowing myself a gargantuan muffin for breakfast or two PB&J sandwiches
for dinner—I could actually sustain a lower weight more easily than I’d been able to previously.

And I had never, ever in my life eaten so nutritiously. I was averaging three apples a day. I was even eating salads, since my husband insisted on them, and they were “free.” Protein was an everyday occurrence. I was making progress.

I celebrated the kids’ achievements with gifts for certain weight milestones. David got a present when he finally—victoriously—stepped on the scale and saw it had passed the fifty-pound mark. He picked an electric pencil sharpener. And Bea and I periodically chose a certain number lower than her current weight and tied it to some item she wanted.

Associating achievement with a specific number on the scale was likely not a strategy a doctor would have approved of, especially since we tended to celebrate in such superficial, girly ways. But I’m unapologetic. It felt right. It would be great if Bea could be motivated to stick to her diet entirely by the promise of reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, but that’s not reality.

I’m aware that some experts say that our “reward culture” is bad for kids. But Jeff and I—and 100 percent of all the other parents we know—have been rewarding our children for achieving goals and improving their behavior since they were babies. There were gifts (bribes?) for potty training, for not fighting, for suffering through flu shots, for remembering to dress themselves and brush their own teeth in the morning. And why not? To a large extent, our new way of eating was a difficult and often annoying form of behavior modification, and adhering to it seemed to merit incentives as well.

I suppose I could have insisted she choose a gift with some gravitas, something that related to her achievement: a kit for growing organic vegetables, an encyclopedia of the human body, a special
reusable snack cooler. But she wanted clothes, so I got her clothes. A few strappy summer tops from the Gap. A white, flouncy flower-girl-type dress from Crewcuts. The latter was particularly sweet because it was a dress she had wanted but hadn’t previously been able to fit into even at the largest size.

She often asked whether she could get a hair feather as her gift, and I said no. Not because I felt it sent the wrong message, but because I kind of irrationally hated those hair feathers. In the spring of that year, salons were gluing or clipping colorful, thin feathers into kids’ hair all over the city. A few of Bea’s classmates had them, and she really wanted one. She also wanted pierced ears. (She also really wanted braces—go figure.) Some things had to wait.

In many areas, I encourage my children to accept aspects of themselves that fall outside the norm. I celebrate David’s choice of pink as his favorite color, even as his peers try to shame him out of it. I don’t make my kids attend some extracurricular activity they’re not interested in, just because “everyone else” is. I don’t even like the word
normal
. But as far as Bea’s weight was concerned, I yearned for her to be normal. In this case, there was a correlation between a medically healthy weight and a socially acceptable weight. Being normal in this area meant maximizing her opportunities in life.

I wanted Bea to love herself and her body. I wanted to find the perfect line between insisting she not be unhealthy and encouraging her to accept herself as she was once she was at a healthy point, even if it meant she was still heavier than most of her friends or the girls she saw on TV. I wanted her to be vigilant about her eating in order to not cross the border back into obesity, yet not be obsessed with food and her weight. I didn’t know whether achieving that balance was possible.

When the summer arrived, I started to get concerned about Bea’s height.

Having not set foot in a doctor’s office for many months, I measured Bea’s height as best I could at home, standing her up against a wall and drawing a pencil mark at the top of her head, then measuring that. These readings were obviously not exact science, but even in their crudeness, there was no mistaking the fact that she was not taller than four foot six. The measurements never, no matter how I tried to stretch them, ever exceeded the height I remembered her being measured at back in January.

This worried me for two reasons. On the dumbest level, I was bothered by the fact that her BMI measurement was not being helped by the growth I had expected. All the hopeful projections I’d typed into the CDC BMI calculator, in which I’d guessed she’d grown an inch, three-quarters of an inch, even half an inch—were irrelevant. She was still four foot six. And whereas a goal weight
of seventy-eight pounds rendered her healthy for her age at four feet seven inches, at four feet six inches she’d have to get down to seventy-five pounds.

Three pounds doesn’t sound like a lot. To give you a sense of proportion, it’s equal to an average-height woman (like me) having to lose four pounds, which I can do in around two weeks. But given the rate to which we’d slowed, I knew those three pounds were going to take a while. Bea was losing a pound a month at best.

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
.