The Heavy (21 page)

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.

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.

And while Bea was outstanding in her adherence to the program, the whining and complaining were repetitive and draining. We fought about some aspect of the regimen every day. In the meantime, I had to worry about toeing the tenuous line between being nurturing and tough, loving and strict, supportive and determined. And between packed lunches, David’s separate dinner, and everyone’s different breakfasts, I was preparing eight different meals and five snacks every day.

It was a lot. I started to criticize Jeff anytime he took the initiative to choose a restaurant, order food, or feed Bea.

If he ordered in food, I’d ask him what he’d ordered for Bea, then ask him to please call back and change it. The Japanese food order needed to be adjusted to excise the glaze from the sea bass and cancel the miso soup, which he had assumed was “free” but wasn’t. Why was I the only person who ever thought about these things? When would I be able to let someone else dictate what Bea was going to eat? When would Bea be able to dictate what she was going to eat?

On such occasions, Jeff would often offer his irritated resignation:

“I’m done,” he would say.

Done
. He generally announced he was “done” when I reached a breaking point and expressed my stress through bitchiness. His ability to be “done,” to walk off and leave me to carry on temporarily without him, underscored an essential difference in the roles we play as parents.

“Well, I
can’t
be done,” I responded at one point. “Someone has to do this.”

That’s part of being the heavy. You can never be “done.” You can never throw up your hands. I hadn’t undertaken this enterprise because of some philosophical idea; it was to help one of the three people I loved most in the world.

Jeff may not have approved of every choice I made in this process—God knows, I didn’t, either. And as with every aspect of my parenting, there was plenty of room for improvement. But, damn it, I was doing
something
.

“You can’t just be the martyr here,” my husband countered. “You need to let other people take on some of the responsibility.
It’s not helping anyone if you’re the only person carrying the burden. You can’t do this alone.”

Jeff was right—I couldn’t do this alone. But I’d learned that I couldn’t rely on others to provide the support necessary to keep Bea on track. That left only one person who could potentially accept the responsibility for managing Bea’s diet: Bea herself.

Approximately once an hour, every hour we were together, Bea could be expected to complain, “I’m hungry!” But what did that mean? There were many possibilities, and in my soul-searching on this topic I have considered all of them. It was, of course, possible that her stomach was really too empty. But given what I saw her eat and how quickly she claimed to want more, that seemed unlikely. I’d also read that sometimes hunger was actually thirst in disguise. Was she maybe just thirsty? I suggested water, but that recommendation never went over too well.

I wondered whether she was confusing a generalized desire for food with physical hunger. It’s an error most people fall victim to, myself included. There’s hunger and there’s appetite. It can be hard to tell the difference.

Then there are the times when emotion drives appetite. Maybe she was bored, tired, or stressed, or maybe she needed some special attention from Mom. Maybe complaining of being hungry was a
way to seek comfort. I’ve discussed the issue of emotional eating and its appropriateness. But I mentioned that I think it’s important to acknowledge the connection, not to allow yourself to just think, “I want to eat,” versus “I’m bored and I want to cook something” or “I’m stressed and I would like to relax with some soup.” I wanted to cater to Bea’s emotions when they needed tending—either with support or with soup—but it was hard to know the root cause of each individual proclamation of hunger. Especially because there were so many of them.

So desperate was I to get Bea’s weight loss restarted that I tenuously began confronting an issue with her that I’d avoided, despite my willingness to smash taboos and my refusal to let any topic be off-limits: I started challenging the veracity of Bea’s statements that she was hungry.

It had started with the endless requests for nighttime fruit snacks, which I’d curtailed. Then I started feeling irritated when a single request for fruit came too closely on the heels of a meal or snack. She’d have just finished a filling lunch, followed up by a piece of fruit (or two), and then she would ask for a strawberry-and-whipped-cream parfait or other snack.