The Heavy (7 page)

It’s easy to look at chubby kids and assume they’ll grow out of their heaviness or that their size is merely an aesthetic disadvantage instead of a medical one. It feels hysterical to diagnose a child whose age is still in the single digits with a disease as dire as obesity. That may be part of why a solution to the problem is eluding us. We’re unwilling to accept the severity and permanence of the disease in children so young. Especially when it falls to us to help them.

I had not previously considered the possibility that Bea was in the obese category. But in a weird way, I was strengthened by the label. It gave me a diagnosis to cling to, to excuse the inevitable deprivation that was to come. No one looks askance at the parent of a diabetic kid when she steers her child away from sugar. It can be embarrassing to see a mother grab an Almond Joy out of her kid’s hand, but you can sympathize with her if you know that her son has a nut allergy. Knowing that Bea was obese officially gave her a disease that it was my responsibility to treat. What might have been construed as overzealous micromanagement could now be chalked up to good parenting. Or so I hoped and rationalized.

As we wrapped up the appointment, I purchased a copy of the
doctor’s book. It had a recipe for brownies, which was one of the few desserts that had ever attracted David’s interest.

“Check it out, Dave, we can make these,” I said. There were also recipes for chicken Parmesan, chocolate chip cookies, and breakfast burritos. My not-so-subtle message:
This is going to be fun, kids!

I flipped to the index of green-light values in the back of the book. The first thing I looked for was pizza. The kids regularly ate their school’s pizza lunch every Friday (while I enjoyed a day off from preparing lunch), and I wanted to see how much it was going to cost them. A yellow light and a green light, apparently—whatever that meant. We had to wait until the following week to find out how many “green lights” (two of which were exchangeable for a yellow light, four of which were exchangeable for a red light) we were allotted for each meal.

But I was excited to get started with a real plan for Bea and to get my own weight back down to the level I’d grown accustomed to. I felt a kind of adrenaline-fueled exhilaration. This was familiar territory for me: the first few days of a new diet, full of hope and anticipation, where the food shopping felt fun, and even words such as
tablespoon
in the recipes for the new diet foods sounded tasty. Best of all, I wasn’t doing it on my own—I had teammates!

We walked out of the office into the midday sunshine.

“Should we get lunch?” Jeff asked. The question chilled me. Well, yes, of course we should get lunch. But what would be an appropriate lunch for our situation? What was “lunch” going to mean from now on? We were about to spend a week in this weird limbo, knowing we were eating too much and not yet knowing how much less we should eat.

As we always do when we want to eat light, we decided to get Japanese food. We found ourselves at a table at a busy, dark, ramen restaurant. As Jeff and the kids looked at their menus, I paged
through the food index of the book I’d just purchased, to look up the traffic-light values of various Japanese dishes.

“Edamame is free!” I exclaimed. “We can have as much of it as we want.”

“Cool!” Jeff chimed in, while the kids ignored us.

We ordered edamame. And soup, and shrimp tempura, and sushi, and chicken teriyaki. I added up the green lights, not knowing what the target was, but knowing we were undoubtedly exceeding it. But I was unprepared to justify a change in our usual ordering habits just yet.

It was strange that first week, holding the keys to the program in our hands but not actually knowing how much we were allowed to eat. It was like having a vial of pills for our disease but not knowing the dosage. Bea wouldn’t talk much about it, but David was oddly into it. One day at home, he spent half an hour making a pen-and-ink drawing of the cover of our new nutrition bible, inscribing it with the motivational phrase “Let’s eat healthy!”

At some point David and Bea asked me what their BMIs were, and together we located them on a chart in the book. Days later, upon opening the book to find a recipe, I noticed two slivers of yellow Post-it notes that David had carefully attached to the relevant pages.
Dave is healthy weight
, the first one read, written in David’s small, tidy handwriting and affixed to the boys’ BMI chart. The other, pasted alongside the girls’ chart in the same handwriting, read simply, “Bea is obese.”

So Bea knew she was not just overweight but obese. She also knew that this “nutritional regimen” she was on is what grown-ups commonly called a “diet.” I had the same attitude toward these words as I did toward telling Bea she was, indeed, “overweight.” Once it became clear that Bea’s problem wasn’t going to be addressed by changes barely discernible to her, such as extra activity
and more fruits and vegetables, it didn’t make sense to shy away from frank terminology in discussing the issue.

This fear of calling a spade a spade reminded me of when Bea and David were in preschool and had to take a couple of standardized tests that are required of children in New York City seeking admission to selective public schools. The conventional wisdom was,
For God’s sake, don’t let your child know he’s taking a test! Tell him he’s going to do “special work with a teacher,” or meeting with “a lady who is interested in finding out what four-year-olds know.” But not a test!

That’s what I don’t get. Since when is my four-year-old aware of what “test” means? And to the extent that he is, is the association necessarily negative? What “tests” has he really been exposed to at this point? A hearing test? A test of his reflexes? I hardly think the word is conjuring an image of sitting in a lecture hall with a blue test booklet in front of him, sweating over organic chemistry problems. So why can’t we just call it a test and present the word as a neutral thing—maybe even a good thing?

When my kids found out in kindergarten that they were getting “homework,” they were elated! Couldn’t wait. It was something big kids got to do. It was cool to them. Words that have negative connotations to us do not necessarily have those same associations for our children. I really didn’t understand why people seemed to think their kids were going to freak out and blow their kindergarten assessments if they thought of it as a “test.”

Growing up, I remember being annoyed at the value judgment inherent in descriptive terms about someone’s physique. Why aren’t “fat” and “thin” as neutrally applied as “tall” and “short”? Why is what is socially considered to be “normal” such a narrow sliver of what is medically accepted to be normal? I should be able to describe people as “fat” if they are, indeed, fat, without that
being considered an insult. Similarly, if I call people “thin,” they should be assumed to be as deviant from the norm as the people I just called “fat.” And individuals who are “normal”—which is a wider swath of people than most of society will acknowledge—are neither thin nor fat.

Meanwhile, shouldn’t “diet” connote what it literally means: the kind of food that a person normally eats every day? Like a vegetarian diet or a gluten-free diet. Why is it automatically assumed to refer to a weight-loss effort? I wanted to take the charge out of these words so that they weren’t so painful to hear.

Another example of how I felt our culture has fallen off the rails a bit with regard to these issues: I can’t even begin to zip up my mother’s size-8 dresses from the 1960s, but now if I go to the Gap, I’m sometimes a size small. If I’m a small, what are the loads of women who are way, way thinner than I am wearing? (The answer, apparently, can be found in the existence of inane new sizes including XXS and 00.) I assume that size numbering has evolved to protect women’s egos as we’ve gotten heavier as a population, but is that a good thing? We’re also served larger sodas and bigger portions of food than we used to be, because we like to eat more. Whole industries have changed to accommodate our new level of unhealthiness, instead of pushing to alleviate it.

People often tell me I look “thin,” and it’s impossible to tell whether that’s some sort of complimentary way of saying “average weight” or whether they truly think I am below normal. Then, of course, we’re supposed to feel great when someone calls us “skinny,” a word that really should have a negative connotation. And some women actually take it as a compliment when, after dropping a few pounds, someone remarks that they look “anorexic.”

I feel bad using the word
fat
around overweight people (see, I
was just too scared to call them fat, and I’m only speaking hypothetically!), and it’s a reflection on everyone’s discomfort with acknowledging weight issues. If a fat person says, like so many of us do, “I’m fat,” there’s this impulse to rush to contradict her. “No, you’re not!” we want to say, because somehow the word itself is so cutting. But is “You’re not fat!” the correct response when the person is, indeed, objectively fat?

In our discussions of this issue, Bea and I usually used the word
overweight
, which seemed to strike the appropriate balance between colloquial and medical. It was less harsh-sounding than
fat
and less clinical than
obese
. But Bea knew where she fell on the BMI chart, and while I assured her we were going to get her to a healthy weight, the knowledge that she was different, that she had this problem with a weird name, was hard for her to take.

One evening we were chatting about her day at school when she got quiet, then teary. I asked what she was thinking about that was making her sad.

“We were all reading this magazine at school and it was talking about how unhealthy school lunches were,” she explained. “And there’s a section in all the articles that tells you some tricky words. And one of the words was
obese
. And after we read the thing, my teacher said, ‘None of you in this class are obese.’ And it just made me really sad because I know that I am, and I’m just trying to change that. And it’s so hard. I just want to blend in with everyone.”

At moments like this, I faltered in my confidence about my approach. I knew she was sad because she felt different. But were her tears from the feeling of being overweight or from the struggle of fighting against it? Was she crying because she was obese or because I had forced her to acknowledge her disease and how
difficult it was to change? Was the work we were doing together bringing her to tears or helping to get her to a point where there wasn’t anything to cry about? I wasn’t sure.

Ultimately, I knew that we had to keep trying to get to a place where she was physically healthy and emotionally happy. The nutrition doctor’s office seemed the right starting point. When we returned there the next week, we were seen by an associate nutritionist, an upbeat, professional young woman. Bea and I were each a few ounces lighter, thanks to the stabs in the dark I had made at reducing our food intake. David and Jeff weighed in, too, but I couldn’t tell you what the scale said because again, really, I was only concerned with Bea’s status.

I do, however, remember what Bea was wearing when she stepped on the scale: a T-shirt and leggings. This was important because I knew that, from that moment on, I was going to have to make sure she dressed in a similar outfit every Friday to eliminate the chance that the variable of her clothing would affect the results of her weigh-in.

During my five months on Weight Watchers after David was born, I made sure that I wore a short-sleeved T-shirt and jersey drawstring pants to every weekly meeting, regardless of the weather. As a seasoned self-weigher, I had a pretty good idea of how many pounds an outfit could add. My beloved Weight Watchers meeting leader used to joke that when she was trying to lose weight, she’d even hesitate before putting on lipstick prior to stepping on the scale. And while I wasn’t quite going that far, I was not about to let a wool turtleneck or a pair of thick socks stand in the way of an accurate weight reading for any of us.

The problem was that our appointments were going to be after school. My preference would have been to weigh in at the beginning
of the day, before eating or drinking anything. Tracking our weight at 4:00 p.m. every Friday seemed to provide many opportunities for misleading results. What if Bea had a big snack on her way to the appointment, or even just drank a bottle of water, and it showed up on the scale? What if someone had celebrated a birthday at school and her weight reflected a fluke cupcake? These issues concerned me, but there was no way around them.

After we were weighed, I eagerly took possession of the pages listing how many green lights we got at each meal. Bea’s chart and mine were almost identical. We got two green lights for breakfast, three for lunch, and one for each of two snacks. While Bea got three green lights at dinner, I got four. David got several more green lights, since he wasn’t trying to lose weight. And because of his size relative to the rest of us, Jeff got the most green lights of all, including a whopping seven at dinner.

Despite our divergent heights, weights, and ages, Bea and I were not so different metabolically. The calorimetry test had revealed her resting metabolic rate burned about 1,500 calories per day, and I burned about 1,700. By my calculations, the charts the nutritionist handed to us converted to about 1,400 calories a day for Bea and 1,600 calories a day for me, if you account for both the allotted green lights and the calories one could expect to take in under the program’s fruit and vegetables policy, which required some be eaten at each meal and snack, and allowed unlimited consumption at other times of day. So if you subtract that from our daily caloric burn, the plan called for us to take in about 100 calories fewer each day than we were expending.

Based on the formula that 3,500 calories equals a pound, at that pace, we’d lose about a pound a month, which is a moderate rate of weight loss for kids and a depressingly slow rate for me. The nutritionist assured us we could bump the rate of weight loss up
to a half pound a week if we increased our activity level. Healthy, but still slow.